Some of you may be wondering at the apparent lack of progress on my QuestMaster project. It all depends on how you define "progress". If you measure progress by the number of releases, then you are probably disappointed. I, however, am in a somewhat privileged position because I know what is going on in my mind (most of the times, anyway). The architecture for QuestMaster has been stewing in my brains, and little by little the pieces are falling into place. I do a lot of reading, to get new ideas and to learn new things.

Some key articles that I read in the past weeks which helped shape the QuestMaster architecture tremendously:

• Unify Windows Forms and ASP.NET Providers for Credentials Management by Juval Lowy: a unified credential management for both Server and Desktop editions of QuestMaster
• Implement a Microsoft Word-like Object Model for Your .NET Framework Application by Omar Al Zabir: enables plugins and automation, something I wanted but didn't know how to do.
• RSS Feed Aggregator and Blogging Smart Client by Omar Al Zabir: real world hint and tips about Smart Client development.
• Developing next generation Smart Clients using .NET 2.0 working with existing .NET 1.1 SOA based XML Web Services by Omar Al Zabir: more real world hints and tips about Smart Client development, this time with a focus on .NET 2.0.
• To Confirm is Useless, to Undo Divine by David S. Platt

So what I want for the Desktop edition: authentication using the same user acounts as on the server. Automation, plugin capabilities for aditional monsters, traps, treasures, ... I want all actions to be serializable command objects, so I can provide unlimited undo/redo and generate scripts in any .NET language and save/restore the command history to/from xml.

Since .NET 2.0 is getting ever closer, I'll be using that exclusively for the desktop part.