Well today I have produced the latest version of the UIL, v1.1, which can be downloaded here: http://www.codeplex.com/UIL/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=23765. This version addresses a problem found with the IsDirty state when opening existing documents.
During a development implementation of it there it was noticed that when you opened existing documents the IsDirty always returned true.
This is now fixed, and I also addressed another problem which was realised. It was actually a design limitation, not a bug (per-say). I had the UIL relying on the ID's of the DocTypes at time of generation, this posed a problem when using the UIL on existing websites. When you tried to deploy the DocTypes into a new environment using Umbraco Packaging (or manually creating them), a new ID would be generated! This posed a big problem. Instead I have change it so the UIL relies on the alias at time of generation, which isn't 100% unique, but it's unique enough ;).
But there is also a bit of sadness in this post, as this post signals the final installment of UIL being under active development (although I use the term active loosely :P). I will no longer be actively adding features to the UIL, unfortunately I no longer have the time to dedicate to the project and implement the features which I had intended to implement. I will try and implement fixes for any bugs which people find, but really I don't have enough time to work on anything new for the UIL.
But it's not all sad, there is a good reason which I no longer have the time to dedicate to the UIL, it is because I have taken on a bigger project. After speaking with Niels and the other guys who make up the Umbraco project I've been asked to develop a proper LINQ to Umbraco implementation. That's right, I'm currently working to produce what the UIL was originally going to become, a LINQ provider for Umbraco.
I'm going to keep some of the details secret, but I'll just say that at the moment the UIL isn't going to be completely replaced by LINQ to Umbraco, rather it's going to be suplimented by it. Where UIL is all about how to interact with Documents and Document creation LINQ to Umbraco is going to be all about interacting with published nodes and the Umbraco node cache.
So be on the lookout for some really interesting posts in the coming weeks/ months in which I'll provide more details on LINQ to Umbraco, or feel free to watch the progress of the of the code on Codeplex..
So sad times, with happy times.