Below is a comment I submitted for Bill Trippe's post:Gilbane Report Blog: Whither InfoPath?

Hey Bill,

Eric Richards from the InfoPath dev team here to give you my own personal perspective. I respect the points you make.

Now then, Microsoft Office is not retreating from InfoPath at all - if you read the Sinofsky keynote from PDC06 PDC05 you get an idea of how integrated InfoPath technology is within the upcoming Office release. My team in particular has been responsible for the hard work of making the InfoPath editor hostable in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, along with being a hostable ActiveX control. Plus we've made the designer hostable inside of Visual Studio, and have integrated VSTA into the design experience for those who want to write managed biz logic but don't have Visual Studio.

Also, consider the investment we've made in the new forms server that renders InfoPath forms within IE or Firefox (hot!). Read more on Tudor Toma's blog entry on the server features.

As for the quiet... I don't have any excuse. Just note that we're busting our collective butt to write these features and now, especially, stabilize them and ensure all the gears mesh together beautifully.

I personally have some bandwidth to start blogging again, including about InfoPath, and I imagine once the public beta comes out other team members will step up their desire to share all the cool features they have designed, implemented, and stabilized.

So, I can only try to spin this as the quiet before the storm of InfoPath goodness, and I personally look forward to sharing more as we ship the public Beta and the final release. If there are particular aspects of InfoPath you'd like to hear us talk about more, please post about it.

Take care,

== EricRi

Updated: link text said PDC06 when I meant PDC05. That check writing algorithm to transform all 2005 references to 2006 must have kicked in...

Updated: trying a ping.