Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Morning Coffee 31

• Architect MVP business news keeps on coming. Today it's Corillian - the company Scott Hansleman works for - getting acquired by CheckFree.
• Los Angeles is looking to provide city-wide low-cost (maybe free) wireless access. My father has often suggested that Internet access be treated like other utilities like water and power. Sounds like LA is heading down that path. I wonder if they're looking at WiMAX?
• The .NET Micro Framework - which powers the SPOT watch - now has an SDK. For those keeping track, that makes three embedded solution platforms from Microsoft, the Micro FX, Windows CE (which also just shipped a new version) and Windows XP Embedded. (via Larkware)
• BEA's Bruce Graham talks somewhat obtusely on a topic I am particularly passionate about: putting more power in business people's hands to build their own systems. (via Joe McKendrick)
• Register for the Windows Home Server beta. Also check out the forums, team blog and SuperSite Preview. Looks pretty sweet (via Scott Hansleman)
• The final version of Live Search for Mobile was released a few days ago. This program rocks. I'm using the Windows Mobile version, but there's also J2ME version as well. (via Dare Obasanjo)
• Any lingering interest I had in Ruby vanished yesterday as got to chapter 8 of Windows Powershell in Action. Chapter 8 is called "ScriptBlocks and Objects" and it is specifically about meta-programming. After reading that chapter, PS seems more flexible in this space than Ruby, which is the current industry darling for metaprogramming. For example, in Ruby you can optionally pass a block of code to any method. In PS, you can define a ScriptBlock like any other parameter. That means you can tell from the method signature that the ScriptBlock is used. Or you can define a function that takes multiple ScriptBlock parameters. Much more thought on this is needed.