Well, it's been underway for a little while, really. But last night, I had the motivation to put quite a bit of time into it. I've rearchitected quite a bit of the way it renders (which is the most complicated part of the control).

For anyone not in the know about Tourney Logic, here's a brief description of what we are about. We started out to build the best ASP.NET pool management software available, and eventually to evolve into the best pool management software available, regardless of technology. As we thought about how the best way to do this was, we came up with the idea of having a bracket control that would handle the rendering and logic associated with brackets. And since we were building it anyway, we might as well make it available to anyone else who might want to use it in their applications. But our eventual goal was to build a Pool Manager, which we did.

Right now, we have two products available: the bracket control and the pool manager. Right now, the pool manager only supports the NCAA tournament, but plans are to make it configurable for multiple tournaments. I'm not sure when that will happen, but that's the goal.

But first, the Tourney Bracket Control. It is undergoing a pretty big rearchitecture. Why? Well, first, some of the rendering logic was not as tight as it could have been. It was good enough for what we needed (a 64 team tournament configured exactly as the NCAA tourney was), and worked for other simple, single elimination tournaments that don't reseed (bye, bye NHL). So we published it. And it did OK. It worked fine for the pool manager. But we wanted more out of it. We have other ideas, and the first step is to get the bracket control "up to snuff."

So what does that mean? First, and most important, is to support double elimination. We have a plan in place to make that happen, but it's not a small task. Next, we will be adding a much better management experience. Teams will be editable right in the bracket. More information can be added to matchups, including locations, times, etc. Each matchup could be linkable to view that information. The designer experience will be much better. Right now, it is very rough, and we know it has issues. We'll have more samples. We know we need more of those. Anyway, we're still in the planning stages, but moving forward on what we know we need to do.

Later this year, we'll begin the process of working on the Pool Manager again. We had a good year with it for a first year, and landed a couple of (unexpected) big fish. Hopefully that trend will continue. More on the Pool Manager as that gets closer. For now, it's all bracket control development.