Wow, it's been a month since my last post - guess I better start filling in some of the recent events around here.

As most of you know, the XP Embedded team has a small group of people called the Strike Team. The job of the Strike Team is to service the OS (via QFE's primarily), handle customer escalations, and work support for our Beta and other programs. Since we don't current have a Beta program, we're primarily a customer contact point and QFE generator. That was full time work for three people.

Well, in the last month, the team is now one - yours truly. The other members of the team left for greener pastures, leaving me with everything - customer escalations, marketing asks, QFE's, service packs, etc. In short, lots of work and lots of stress, not lots of time for updating blogs.

That's gonna change Real Soon Now®... We've hired on a new guy who you all will be meeting soon. He's still coming up to speed, and I'm having him concentrate on QFE's for now, but he'll be in the newsgroups and customer events soon as well. A third member is in the works, bringing the team back up to it's full complement. Which means I'll have time to work on cool new things and get back into the newsgroups.

Speaking of cool, we've implemented some new processes internally that should help decrease the delta between the desktop QFE release and our QFE release. It helps that the desktop has moved to a monthly release schedule - we're moving to the same schedule and working closer with the desktop guys so we know what they're releasing before it's released, and can do our own authoring and testing. The first results of that should be visible this week - we've got MS03-049 working through our release process now. We're also working through our backlog and should be caught up soon.

Well, that's that for now - hopefully I'll have more early next week....