Will The Real DevHawk Please Stand Up?

Sometimes when I blog about politics, I'll get a comment like this:

As far as I'm concerned, posting about topics such as politics or religions on a blog that's supposedly about technology is just looking for trouble.

As I've pointed out before, DevHawk is not "a blog that's supposedly about technology". It's a personal blog - my very tiny corner of the web, if you will - so I feel totally justified writing about technology, politics, hockey and whatever else I want to. I figure that if you don't like it, you're free to unsubscribe and neither of either of us will lose any sleep over it.

The flip side is that DevHawk has traditionally been the only place where I exercise such lack-of-restraint. When my blog was featured on MSDN Architecture Center, I cross-posted relevant content to a separate blog so as to create an topic-focused and safe-for-work subset of my "real" blog. It was always a hassle - especially tracking comments to the same post in two places - and I quit doing it shortly after leaving the Architecture Strategy Team.

However, now that I'm using Twitter, it doesn't feel like DevHawk is "my only place" anymore. My blog == my writing, my del.icio.us == links I find interesting and my Twitter == real time updates. I use FeedBurner to include my del.icio.us links in my blog feed and twitterfeed to include the blog feed in my twitter feed. Therefore, Twitter is the only place to get an feed of all three. Obviously, Twitter's feed isn't full content, but in an always connected world, clicking the link to read the blog entry in the browser isn't that big a deal. Besides, you can always subscribe to both the blog and twitter feed if you want full content + real-time.

I haven't fully integrated Twitter into my daily life yet, though I'm getting there - for example I twittered the results of my hockey game last night. But unlike other social software sites, I think I'm going to be using Twitter regularly. I'm on Facebook, but there's too much "you've been bitten by a Vampire!" type spam to really use it for anything but pure entertainment. Twitter is more like blogging, where there's an information exchange with only the people I subscribe to follow. Also, maybe it's me, but there doesn't seem to be the same stigma if you stop following someone on Twitter compared to rejecting them as a friend on Facebook.

DevHawk has been "me", but now it feels like DevHawk @ Twitter will become "me" which leaves my blog to become my endless book. It's not a bad thing, but it does feel a little strange.

Morning Coffee 155 - Dueling Conference Edition

• If you don't want to watch the video of yesterday's MIX keynote but still want a sense of what happened, check out Tim Sneath's keynote liveblog. (via Sam Gentile)
• Other announcements from Mix day one keynote that I missed (all via Tim Sneath)
  • Windows Media Services for WS08 released last week. Additionally, the IIS 7 Media Pack adds web playlists (CTP) and bandwidth throttling (GoLive beta) to the baseline media streaming platform.
  • The source code (and unit tests) for all the built-in Silverlight 2 controls is available for download. I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't look like a "reference-only" licence like the .NET Framework source code is released under. Very cool.
  • The Seadragon technology for smooth navigation of mutli-gigabyte sized images over the network will be emnedded in Silverlight as a feature called DeepZoom. You can see a cool demo of DeepZoom on the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and Scott Hanselman posted a walkthru of using the DeepZoom Composer preview tool build your own DeepZoom experience.
  • Apparently the .NET client roadmap isn't all perf and working set improvements. WPF is getting shader support. I couldn't find anything on this besides the announcement itself, but I'll be interested how much overlap there is with the DirectX / XNA shader language.
• Quick side note - Installing Silverlight 2 in order to check out the DeepZoom Hard Rock demo was smooth, fast and easy. It's hard to believe there's a whole CLR in there.
• Now on to public stuff I saw @ TechFest:
  • One of the problems with touch screens is that your fingers obscure what you're trying to touch. Lucid Touch solves this by having you touch the back of the device, while rendering a virtual shadow of your hand - a technique they call "pseudo transparency". You really need to watch the video to "get" this. It's not currently feasible - the prototype uses a webcam on a foot long boom to track hand and finger position. However, they expect a future version will have some type of imaging sensors embedded in the body of the device.
  • The Berkeley Emulation Engine version 3 (aka BEE3) (video) is a high powered hardware simulator. Apparently several orders of magnitudes faster than conventional simulation. Frankly, most of this demo was over my head and I'm not really a HW guy. But it sounds really fast.
  • BLEWS or "what the blogosphere tells you about news". Given my interest in political blogging, it's not a surprise I was interested in this project. This tool categorizes news stories according to their reception in the political blogosphere. It provides a visualization showing not only how many links from a given ideological sphere there are, but how strong the emotions are running. Kinda like Memorandum on major steroids.
  • Music Steering (video) is an "interactive music-playlist generation through music-content analysis, music recommendation, and music filtering". Sort of like LastFM + Pandora on your Zune.
  • In-Depth Image Editing (team site) showed some cool photo editing software that reminding me of Microsoft Max.
  • MashupOS (paper) is a set of abstractions to improve the browser security model, allowing for isolation between blocks of code from different sources while still allowing safe forms of communication.
  • MySong (paper, video) "automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody, allowing a user with no musical training to rapidly create accompanied music". Karaoke singers rejoice! Actually, it's pretty cool. You can adjust sliders to adjust characteristics of the generated music like "Jazz factor" and "Happy factor". Actually, I just want a happy factor slider in all my software.
  • I saw some cool projects from the Socio-Digital Systems group and MS Research. My wife is a sociologist and always says there's no way she could ever get a job in the big house. Maybe after she checks out this team, she'll stop thinking that.
  • The Worldwide Telescope booth was so crowded that I couldn't get anywhere near it. From what I could see from standing in the back, it looked fantastic. It's not live yet, but you can check out the video from the TED conference to get a sense of it.

