The past months (weeks in particular) have been hectic, crack-full of 16-hours working days and full of surprises, excitement and changes. First off, we made various legal shifts, hired an accountant and I became freelancer & CEO (whatever it means) at the same time. I quit my job and embarked on a new journey with full focus on WPF, Silverlight and diagramming. At the same time I started working for one of the top management consulting companies (NDA’s here) in a 100% Silverlight research & development environment, full of brilliant minds and high-speed scrum productivity. Along the road we needed to shift away from the old small-business tools and backoffice, so we now have a hosted Microsoft Dynamics (CRM)+Exchange+Sharepoint. Thanks to 123Together the whole process was painless and setting up the environment and data was a joy. In this context I have to mention that we tried Google Apps as an alternative but it failed to deliver the expected integration (whether the Outlook integration or through the platform integration like SalesForce and similar).

Accounting and administration horror…what a challenge to understand and pierce through all this. Nevertheless, I have been touched by the kindness and helpfullness of (gray administrative) people to explain, to help and to guide. I have no clue what the fun is of accounting and legal problems (I certainly experienced none) but I survived! And the proof is just one number: BEO818064544.

One of the problems of startups being the whole difficulty of choosing what to buy and how much to spend I am reaaaaaaally happy with the BizSpark initiative and that we were enrolled in the program. It means in effect to have access to all the high-end software of Microsoft for the next three years, plus a whole range of support and visibility. Check it out, it’s an amazing offer.

On the diagramming front I started to transpose the architecture of G2 to Silverlight which thanks to the Unity library for Silverlight is now much easier than before. This means also a convergence between our Graphite for Silverlight product and G2, it should enable companies wishing to have a solid diagramming solution across the two technologies to use (almost) the same control templates and approach.

Finally, a big thanks to Luc Berben for his amazing trust and understanding, Vassil Terziev for giving us perspective and hope, John Hodgson for his believe in G2 and our expertise, Dave Simbieda for being the easiest customer ever, Chantal Vervaeke for making me laugh in days of total professional despair and splendid professional skills, Colin Schenk for a truly motivating project and great personality, Denis Vuyka for stepping with me in this adventure, Wout Slechten & Ludo Versweyveld for sparkling discussions and helping me survive in the shadows of Materialise. And last but not least, Geri & Merel for the music of life and lifting me up beyond what I thought I was able to do.