Ok, for the past few months, I have hinted that I have been doing some very cool things with VSIP and Visual Studio.NET. With the first public announcements and an MSDN webcast out there, I think it is a good time to tell you about a very cool thing we have built that will be a great tool for .NET developers out there and the community at large. For the last 7 months, I have had the priviledge of working for Jack Ozzie and with some very bright people at Groove Networks in creating a full design add-in, the Groove Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, that will allow the .NET developer to create fully collaborative and peer-to-peer applications quickly and easily inside of VS.NET. You will be able to freely download this toolkit in a couple of weeks!
We have used VSIP with its ATL C++ COM code base together with some pretty innovative use of managed code in C# to create an awesome design tool. This includes manipulation of the Forms Designer in VS.NET. "The text-based approach to developing tools and applications for Groove is just too cumbersome for most developers," said co-founder Jack Ozzie. "With our support for Windows Forms, and the development of our Groove Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, we will cut the time it takes developers to build Groove tools or applications by 75 percent, or more. " This is more than true. We actually have it down, in the simple case, to less than 4 minutes end to end and the touch of a few buttons! The XML files that were previously hand-edited quite tediously are now generated all behind the scenes for you automatically. For this, I used a lot of managed code from the absolutely fabulous System.Xml namespace, which just rocks!!
I think that the Groove Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET is going to be a very important tool for .NET developers as you can now easily build a true collabrative peer-to-peer application in the same time as it takes you to build any WinForms app. You can use the same technologies you already know - C# or VB.NET, WinForms and such. I have been honored to be a main part of this and work with some brilliant people. That also includes the parallel effort in Web Services led up by Matt Pope, who sits a few cubes away (and has always been a great friend) and John Burhhardt.
7:49:10 AM 
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