Lunchtime Coffee 153

• p&p have published new versions of both the Web Service and Web Client Software Factories. Beyond support for VS08, I'm not sure what's new but that's worth the price of download (admittedly close to zero) right there. I assume these need the most recent release of the Guidance Automation Toolkit as well.
• W3C has published a new working draft of the Service Modeling Language. I'm really interested to see where this technology goes.
• Yesterday, Microsoft announced the Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint, part of a larger Software + Services Blueprints initiative that I wasn't aware of. According to Michael Lehman (who's blog I've been been remiss to read of late), S+S Blueprints has a bunch of other interesting projects including Video.Show and Outlook+Services.
• Martian Maly demonstrates how you can use DLR trees to build a statically typed add function. Literally, my very first thought after Martin presented DLR Trees @ Lang.NET was "I wonder if you could use that for static languages too?" I guess the answer is yes.
• It's been six months, and Scott Hanselman still isn't evil. Perhaps he could start turn his ASP.NET wiki into an evil ASP.NET wiki? Actually, I'm only linking to his post because I liked the way he described blogging as "I'm writing a book that will never end".

Morning Coffee 147

• My son Patrick turns five today. The big treat was his cousin Jack coming up for a visit. Here's a picture of the two of them at Patrick's party on Saturday. My wife has all the details on her blog. Update: My wife just posted a whole slew of Early Patrick Pictures.
• If my son is five, it means this blog is also five - I started this blog about a month before Patrick was born. I never remember to mark the occasion until Paddy boy's big day comes around.
• Major props to the House of Representatives for growing a backbone and not caving to President 30% Approval on telecom immunity...yet. Personally, I'd like to see the House bury the measure completely, though I'm not holding my breath. But given that even the right-wing Washington Times reports "Analysts say FISA will suffice", maybe the House Dems will do the right thing.
• After tearing it up since Thanksgiving, the Caps have gone a little cold. 5-4-1 in their last ten and 2-2-1 in their last five. In the month of February, they're 1-3-1 against SE division opponents. Good news is that they're still even with Carolina (two points behind with two games in hand), half a game up on Atlanta, a game and a half up on Florida and two and a half games up on Tampa Bay.
• Bill Gates announced a new program called DreamSpark to provide college students access to all of Microsoft's developer and designer tools, including Visual Studio, Expression, SQL Server, Windows Server and XNA Creators Club membership. This looks like an outgrowth of the MSDN Academic Alliance program. I think it's a great idea. Update: Looks like high-school students will be able to access the DreamSpark program too. However, since they're minors, they have to get the software via their teachers. (via LiveSide)
• The winners of the XNA Silicon Minds contest have been announced. Of the five winners, Specimen looks the coolest to me. I wish I had more time to get into game development. (Via LetsKillDave)
• Speaking of game development, this week is the Game Development Conference, so be on the lookout for lots of game-related news. Xbox Live VP John Schappert is giving a keynote on "Unleashing the Creative Community". XNA GM Chris Satchell said last year they would "announce full details on, and ... vision for, opening XNA creations to the community" sometime this year. I'm guessing this is said announcement.
• Speaking of Xbox, there's a rumor that Microsoft and Netflix will announce this week that Netflix is bringing their Watch Instantly service to Xbox 360. If true, sign me up!
• Grigori Melnik announces the GAX/GAT February 2008 final release. Key feature is VS08 support. Is it just me, or does calling it the "final release" make it sound like they won't be upgrading GAX/GAT further?
• Speaking of p&p, Grigori also announces the Feb 2008 CTP of Unity, p&p's new IoC container. I've seem lots of folks echoing the announcement, but not much in the way of specifics on Unity itself. For example, Chris Brandsma describes IoC and mentions Unity, but he doesn't cover any Unity specifics. :(
• MSIT EA Nilesh Bhide has started blogging. His first post is on Customer perception of Service Quality in S+S/SaaS. I've worked closely with Nilesh in the past two years, so I'm excited to see him take to the blogosphere. (via Nick Malik)
• I don't know how I missed it, but the MSDN Code Gallery launched last month. As Charlie Calvert explained, this is logical successor to GotDotNet's user samples area. Between Code Gallery and CodePlex, GotDotNet has finally been shuttered for good.
• Telligent, makers of the very popular Community Server, have released Graffiti CMS, which looks like a more flexible content platform than Community Server. (via DNK)
• In somewhat unexpected news (at least, unexpected by me) Microsoft has released specs for the Office binary file formats. I'm not sure why this is happening now, rather than say when we released the specs for the Open Office XML file formats. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee 141 - Lang.NET '08 Edition

