What I hold in my hand today, is a fresh copy of CCS 9.0 (actually, this is one box of four that are part of the release). After years of enterprise development, I never actually got a official box of software. Most of the software I built, or was part of were enterprise application built to provide services to clients, not to be bought off the shelf. I think back to the early 90's and reading my first review in a software magazine about software that I built in a team of three and how excited I was at the time. Those were the days, writing UI code in APL is nothing like WPF today (we are so spoiled nowadays). Sometimes not having to write a slider control with a box-line and mouse move events take all the fun out of it. Hummm... I better stop thinking about the "good-old-days".

If I am correct with the numbers, almost 200 people were involved building and testing this release and almost two years from conception to RTM. Of course, you won't find this sitting at Best Buy on the shelf next to Norton Antivirus, but you get the point.

I rushed home to tell my wife of my excitement, and I got a look of "great another thing to overflow our shelf that you don't actually use or read". Oh well, I think deep down she knows how cool it is... well at least that is what I tell myself.