Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Morning Coffee 117

• Quick update to the DevHawk 2007 World Tour: I won't be making it to the SOA & BP Conference. Riley's having her tonsils out. As much as I'd like to hang with my geek peeps, family is the priority. But I can still make an evening event or geek dinner later in the week if anyone is game.
• Caps season-opening winning streak continues. Still 100% on the PK, though the power play is pretty anemic. As I said yesterday, it's WAAAAY to early in the season to start bragging, but starting strong is much better than starting weak.
• Speaking of hockey, looks like the NHL Network is launching in the US this month (it's been available in Canada since 2001). Also, NHL.tv is up and running. Those wishing to see Caps highlights can go directly to Capitals.NHL.tv. Unfortunately, if you want to see full games, you've got to subscribe to Center Ice or Center Ice Online to the tune of $150. But I don't want to get "up to 40 games each week", I just want the Caps games. Between the time zone difference and kids, it's not like I have time to watch that much hockey anyway. Why can't I subscribe to just the Caps games online for say $25 a season?
• Finished Halo 3 Sunday night. Fun game and a great end of the trilogy. Looking forward to what the newly-independent Bungie does next. Something tells me we haven't seen the last of Master Chief. However, I do think Bioshock has better and more original storytelling. Mass Effect looks like it'll be better still.
• Sam Gentile pointed out that his Neudesic colleague David Pallmann has posted a series of WCF tips. Several of them are right on the money like "Take Advantage of One Way Operations" and "Use a Discovery Mechanism to Locate Services". However, I can't agree with "Maintain a Service Catalog". David warns that if you don't, "The left hand won’t know what the right hand is doing." Of course, that's probably the case regardless of how you maintain your service catalog. And "Retry on minor failures"? That's fine, if you've got an idempotent operation. Unfortunately, most non-read operations aren't idempotent unless you take the time to design them that way. And most people don't.
• Speaking of Sam, he's blown up his CodeBetter blog and walked away from the ALT.NET crowd. I've not been a fan of this ALT.NET stuff since it surfaced - as Sam said, "ALT.NET is a divisive thing" - so I'm happy to see my good friend walk away from it.
• Speaking of ALT.NET, Scott Hanselman blogged about previewing the new ASP.NET MVC Framework at the ALT.NET conference. Like Sam, Scott thinks the term ALT.NET is "too polarizing". I like Scott's suggestion for Pragmatic.NET. Oh, and the MVC framework stuff looks cool too.
• Reading Dare's description of OAuth gave me a distinct sensation of deja-vu.