For the past year, an odd thing has happened, if you’ve followed my doings. My work on Fog Creek Copilot seemed to dwindle, I became tight-lipped about what I was working on, and I started getting really excited about an upcoming product release. Also around this time, my knowledge of Mercurial, Python, C#, and ASP.NET MVC all seemed to dramatically increase, even though my free-time code output shrank to nothing. What was going on?

Oh, the usual. I was working on a top-secret brand-new project. And now, it’s released to closed beta.

I’d like to introduce to you Kiln, a brand-new source code hosting and code review tool from Fog Creek. Kiln introduces what I believe is a truly novel take on code reviews that integrates the strengths of Mercurial and FogBugz to provide rejectable code review after commit. We also have some unique takes on Mercurial features, such as the ability to preview what will go into a merge beforehand, really awesome branch management, the most beautiful DAG view I’ve seen in any DVCS product, and lots more.

Over the next few days, I’ll be providing a couple of blog posts detailing how Kiln was developed. In the meantime, go check out Kiln and sign up for the beta. We’re approving new people for the beta on a regular basis, so if you don’t get an invite immediately, don’t worry; we’ll get to you sooner rather than later.