I was hoping to blog my thoughts on Lang.NET as the event went along. Obviously, that didn't happen, though I was pretty good about dumping links into my del.icio.us feed. The talks were all recorded, and should be up on the website in a week or two. Rather than provide a detailed summary of everything that happened, here are my highlights:

• The coolest thing about conferences like this is what John Rose called "N3" aka "Nerd-to-Nerd Networking". It was great to meet in person, drink with and geek out with folks who's blogs I read like Tomas Petricek, Wesner Moise and Larry O'Brien. Plus, I got to meet a bunch of other cool folks like Gilad Bracha, Stefan Wenig and Wez Furlong. That's worth the price of admission (which was admittedly nothing) right there.
• Coolest MSFT talk: Martin Maly "Targeting DLR". I was wholly unaware that the DLR includes an entire compiler back end. Martin summarized the idea of DLR trees on his blog, but the short version is "you parse the language, DLR generates the code". That's pretty cool, and should dramatically lower the bar for language development. Of course, I want to write my parser in F#, so I'm going to port the DLR ToyScript sample to F#.
• Runner-up, Coolest MSFT talk: Erik Meijer "Democratizing the Cloud with Volta". Erik is a great speaker and he really set the tone of his session with the comment "Division by zero is the goal, not an error". He was referring to an idea from The Change Function that user's measure of success is a function of perceived crisis divided by perceived pain of adoption. Erik wants to drive that adoption pain to zero. It's a laudable goal, but I remain unconvinced on Volta.
• Coolest Non-MSFT talk: Gilad Bracha "Newspeak". Newspeak is a new language from one of the co-authors of Java. It's heavily smalltalk influenced, and runs on Squeak. He showed developing PEGs in Newspeak, and they were very compact and easy to read, easier even than F#. He calls them Executable grammar, and you can read his research paper or review his slides on the topic. Unfortunately, Newspeak isn't generally available at this time.
• Runner-up, Coolest Non-MSFT talk: Miguel de Icaza "Moonlight and Mono". The talk was kinda all-over-the-place, but It's great to see how far Mono has come. Second Life just started beta testing a Mono-based script runner for their LSL language (apparently, Mono breaks many LSL scripts because it runs them so fast). He also showed off Unity, a 3D game development tool, also running on Mono.
• Resolver One is a product that bridges the gap between spreadsheets and applications, entirely written in IronPython (around 30,000 lines of app code and 110,000 lines of test code, all in IPy). Creating a spread-sheet based app development environment is one of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect, at least to me. If you do any kind of complicated spreadsheet based analysis, you should check out their product.
• If you're a PowerShell user, you should check out PowerShell+. It's a free console environment designed for PowerShell and a damn sight better than CMD.exe. If you're not a PowerShell user, what the heck is wrong with you?
• Other projects to take a deeper look at: C# Mixins and Cobra Language.
• I thought my talk went pretty well. It's was a 15 minute version of my Practical Parsing in F# series. Several folks were surprised I've been coding F# for less than a year.

