I am always happy to see a project go into production. And finally at Elite Models, we can call the model booking system a success.

This project started in early 2005 as a proof of concept that I did. It was actually the first project that I worked on with our perennial Graphics Designer Petri, and it was the first VSTO project that I ever looked into. Actually, that's a direct lie, it was originally an IBF project (IBF is in many way the precursor to VSTO. VSTO wasn't a real technology then (VSTO 1.1 was pretty useless, having no UI components, it was more like a .NET 1.1 code-behind for a word doc), and IBF was a fledgling tech extension to Office. IBF failed because it was too damned hard to use (basically, you had to write tons of obscure XML) and it was a client-server technology (*everything* was a call back to the IBF server – way too slow).

In the times since the initial design a few cool things happened. First, office 2007 started its gestation period. I've been fortunate enough to be working with Office 2007 since the "Dog Food 4" (pre-alpha) days in Aug 2005, so I could see the new capabilities coming down the pipe. The improvements to Outlook really were what caught my eye – along with the changes in SharePoint 2007. Outlook now had support for a Task Pane (which wasn't supported before) – so we could now create our own UI in Outlook just like we could with Word and Excel.

Also, VSTO 2005 came out, which allowed us to take advantage of the Outlook TaskPane. For those not familiar with what VSTO 2005 does, it basically allows you to treat the Task Pane in Office as a .NET Winform. So you can put arbitrary code that operates inside of Office. This means the age of the isolated win32 app is finally at a close – thick client work these days is going to start becoming increasingly integrated into Office.

Finally, we saw WPF as an emerging technology. It's really great for what Elite needed. Elite's entire business is around image, and what better to use there than a next gen UI technology. It allowed us to create new ways of viewing client portfolios (collections of swimsuit edition style photos).

The result of this project is that Elite's entire North America operations now run on Infusion technology (which is really just customization of the Microsoft stack). This caught the attention of some important people at Microsoft. In fact, we even did a video case study out of it, which was shown on stage with Steve Ballmer at the New York Premier.

So, here's the link to the video that was shown with SteveB. There will be two other short MS videos (that focus more on the technology) coming out in the next two weeks. I'll post them when I have a chance. Along with that, Infusion made its own "Making of" video that shows what it was like to work with the Modeling Agency and Microsoft. It's currently being edited, but we should have that out sometime in late Q1 I imagine.

That's going to be an absolute riot.

Way to go, Infusion Elite team.