I wish them all the luck with this.  Personally I'd love to see a really rich Silverlight experience for browsing, reading, and posting when online. You can also tell that he opened one of my favorite old can of worms from the comments in his post.  Who new RSS feeds were aggregated into NNTP anyway?  Where do these people come from?

Via The JPK Experience : Announcing a new collaborative project

The new project...

One of the issues that I've heard from a lot of different sources is the need for a tool that would let people read the forums offline, and compose responses when they don't have an Internet connection. 

Several projects like this have been attempted before, each meeting with varied amounts of success.  We're going to add another one to the list.

Why this one will work...

This time around we've got a couple things going for us to enable our success on this project. 

First, the forums team is supportive of the project.  We've talked with them about it, and we're keeping close ties to make sure they know what we're doing and so we can get help if we need it. 

Second, since the team has just released a new platform (check it out here) they're really focused on making it a success.  To the point that providing an API that we can work with has been a high priority.  The API isn't publicly accessible quite yet, but it should be soon.