Morning Coffee 138

• In writers strike news, the WGA has made side deals with Worldwide Pants (aka Dave Letterman's company), United Artists (aka Tom Cruise's company) and The Weinstein Company (previously known as Miramax). The WGA strategy of divide and conquer seems to me making slow progress. Update: The Weinstein Company was founded by Miramax's founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein after they left Miramax. But Miramax is still around. Thanks to GrantC for the correction.
• They're still two games under .500, but the Caps completed a season sweep of the Eastern Conference leading Ottawa Senators last night. They're only 3 games out of the top spot in the (admittedly very weak) Southeast division
• Big tech news today isn't coming from MSFT-land. Sun is buying MySQL and Oracle is (finally) buying BEA. Both deals seem like pretty significant culture clashes, though Sun/MySQL seems like the better fit of the two.
• There's a new draft of Service Modeling Language 1.1 available. If you'll recall, this used to be called the System Definition Model, part of the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Hadn't heard anything from those folks in a while, good to see they're making progress.
• Stephan Tolksdorf dropped me a line to tell me he was able to "vastly simplify" FParsec, and as a result it now runs on the current version of F#. Awesome!
• Speaking of F#, Scott Hanselman has a new F# podcast, this time interviewing Dustin Campbell. Check out all of Dustin's F# posts.
• I didn't know about the "Copy as Path" feature in Vista. Why is it hidden?
• I was a big fan of the WDS deskbar shortcut feature - a feature that is missing in Vista. Enter Start++ by Brandon Paddock, which adds shortcuts to Vista's search box. It also supports "iPhone apps" and scripting. But JScript? Where's the PowerShell love, Brandon?
• EA released the source code to the original SimCity under the GPL. Bil Simser is digging into the code and it looks like he's going to port it to XNA. (via Ozymandias)
• Wes Haggard has published the source code to CodeHTMLer on CodePlex. He took two updates from me: the F# language definition as well as the ability to choose the font when not using PRE tags.

Morning Coffee 133

• I've been off for two weeks, so getting back into "the swing" of things will probably take a day or two - both at work and on my blog. Hope everyone had a happy holiday season.
• I ended the year with 245 blog posts, which wasn't quite as many as either of my first two years blogging, but was much more than I had been writing for the last two years.
• It was a Zune Xmas in the Pierson house. I got a pink Zune for my wife, and my mother and father got Zunes for each other. I got to load them all up with content for Xmas morning. Maybe I'm just used to WMP, but I'm not a huge fan of the Zune software. Yes, it's very pretty but it's missing some fairly basic features like automatic down-sampling lossless music. On the other hand, the on-device experience rocks and my wife is using her Zune regularly. I've got a trip to England coming up in April, and I'm thinking about getting one of the new 80GB ones for the trip.
• They lost any chance of playing for the national championship, but USC sure looked like a champion yesterday. Seems appropriate for this crazy college football season that if Ohio State doesn't win big, pretty much all the other BCS bowl winners with a legitimate argument to be #1.
• The Caps beat the eastern-conference leading Senators yesterday for the third time this season and the second time in four days. They have 13 points in the last ten games and 10-5-4 since Boudreau took over as coach. If they keep that pace up, they would likely make the playoffs - that would be quite a feat given their horrific start.
• Speaking of hockey, I watched most of the Winter Classic yesterday, including the game-winning shootout goal by the Anointed One. It was really strange but cool to watch a hockey game between snowflakes. I agree with Scott Burnside's take that these outdoor games are good for the league, but shouldn't be a regular part of the season.
• I finished Portal yesterday - that's a fantastic game. I also got Mass Effect, so now I need to decide which to take on first: that or Half-Life 2.
• A few months ago, I was thinking about using HomePlug for home networking but decided to upgrade my wireless network instead. But recently I've started streaming movies from my loft computer to my Xbox, and the wireless network isn't always up to the task. I could run CAT5, but there's already an unused coax cable running up to the loft and I wondered if I could just use that? I discovered the Multimedia over Coax Alliance, but none of their certified products appear to be available. Those products have to share the home coax network with the cable company, but I can dedicate my coax cable. Anyone know a way to use coax to bridge CAT5 networks? Even something DIY?

Blogging F# Code

I'm going to start posting about my F# parsing code soon. Obviously, I'll make the code directly available, but I'm also going to be writing about it quite a bit. Since I'll be posting lots of F# code snippets, I took the time to build an F# language syntax definition for CodeHTMLer. Of all the various WL Writer Insert Code plug-ins, CodeHTMLer is my favorite because it can be configured not to use <pre> tags, which many RSS readers handle poorly (in my experience).

