I love the ClickOnce technology of smart clients.  What a great way to distribute software to my clients.  Since I'm an independent with many clients all in geographically different locations, most of which I've created a mixture of web apps and winforms software for, smart clients have simplified my job greatly.  Someone needs a quick fix or tweak, presto, from home, I make the change, publish it and there off and running.  No more taking an hour or so out of my day to go spend 5 minutes distributing an update on site. 

There are pitfalls to the clickonce technology however that I've discovered.  Mainly the issue of the expiring certificate which requires and uninstall and reinstall of the application.  A buddy of mine has created a workaround that using the C++ code in the KB article linked, that fixes the issue, but still not an optimal solution.  Supposedly this is fixed/changed in Orcas.  I'll have to dig up his solution and blog about it soon.

Wondering though, is ClickOnce used in the wild much?  For standalone apps, commericial or otherwise?  I would think that there would be some, but having difficulty finding any.  Just curious if the ClickOnce model is viable for a released product.

Off topic, but this is pretty cool.   I'm a bit of a amateur astronomer (and I mean really amateur) but I read about Comet 17P which had a super outburst on October 24th where it brightened 12-13 magnitudes.  Anyways it was pretty easy to find and while I didn't drag my telescope out, it was quite visible and spectacular in binoculars.  Once you know what you're looking for it's easy to find with the naked eye.  It's currently in the constellation Perseus.  Check out the links and you'll find pics and better description of where to look.

I've played off and on over the years with developing my own blog engine.  Why?  Mostly just as a learning experience and a place to experiment with new stuff.   What I've been finding with most other blog engines (dasBlog used here, Wordpress being the two that I'm most familiar with) that while they have a great number of features, like most software, I only use a small fraction of the features.  I want a blog engine that is all my own that has just the features that I want.

I've been inspired to finish it up.  Check out this new blog I stumbled upon through a comment in a Hanselman post.  Josh took up the challenge to create his own blog engine and I must saythe result is a very clean, nice design.  While I haven't seen any of the underlying code, I'm pretty impressed with the end results.  Great job Josh.  Now to polish off my source (perhaps polish it off just to throw it all away) and get moving on my own engine.  Plenty of stuff to learn!

Been a bit since I've been around, but I won't dwell on that.  I'm here now and that's all the matters.  Here is my question to anyone that still may look at this from time to time.  I often work on projects with other consultants and normally we work remotely.  I've got some ideas on how to handle source-control remotely amongst many independent developers that are not necessarily in the same town, state, whatever, but I wanted to get some other opinions on how others many handle this.  What software do you use?  What services if any are available?