Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Afternoon Coffee 77

• Pat Helland is finally blogging again. His first post back is basically "what I've been up to for the past two years", which is to say no cool tech stuff...yet. David Ing calls Pat's time @ Amazon "an extended training sabbatical" and that we're lucky to have him back. Agree 100%. BTW, since Pat didn't include a link to his recent paper and presentation, I will.
• Speaking of blogging luminaries, James Clark is also blogging. Don Box calls him the "brightest guy in XML-land". Money Quote: "any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML."
• Rick Barnes - aka my boss - likes Roger Session's white paper A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures and comes up with a number of variants of Roger's Observe/Orient/Plan/Act model. Then he asks the $64,000 question: "Why then, do we insist on spending months analyzing software the business, interviewing subject matter experts and end users, writing hundred or thousand page "requirements" documents, and meeting to agree on dozens or hundreds of features before we write the first line of code?" Rick is one of the reasons I took this job instead of the other awesome opportunities I had when I was switching jobs. I'm sure you see why.
• Speaking of requirements, Eric Sink has a phenomenal post on requirements. Go read it. Can we officially grant "Walking Spec" anti-pattern status without the customary waiting period?
• Scott Guthrie posted on Anonymous Types, the latest in his series on the new language features coming with LINQ. Anon types in and of themselves are a fairly simple construct - you pass the properties and values into the new object init syntax and the compiler munges up a class to match. Simple, but critical for SQL-style data shaping queries. Of course, the limitation is that you can't pass the anonymous type object around in any type-safe way.
• LINQ to * Watch: LINQ to SharePoint. Details on Bart de Smet's blog.
• Jeff Atwood writes a long post to ask for background compilation in C#. +1 on that request. But I disagree with his point about "giving up on the idea that .NET is a multiple language runtime". Even though the runtime supports multiple languages, most programmers are only fluent in one.
• I'm a bit behind on this, but my old team has moved SkyScrapr to MSDN. For the uninitiated, SkyScrapr is a site for aspiring architects to learn about software architects and architecture.
• p&p Clarius has shipped a new software factory: the VSIPFactory, a software factory for Visual Studio Extensibility. Pablo Galiano has more.

Update: I mistakenly attributed the VSIPFactory to p&p. It's from Clarius. Sorry guys.