In case anyone else wants it, I've stuck the CodeHTMLer F# language definition up on my SkyDrive. If you using the CodeHTMLer WL Writer Plug-in, you can easily add this to your machine. Once you've installed CodeHTMLer and run it once, go to the command line and type "cd %appdata%\WindowsLiveWriter" and you'll find the LanguageDefinitions.xml file. Edit that file to insert the add the contents of my F# language definition after the <CodeLanguages> tag and you're all set.

BTW, the first language in the file will be the default language in the plug-in, so if you're an occasional F# user, you might want to add the F# definition to the end rather than the beginning of the file. If you don't want to further edit the XML file manually, you can select "Edit Languages" in the plug-in and edit the order of the languages to your heart's content.

Morning Coffee 128

• After using Outlook 2007 as my RSS reader for a few months, I've gone back to RSS Bandit. I run two work machines (desktop + laptop) and I finally got tired duplicated blog entries because each copy of Outlook downloads the same post. Also, for some reason Outlook downloads the same Technorati posts over and over again.
• ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 was released. The latest CTP of the EF Tools is also available. And as per the press release, EF has gained support from "Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, Firebird Foundation Inc., IBM Corp., MySQL AB, Npgsql , OpenLink Software Inc., Phoenix Software International, Sybase Inc. and VistaDB Software Inc". I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but I guess you'll be able to LINQ to Entities on a wide variety of DB platforms. Interesting Oracle isn't on that list. Not really surprising, but interesting.
• Here's a new ASP.NET MVC article from Scott Guthrie, this one on views and how you pass data to one from a controller. Using generics to get strongly-typed ViewData is pretty sweet. But where's the MVC CTP that was supposed to be here this week?
• In news about web app tool previews that did ship this week, Live Labs announces Volta. Haven't installed or played with it yet, but I did read the fundamentals page. It primarily looks like a tool to compile MSIL -> JavaScript, so you can write your code in C# but execute it in the browser. Sam and Jesus are excited, Arnon not so much. Arnon's argument that being able to postponing architectural decisions is to good to be true is fairly compelling, and not just because he quotes me to support his argument. But I'll download it and provide further comment after I experiment with it myself.
• Simple Sharing Extensions is now FeedSync. Not sure what else is new about it, other than it's been blessed with "1.0" status. The Live FeedSync Dev Center has an introduction, a tutorial and the spec. (via LiveSide)
• Dare likes tuples. Me too. I also like symbols.

Afternoon Coffee 126

• In a surprise to exactly nobody, the Caps let coach Glen Hanlon go yesterday. I gotta say I feel for the guy. I mean, he had to go, but still. The Caps promoted the coach of their minor league team Bruce Boudreau. Makes sense - the farm team is where you develop players, why not coaches to? The team responded by beating the Flyers in overtime, though they did blow a 3 goal lead along the way.
• It won't get them back in the national title hunt, but thrashing ASU may earn USC a ticket to a BCS bowl, or the Rose Bowl if the Ducks can't win without Dennis Dixon.
• I finally finished Dead Rising today. A sequel has been rumored and hinted at, but not confirmed even though the ending left the door wide open. I really enjoyed it, so here's hoping. I'm going to hold off on starting anything new until I get back from Canada, but it'll probably be R6:Vegas. Don't really have time between now and Christmas to finish Blue Dragon and it's 3 DVDs.
• In more "Screw Turkey Day, we're shipping anyway" news, p&p shipped a new version of the Web Service Software Factory. This one's called the "Modeling Edition". I saw some of this stuff back in August, and I like what those p&p folks are doing. It's worth a look, just to see how they've integrated DSL and GAT.
• My old team shipped a new version of their S+S demo app LitwareHR. There's also some tools for testing multi-tenant databases.
• Quick reminder: I'm @ DevTeach Vancouver next week, so blogging will be light. I've got a series of thoughts on F# ready to post, but we'll see when I get network access to post them. Given that I took a month off from blogging a short while back, I didn't bother asking Dale to cover for me.

The Hawk Flies Again

After a week offline, I think I've finally gotten DevHawk back online. I'm having a few issues from my personal laptop, so if you're having issues seeing the site, please let me know.

I took the downtime to make a few changes to the site. I fixed up a few things with the theme - I run 120 DPI on both my machines and the theme looked wrong in a few places. Now, except for the main text, I specify font sizes in pixels instead of points so it looks right whatever DPI you run in. Also, I finally got around to updating the stylesheet so the tag list and calendar renders correctly plus I added "older posts" and "newer posts" links at the bottom of the page.

