As we approach the one-year anniversary of .NETDJ's preview issue, it seems like a good time to consider the recent past, present, and near future of our platform, our magazine - and your humble editor!

The Past
For me, the past few months have been incredibly busy! Last month, I spoke at two conferences in Europe. The first was the Mobile Workforce Solutions conference (www.mobileworkforcesolutions.com) in London. The second was the Bluetooth World Congress (www.ibctelecoms.com/bluetoothworldcongress) in Amsterdam.

As for the magazine, we have added two members to our editorial board! Scott Hanselman is a Microsoft Regional Director (RD) and chief architect at the Corillian Corporation, an e-finance enabler. Patrick Hynds, Microsoft RD for Boston, has also joined the board.

The Present
I've been struggling with an interesting impersonation issue this month (see last month's editorial for a brief introduction to this ongoing saga). It seems that if you use impersonation under ASP.NET and then try to open a WMI connection with EnablePrivileges set to true, you will get an "Access Denied" error. Interestingly enough, this problem goes away on Windows 2000 and XP if you change machine.config to use the System account instead of machine. Of course, this shouldn't be the case, since you've already impersonated another account by the time you try opening the WMI connection. With any luck I'll have more information about this for you in a later issue.

In the meantime, the theme for this month's issue is Visual Studio .NET, specifically deployment of solutions created via Visual Studio .NET and custom controls that can be used within it.

Toward this end, we've cooked up something extra special for you this month - .NETDJ's first ever product shootout! This month, the shootout is between Wise and InstallShield. For those of you who haven't already heard, there is a major legal dispute currently raging between these two players, so we think that this should make for quite a tasty little "grudge match!"

Our coverage of deployment also includes Dan Fox and Jon Box's piece on "Packaging and Deploying .NET Compact Framework" solutions. It is my pleasure to announce that Jon Box has agreed to accept the newly created mobility editor position, in addition to continuing to serve as a member of the .NETDJ editorial board. For those of you unfamiliar with Jon, he also serves as Microsoft RD for the Southeastern U.S. and is a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau!

In other news, we're currently seeing a lot of activity on the .NETDJ discussion boards regarding two of our postings. The first of these is an article on .NET purity (articlenews.cfm?id=356) that raises some interesting points about the interaction between .NET and the native Windows APIs underlying it. The other article receiving a lot of attention (articlenews.cfm?id=361) is Microsoft's news about their upcoming Whidbey and Orcas releases of Visual Studio .NET.

The Future
Whidbey isn't expected until 2004. Here at .NET Developer's Journal, we are currently putting together our editorial calendar for 2004. What that means (for those of you not in the publishing business) is that we are trying to figure out what our readers would like to read about in .NETDJ next year.

If you have any topics that you would like to see covered, please feel free to e-mail me directly at derek@sys-con.com.