Monday, May 21, 2007

Birthday Coffee 80

• Saw Shrek the Third over the weekend with the kids. It's gotten mixed reviews, but I liked it even though it wasn't as good as the first two. Is it just me, or has sequel-itis reached an all time high? This month alone we've had Spiderman 3, 28 Weeks Later, Shrek the Third and the new Pirates movie opens this week.
• Hot on the heels of his post on anonymous types, Scott Guthrie starts to explain LINQ to SQL, which is where all these C#3/VB9 features have been headed. Lots of digital ink have been spilled on this topic since we announced LINQ @ PDC 05, so I'll just point out that I think this is the first OR/M solution that really works well across the board.
• David Ing sucks the fun out of PopFly by suggesting it might be a "nice data aggregation / reformatting service for technically-challenged managers [and] their business data". Sounds like the next step of enterprise mashups.
• Speaking of PopFly, Larry O'Brein thinks PopFly is helping restore " the bridge between power users and programmers". From the PopFly FAQ: "We’re going back to our roots in 1975 when Microsoft originally launched BASIC for the Altair 8080. Tools like BASIC and Visual Basic 1.0 democratized development by enabling users to easily build applications on DOS and Windows. We believe we can make Popfly a great tool for building and sharing applications on the Web."
• Scott Hanselman wonders if Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks. In a related vein, I wonder if MS should be learning more aggressively from the community. MS has been the source of many developer innovations, but certainly not all. For ideas pioneered elsewhere, we tend to eventually get it, but I think we could be better about it.
• Apparently, I'm just a little younger than video games. Pong was born May of 1967, only three years to the month before me. (via Ozymandias)