I also took the opportunity to get rid of my Projects, Articles and Presentations sections. I didn't trash the content, I moved it all to my SkyDrive. But now I've eliminated a bunch of pages from my site that I just never took the time to keep up to date.

Back to regular blogging "soon".

Morning Coffee 116

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue"
Steve McCroskey, Airplane!

• So it's been a while since my last post. Just over a month, not including The F5 High, which wasn't "original IP". Frankly, I just stopped reading pretty much cold turkey. I wanted and needed to go heads down on day job stuff for a while. Since I haven't been reading, Morning Coffee is going to be a little cold while I ramp back up.
• The new NHL season is upon us, and the Caps are looking good so far. Obviously, they have the new uniforms, but they're also out to a 2-0 start for the first time in five years. And in those two games, they've only allowed one goal and are 100% on the PK. It's nice to see them start strong, but obviously there's a long way to go. Here's hoping the can stay strong all season.
• Speaking of staying strong, the wheels that were rattling last week came off the Trojan bandwagon completely this week. I'm not sure it's as big an upset as Appalachian State beating Michigan but it's close. What happened to the team that scored 5 TD's in a row on Nebraska?
• Big news last week is that MSFT is going to release the source code to much of the .NET Framework. Scott Guthrie has the details. Frankly, between Rotor & Reflector, it wasn't like you couldn't see the source code anyway, so this seems like a no-brainer. But integrating it directly into the VS Debugging experience, that's frakking brilliant.
• I haven't had a chance to install the new XML Schema Designer (Aug 07 CTP)  but I was really impressed with this video. The XML Team blog has more details. However, I'm not sure what the ship vehicle is. The CTP install on top of VS08 beta 2, but in the video they keep saying "a future version" of VS, implying that it's not going to be in VS08.
• Dare is spending some time investigating SSB. I think it's interesting that some of the REST crowd are starting to see the need for durable messaging. Dare argues that the features and usage models are more important than wire protocol. As long as it's standardized, I don't care that much about the protocol. Several of the REST folks mentioned AMQP. While I've got nothing against AMQP technically (frankly, I haven't read the spec), but what does it say about durable messaging vendors (including MSFT) that a financial institution felt the need to drive an interoperable durable messaging specification?

Morning Coffee 100

• The big 100. This puts be 1083 posts behind Iron Link Poster Mike Gunderloy. As his .NET skills deteriorate, maybe I can catch up...but I doubt it. I'm only 77 posts behind Sam Gentile, so maybe that's a bit more feasible. 
• The ADO.NET Team blog announces the new Entity Framework CTP. Looks like there's also a new .NET Framework 3.5 CTP and new Visual Web Developer "Orcas" Express CTP as well. (via Sam Gentile)
• Speaking of "Orcas" VS 2008, it launches with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 next February. (via DNK)
• Scott Guthrie continues is LINQ to SQL series. This time, using LINQ to SQL to update the database.
• My friend Arvidra Semhi recently moved and rebooted his blog. Among his many accomplishments, Arvindra started the Architecture Journal. I'm particularly interested in his recent Service Capsule work. Subscribed.
• Last night was the Microsoft E3 Briefing. Gamerscore blog has the news rundown. Didn't seem to be any HUGE news. Last year's E3 was the first Halo 3 showing and X06 featured the Halo Wars announcement. Nothing that earth-shaking this time, though the XBLM keeps on rolling, now featuring Disney movies. (Major Nelson has a list.) I'm thinking that the whole HD-DVD vs. BluRay war is going to be eclipsed by direct download before it's over, though I'm still waiting for PC support & all-you-can-eat pricing.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: Clay Shirky has a great blog post on modern-day Luddites. As he points out: "A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfort the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys." How much inefficiency is there in our modern political system? And more importantly, who benefits from that inefficiency? We've already seen the dramatic effects blogs can have on political news, media and reporting. What happens when users citizens are no longer satisfied just writing about the political process and want to get their hands dirty in the policy-making process itself?

