It was beautiful here in East Tennessee today–50 F and only light winds–so I took time off at lunch to fly my newest airplane: a twin-engine ARF called the Twinstar. It’s 50“ long and has a 56” wingspan. It’s powered by a pair of O.S. 25FX engines, which turn the 3-blade 8×6 props at more than 14,000 RPM. It screams in the air and has that beautiful sound that only a twin can make.
The engines are close to the fuselage and are canted several degrees outward. Consequently, the Twinstar is supposed to fly pretty well on one engine. I hope I never find out.
Flying this plane is good practice for my B-25, which is almost ready to test-fly. I’m running the B-25’s engines to break them in and waiting for the perfect day to take it up. Last night the History Channel ran a program on Doolittle’s Raiders. In the early days of WWII, the Raiders flew modified B-25s off an aircraft carrier in order to stage a daring raid on Tokyo. I LOVE watching those B-25s bearwalking off the carrier deck. Chills!
Workwise, I’m six feet deep into another whitepaper for Microsoft. This one documents the internals of SqlMembershipProvider, SqlRoleProvider, XmlSiteMapProvider, and other providers that come with ASP.NET 2.0. It’s about 75% finished and should weigh in around 60 pages when it’s done. I’ll put a blurb on Wintellect’s home page when the whitepaper is published, and I’m sure MSDN will run an item, too. Along with the provider whitepaper we’ve already published, this one should be required reading for developers writing ASP.NET providers of their own.