Friday, January 05, 2007

Morning Coffee 4

Recurring 8am Friday meetings are not my style.

• I've been tracking WCF for a long time. Yet, it's still a dauntingly large topic. Yesterday I spoke to a friend who works in Windows Live who is just beginning to learn about WCF and it's literally overwhelming him. His reaction reminded me of my early reactions to COM. It feels like no matter how much you learn about WCF, the "pile" of stuff still to learn doesn't shrink. In contrast, while my initial exposure to the .NET Framework was overwhelming, eventually I got to the point where I felt like I had a good handle on what was in there. 
• With all the configuration settings in WCF, the number of valid combinations is astronomical. While WCF's configuration based approach is arguably more flexible than a code based approach, it's also more complex and harder to debug in my experience. Config debugging seems to be an endless cycle of tweaking the config file and running the app to see what the effect is. We need better tools than SvcConfigEditor.
• Responding to yesterday's Morning Coffee, Jon Flanders confirmed via email that the built-in SQL WF persistence service "doesn't recover from faults to the last good persistence point" and that "when a fault happens, the instance closes and...is removed from the persistence database." Is this the right behavior? I'm thinking it depends on the workflow. More on this later.
• I'm trying to get my teammates to start using the Beyond Bullet Points approach to the various presentations we build as a team. Interestingly enough, it's been easier to get my team to adopt an agile development methodology than to adopt the Beyond Bullet Point presentation methodology. I would have expected the opposite.
• The Caps trounced the Canadiens last night, ending a five game losing streak. I'm not that worried about the losing streak - the Caps have had several players out with the flu. But beating Montreal, who came into the game twelve games above .500, so badly is a good sign. And how about Nycholat? Two goals and four assists in seven games since he was called up from Hershey. Even more impressive, he's +2 even though the Caps were 2-5 and outscored 24-18 in those seven games while averaging nearly 21 minutes of ice time per game. Here's hoping Nycholat stays hot.