Morning Coffee 164

• Big news since my last Morning Coffee post was the announcement of Live Mesh. I've been running it for about a month, and I'm really digging it. Make sure you check out the team blog and watch the developer tour video (be on the lookout for IPy about half way thru the video)

ALT.NET

• I had a great time @ the ALT.NET open space conference last weekend. I was somewhat distracted on Saturday as due to a family communication mixup, I had to bring my son Patrick with me. Jeffrey Palermo shot a cute video of him (3 minutes in) where he explains that he's at the conference "to be with my dad". Having a five year old is a little distracting, but everyone was amazingly cool with having him around. When he gets a little older I have no doubt he'll be attending conferences and leading open sessions.
• I did a session on F#, but it felt kinda all over the place. I hadn't touched F# in a few months and it showed IMO. Matt Podwysocki was there to help keep the session from devolving into mass chaos. Thanks Matt.
• My favorite session of the conference was Scott Hanselman's "Are We Innovating?" talk, which I think originated from a question I asked him: There are many examples of large OSS projects in other dev communities that get ported to .NET (NHibernate, NAnt, MonoRail, etc). Can you name one that's gone the other way? I can't.
• I took Matt's advice and joined the local ALT.NET Seattle group.

DyLang Stuff

• Martin Maly posts about how dynamic method dispatches are cached in three different layers by the DLR. You shouldn't care about this stuff if you're a DLR language user, but you will certainly care about it if you're a DLR language builder.
• I'm really excited to see Phil Haack (whom I met F2F @ ALT.NET) is experimenting with IronRuby & ASP.NET MVC. True, I'd rather it was IPy, but his Routes.LoadFromRuby would work with Python with very little code change.
• Note to self, take a deeper look at Twining, the IPy database DSL by David Seruyange.
• Daily Michael Foord - Ironclad 0.2 Released. Ironclad is a project to implement Python's C extension API in C# so that IronPython could load standard Python C modules like SciPy and NumPy. So far, they're able to load the bz2 module. 

Other Stuff

• Congrats to Brad and Jim for shipping xUnit.net 1.0.
• Everyone seems to be jumping on the functional C# coding bandwagon. Bart De Smet's series on pattern matching in C# is currently at eight posts. Now Luca Bolognese is in on the action, with three posts so far on functional code in C#. I like how Luca keeps writing that the C# syntax is "not terrible" for functional programming. Again, why suffer thru the "not terrible" syntax when you could be using F# instead? (via Charlie Calvert)
• I need to take a look at VLinq. Charlie and Scott Hanselman both mentioned it recently.
• I would like to have been in the conversation with Ted Neward, Neal Ford, Venkat Subramaniam, Don Box and Amanda Silver.
• I haven't had any time to play with XNA of late, which means the great list of GDC videos Dave Weller posted on the XNA team blog will remain beyond my ability to invest time for now.
• There's a new drop of Spec# from MS Research. IronRuby is using Spec# heavily as I recall.

IronPython 2.0 Beta 1 Released

I'm sitting in the PyCon keynote right now, but I wanted to take a quick second to say congrats to my new teammates for getting the brand spanking new beta 1 drop of IronPython 2.0. You can find out what's new via the release notes.

Joining the Dynamic Languages Team

After nearly two years in MSIT and six years focused on architecture across three different roles, I'm moving on to a new job in the Developer Division. In a couple of weeks, I'll be joining the Dynamic Languages team as a program manager. This is the team who ships IronPython, IronRuby, the Dynamic Language Runtime and Dynamic Silverlight. After seeing all the their cool work at Lang.NET this year, I just had to be a part of it.

As you might imagine, I'm pretty excited about this opportunity.