Morning Coffee 98

• Morning Coffee was canceled on Thursday and Friday on account of a kidney stone. So not fun. Luckily, it was a little one and it was alone, but I will be listening very closely to my doctor's advice to avoid another.
• Took the kids to see Ratatouille last Tuesday and saw Transformers yesterday with my wife due to fluke babysitter luck. I liked Ratatouille, but I'm not sure it's the 51st best movie of all time. On the other hand, major props for making a kid movie with a significant lack of toy tie-ins. Ratatouille is a better movie that Cars, but I don't see my four year old boy trading in is Lightning McQueen toy car for a Remy the Rat. Transformers on the other hand obviously did not forgo the toy tie-ins! Still, it wasn't bad. Kinda reminded me of The Rock with a bigger budget.
• Micahville listed DevHawk on it's list of 69 Tech Blogs That Don’t Suck. Thanks!
• David Ing boldly writes that C# is getting fat. Or maybe it's just big-boned. My take: no question that integrated query is a big feature that covers a lot of surface area. But given the prevalence of databases and other queriable stores, it's critical to improving programmer productivity. Go read Todd Proebsting's talk on Disruptive Programming Language Technologies. Two of his candidates for disruptive language technologies were Database Integration and Manipulating XML. LINQ neatly covers both.
• According to John Shewchuck, the new BizTalk Services release is available. However, when I click on the "what's new" page, it tells me they're experiencing technical difficulties. (Their error page is Oops.aspx. Funny!)
• Scott Hanselman has Programming Personas 2.0. Who are you? I thought I was and "Order n" Architect (the quote "Where's the whiteboard" is spot on) but my CS background isn't as strong as the persona's.
• Sam Gentile is starting to dig into Concurrency and he has a great list of links that have influenced his design.

Morning Coffee 97

• For the first six months of 2007, I posted 158 times in 181 days. I'm obviously off the pace I set in January of averaging a post a day, but I am averaging just under nine tenth of a post per day. Not bad. At this rate, I'll post almost as much this year as I did the last two years combined.
• It was a great family weekend. Saturday, three of my friends helped me move an upright piano that we got used for a great price. Luckily, one of said friends is also a physics teacher, otherwise I don't think we could have gotten that heavy thing in the truck. To say thanks, we BBQed for them Saturday evening. Then yesterday we took the kids to see a Sesame Street Live show. Both days were beautiful, which my wife greatly appreciated.
• The Caps hit the free agent market running yesterday, picking up Tom Poti (four years, $14 million) and Victor Kozlov (two years, $5 million). They weren't the A-list free agents, but they both seem like solid pickups. According to Japer's Rink, the Caps were about $6.5 million under the new cap minimum. These two signings just about close that gap, but it doesn't sound like they're done. That's good news for Caps fans.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on LINQ to SQL. While I've seen most of this before, the cool thing Scott shows is hovering over the LINQ to SQL result and bringing up the exact SQL statement in a debugger window. That's pretty cool.
• Nick Malik is now "Mr. SOA" inside MSIT. As you might imagine, I'll be working with him fairly closely. Actually, he's late to a meeting with me as I type this.
• John Shewchuk announces a new version of BizTalk Services coming soon. The big new feature is access control for services exposed via the BizTalk Services. If you can't wait, you can try out the new stuff in their pre-production environment right now, before it's live. Is this a beta of a beta?
• Soma announces the MSDN Small Business Developer Center. I took a quick look thru the site. Strangely enough, it doesn't cover Dynamics - Microsoft's business software primarily targeting small and medium size businesses.
• Ted Neward called object/relational mapping the "Vietnam of Computer Science". David Chappell gives us our next war / technology analogy, declaring that the REST vs. WS-* war is over, ending in a truce like the Korean war rather than "crushing victory for one side".
• Like Jeff Atwood, I didn't realize About Face has been updated, twice. I am a huge fan of the first edition, but Jeff calls About Face 3 "the best edition of this classic yet". I just ordered a copy for myself.
• David McGhee transcribed a fantastic session with Dr. Don Ferguson at the Australian Architecture Forum on SOA/ESB integration in the real world. Go read the whole thing. Udi Dahan pulls out the quote "there is no such thing as a centralized ESB." Amen to that. My other favorite quotes from this discussion is "The temptation is often to get everything in a repository, but often you cannot rely on people to put everything in the registry" and "there is sometimes the “Highlander” philosophy of there can be only one service". If you're design depends on centralization and/or significant change in human behavior, it's doomed from the start. Frankly, it's amazing how often that happens.
• In response to my What is the Rails Question post, Hartmut Wilms wonders why "the .NET community (for the most part) ignores Open Source Projects". I wonder the same thing, though I don't think you can lump the whole .NET community together on this. While some parts of the community ignore anything they can't download from MSDN, other parts strongly embrace open source projects.

