Ha, ha, it’s funny how an email can change your day…

A couple of weeks ago I started doing bits on my new project. I had determined that it should be a web-based project, just because I haven’t worked on a meaty web-based project for a couple of years. I wasn’t sure what I wanted the subject matter to be – ideally I’d like a fresh subject but, if it came to it, I could provide a web-based equivalent of Diem.

I started sniffing around Microsoft HealthVault. This is a Microsoft effort, so will have decent resource behind it. It provides end users with a nice web site through which to store various health-related data, including their blood glucose. It also provides an API, so allows people to write an application, connect to HealthVault, and use HealthVault to store the data. One of the big things about health applications is user security, and the big win of using HealthVault was that Microsoft handled all that – it is already a secure site.

So I’ve downloaded a couple of samples, got them working, and earmarked some time to write my own noddy code, just to see how it all hangs together. HealthVault doesn’t support all the statistics supported by Diem, so another thing on my list was to discover whether I could store that data somehow. Fortunately, as it happens, I hadn’t got anywhere near that yet.

So I signed up and got myself a HealthVault account, only last week. I’ve logged into it just to poke around, but haven’t got into any specifics yet. Then, fast forward to this morning. When I loaded my email program, lo and behold, a message from Microsoft saying that they’re pulling the plug on HealthVault in six months time.

In some ways, a shame, because I might have been able to use it. But I’m mightily glad that they made this announcement when I’m just embarking on a new project, rather than a year into it.