In the short term, I'll be primarily focused on IronPython, which is marching towards their 2.0 release. Towards that end, I'm attending PyCon 2008 in Chicago this weekend, though I don't officially change jobs for a couple more weeks. Longer term...well let's just say I'm going to be really focused on doing my part to get IPy 2.0 out the door and after that we'll see where things lie. This is a pretty big shift for me, so I'm explicitly trying to focus on short term work for the first six months in order to absorb as much knowledge as possible from the folks I'll be working with like Jim Hugunin, John Lam, Martin Maly, Jimmy Schementi and a bunch of others who I haven't met yet.

While this is a pretty big role shift, I haven't given up my passion for services and/or architecture. In other words, this isn't the last you'll hear about Kitchen Sink Variability, the ROI of EA or my perspective on Nick's Shared Integration Model. Obviously, with the job focus change, I expect focus on my blog to change as well. I'm not exactly sure how blogging fits into this new role, though the Dynamic Languages team is pretty open and many other members blog (as linked above) so I doubt I'm going anywhere. I'm going to try and keep blogging Morning Coffee, but I'm guessing it won't be quite as regular as it has been in the past. Unfortunately, I am going to stop coding F# for a while (sorry, Don!) I can't focus on learning two languages at once and obviously Python is my new top priority.

I wasn't in my MSIT architect role that long, but I feel that the "in the trenches" experience will serve me greatly for years to come. And of course, I will miss my teammates, especially Dale  who regular readers might remember from filling in around here occasionally.

Morning Coffee 154

• Did you see yesterday's Dilbert cartoon? Classic.
• MIX isn't the only Microsoft conference this week. It's also time for the annual MS Research TechFest conference. It actually started yesterday, with a keynote from Rick Rashid and Craig Mundy (available on demand). I'll be heading up there later today and will blog everything I saw that is public, like I did last year. In the meantime, you can check out some cool MS Research projects on the TechFest video page.
• Speaking of MS Research, they've published the Singularity source code (for academic and non-commercial purposes) on CodePlex. Singularity is research OS "focused on the construction of dependable systems". I've wanted to play with this, but I've never had the time. Frankly, that hasn't changed, but now that it's available to the community, I'm hoping I can live vicariously thru other people hacking around with it.
• Some announcements coming out of MIX won't be a surprise to anyone:
  • The IE Team blog has been discussing IE8 quite a bit of late, and the folks of LiveSide are reporting the IE8 Readiness Toolkit is already up (download links aren't live yet). There are also a bunch of developer whitepapers on Code Gallery. Update: the install links are live.
  • Scott Guthrie already announced that Silverlight 2.0 would go beta at MIX, and Neo @ SilverlightExamples has all the links for the runtime, docs and the SDK.
  • Scott also already announced a new preview drop of ASP.NET MVC, which you can get from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions download page.
• Here some primarily "new" news from MIX:.
• I'm not sure which team owns it, but I'd say the biggest previously-unannounced news was SQL Server Data Services (aka SSDS), a "highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services." In other words, SQL in the sky. There's a free beta sometime this month you can sign up for. Very cool, though no word on what it's going to cost. If you're interested in this, I'd keep an I on the Data Platform Insider blog.
• John Lam announces the Dynamic Silverlight extension that lets you run DLR languages on Silverlight. Given that they talked about this last year, I'm not sure it's really "news", but John provides lots of gory details so it made the cute. But are they really using "DSL" as the acronym for this? Guys, that acronym's already taken.
• Mary Jo Foley has a scoop on Silverlight for Nokia Symbian mobile phones.
• There's a new beta of Expression Studio 2 as well as a separate Expression Blend 2.5 preview for Silverlight 2. Soma has the details. This isn't really a surprise, but I hadn't seen any news on new versions of all the Expression Studio products.