Morning Coffee 88

I've got over 500 unread news posts and 200 emails in my inbox to process. So this is nowhere near comprehensive.

• Clarius released the June 07 CTP of their Software Factory Toolkit. Big new feature in this drop is T4 Text Template editor that has syntax highlighting and eventually intellisense. They also released the May 07 CTP of VSSDK Assist, previously known as VSIP Factory. Haven't played with either yet, but it seems like a good time to be a tool builder.
• PowerShell hits a million downloads in six months. No surprise there, IT'S FRAKING AWESOME. Jeff Snover details seven MSFT products using PS, promising many more that he can't talk about. See earlier comment about being fraking awesome.
• Speaking of PS, I don't "get" Server Core because it doesn't support managed code. So no PS for Server Core. They announced @ TechEd that Server Core will support IIS 7, but since there's no CLR you can't run ASP.NET. As far as I'm concerned, no PS and no ASP.NET is below the minimum threshold of usefulness. I realize it's technical limitation related to the current factoring of the .NET Framework and I assume some team somewhere in Redmond is working on fixing it. But what's the point of releasing Server Core in the meantime?
• QUT releases version 0.8 of their Ruby.NET compiler. Given that the IronRuby guys bootstrapped by licensing the Ruby.NET compiler, I wonder how these two projects will evolve side by side.
• Speaking of Ruby, JRuby has gone 1.0. Congrats!
• At TechEd, I saw my friend Steve Jones from Capgemini, and it's not this Steve Jones. Woops. But CRUD is still CRAP.
• Pat Helland breaks Scott Hanselman's Rule #2 and details how he "lost a Megan".
• My ex-teammate David Hill has been busy with Acropolis. If you are even the slightest bit interested in this technology, you should be reading his blog.
• Microsoft acquired a company called Stratature last week. I don't typically track MSFT acquisition news + it was lost in the noise of TechEd. But Roger Wolter thinks it's a great move and that Stratature's Master Data Management hub product is one of the best. Given the importance of MDM in SOA, I think I need to go learn more about this product.

Morning Doughnuts 11

Harry will be back on Monday so I will returning to blogging on my website, while I will let the expert return to his normal posts here (not that he really took a break). I agree with Harry's post in that I really want to get something built so that we can talk about more than theoretical models. Like last time I appreciate the opportunity to sub for the master this last week. I hope that you found some of my entries interesting.

• Sam Gentile wrote the other day why it's great to be a Microsoft developer. I enjoyed that post because I just celebrated the end of my first year here at Microsoft. At this point I am not sure what I have contributed, but I have learned a great deal and want to apply that knowledge over the next year to help the company to succeed. We really do have great people and great technologies.
• The Seattle/Oklahoma City Sonics hired a GM who is only 30 years old. You know you must be getting old when the people running the sports teams are younger than you. He comes from the Spurs organization though so at least he has a background from a successful franchise.
• Ben Pearce listed out his top 5 questions about PowerShell this week at TechEd. He also recommends the book "PowerShell in Action" by Bruce Payette. I heartedly agree with this endorsement as the book is excellent.
• It looks like there are going to be more family friendly games for the XBOX360. I for one am glad to hear that. The other day as I was trying to find some games my 4 year old with the broken leg could play I realized how many games I have that wouldn't be appropriate for him. This is very good news in my opinion.

Morning Coffee 71

• It's been almost four months since I started these morning coffee posts. I like the regularity - there's been 84 weekdays so far this year, so 84 - (71 + 6 days missed from vacation) = only seven missed morning coffees. On the other hand, I think my daily blogging fix is keeping me from digging deeper into some issues. So I'm going to start cutting back to only three morning coffee posts per week, with the hope of three deeper technical posts and one wildcard post per week.
• Speaking of cutting back, my parents are in town this weekend so I doubt I'll get a post out tomorrow or Monday. Have a good weekend anyway.
• Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 3 is out. Now is time to start getting serious with it.
• Joe McKendrick is reporting that Gartner has given the green light to spending more on SOA. Maybe it's because I work for a technology savvy company, but I've never understood outsourcing critical business decisions about technology adoption to a consulting company.
• It's a Joe McKendrick twofer: He also reports that IBM is calling for a new SOA directory / discovery / registry standard to replace UDDI. I totally get the need a "new UDDI", though I'd wager that my issues with UDDI are very different than Big Blue's.
• Yesterday, I