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 143

• I've been sick for three days, hence the lack of posting around here.
• As a Redskins fan, it's hard to root for any other NFC East team. On the other hand, it sure was easy to root against the Patriots. Congrats to the Giants on their Super Bowl victory. Favorite headline: 18 and uh-oh!
• Sounds like there's cause for optimism regarding the writer's strike. But is it already too late? Will the 9% drop in viewers ever come back? Personally, I think the studios have hastened their own irrelevance.
• With last night's win, the Caps are one game above .500. In and of itself, that's nothing to be proud of - Coach Boudreau remarked when we reached .500 that the Caps had "officially reached mediocrity". However, the Caps are the only team in the SE conference that's above .500. If hockey used baseball standings, Carolina, Atlanta and Florida would each be 1/2 game back of the Caps. It's going to be a fight to the finish.
• In fairly big managed Ruby news, Wayne Kelly has decided to contribute to the IronRuby effort, effectively walking away from the Ruby.NET which helped get off the ground. One the one hand, obviously this is great for IronRuby. On the other hand, I liked the idea of multiple managed implementations of Ruby, so here's hoping Ruby.NET doesn't fade away.
• Speaking of the DLR, I know I mentioned Martin Maly's blog in my Lang.NET Morning Coffee Post, but I didn't actually get to read his posts on targeting the DLR until I unexpectedly had several days off sick. If you are at all interested in writing your own language for the .NET platform: Go. Read. Now. You should also check out Tomas Restrepo's blog, he has also started writing about targeting the DLR.
• Larry O'Brien's blog is currently offline, but he commented that he doubted my ToyScript F# parser would be more than 600 lines of code. Currently, the parser is clocking in at 287 lines of code plus about 50 more for the AST. It's not done yet - see earlier statement about being sick - but I'm fixing bugs not writing additional code at this point. To be completely accurate, that's 287 lines of FParsec code. It's taken me a little bit to learn FParsec, but so far I'm pretty happy with it.
• Scott Hanselman points to the new MS Deploy project, a tool for managing content and configuration on web servers. I've never understood why this wasn't a standard part of IIS. It seems every hosting company I've used has rolled their own web-based management tool like DotNetPanel.
• Oh yeah, Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 shipped Monday. Congrats!
• I fired up Inside Xbox the other day, and there was a page about the new Disney Channel show "Phineas and Ferb". Of course, with two kids under five, anything new on the Disney Channel is notable in my house. What made this blog-worthy is the fact that it's directed and written by Dan Povenmire, who I knew from my USC days. I used to go see his band Keep Left and groan loudly at the bad puns in their song "PSA". Dan, if you found this searching for yourself online: Awesome work, my kids love the show!

Morning Coffee 142 - Wishful Catchup Edition

• After spending most of the last four days away from my desk, I was planning on a quiet day to catch up on a variety of things. Then I heard the oh-so-minor news that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for almost $45 billion. Hasn't been much reaction on the dev, architecture, politics and hockey-oriented blogs I read, but you can get a ton of reactions on TechMeme.
• Lost is back. Finally. I stayed up late last night reading Lostpedia, catching up on Lost Missing Pieces and the Find 815 ARG.
• Alex The Great had four goals and an assist in last night's victory. Coughing up three goal lead and letting the Canadiens tie the game in the last 30 seconds isn't encouraging, but a win is a win. The Caps are currently one game behind the SE leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eight seed Rangers. Alex was named first star for January.
• Ted Neward has a nice summary of Lang.NET by day: one, two and three. I wonder if my talk qualifies for the exception to Ted's rule that "A blog is not a part of your presentation, and your presentation is not part of your blog". I had 15 minutes to discuss something I've written about over ten posts  (so far).
• John Lam points to the latest DLR hosting spec. I'm much more interested in the DLR code generator, but at least the hosting interface is documented.
• Scott Hanselman has a nice post on fluent interfaces. Note to self, find out if Beautiful Soup works with IronPython.
• I wonder if the VS Source Code Outliner PowerToy works with F#? (via Sam Gentile)
• Chris Tavares has an extensive post Deconstructing ObjectBuilder? I've poked around inside OB before, but I'm really looking forward to Unity (also via Sam Gentile)
• NVIDIA finally updated the drivers for the video card in my Tecra M4. That only took a year.

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.