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.

Morning Coffee 163

Between MVP summit last week, ALT.NET this past weekend and an internal brown-bag presentation yesterday, my unread email and blog posts have piled up. Most of the following is old news, but I wanted to get something out. Especially since I feel a case of Caps Fever coming on that will force - force you understand - me to head home early today.

DyLang Stuff

• My teammate Srivatsn demonstrates how to make your static C# types act more dynamic in order to interop better with DLR languages. For example, by implementing GetBoundMember and SetMemberAfter, you can support setting arbitrary attributes on a C# class from Python. Cool.
• Today's Michael Foord link: On Testing: Some Programmers Refuse to Get it. He's responding to a comment by Allen Holub suggesting that having 110k of test code for 30k of production code is "a real indictment of the language" (IronPython). I'm with Michael on this, Holub's suggestion is laughable and worse radically uninformed. I like the way Larry O'Brien (who passed on Holub's comment in the first place) describes the views of tests from inside and outside the agile community. I also like his description of tests as "quality diodes".

Other Stuff

• Werner Vogels posts about a new Amazon EC2 feature: Persistent local storage. Basically, you can create an empty volume up to a terabyte in size and then mount it to your images as a drive. The objective seems to be able to run relational databases in the images, rather than being limited to S3 and SimpleDB. Kinda interesting, but given Google's announcement last week, I think the shine is off EC2 a bit.
• This past weekend's Twitter outage has Dave Winer re-thinking the idea of building networks on a single point of failure. While obviously I agree with the concept, I don't agree with his solution that "We need some big infrastructure companies to get into this game". While there are some big blog infrastructures out there, most of that network was built on a massive number of small infrastructures. Why wouldn't the same thing work for microblogging?

Morning Coffee 162

• Another nice thing about the new job: I'm working in the vicinity of some good friends. I was over in building 42 yesterday and made it a point to stop by Pat Helland's office yesterday and spend an hour or so chatting about the new gig. Pat is down the hall from David Hill, whom I worked with on Architecture Strategy. Back in my building, we're down the hall from the VSX folks including my friends Ken Levy and Gareth Jones. I'm sure there are more folks I know around, but hey it's only my second week!
• I'm a big fan of Carbonite, which I use to back up all the digital media on my home computer. With two little kids, we have lots of digital photos as you might imagine . However, one thing that bugs me about Carbonite is that it doesn't back up video files by default, you have to go in on a folder by folder basis and select "'Back up Video files in this folder" from the context menu. Given how much trouble this "feature" has given me, I imagine less techie folks don't even realize their video files aren't getting backed up. However, I will say the latest version of the Carbonite Software at least makes it easy to find files that aren't backed up. A quick sweep revealed around a dozen folders that had un-backed-up video files in them, which I promptly fixed.
• The big news yesterday was the new Google App Engine, which looks to give you access to virtualized infrastructure that sounds similar to what GOOG is rumored to use internally. I like Dave Winer's comment that this enables "shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians." Given Google's history w/ Python - Python's BDFL Guido van Rossum works there - it's no surprise that Google App Engine (GAE?) runs on Python, though apparently they "look forward to supporting more languages in the future". I'm guessing "more languages" == Ruby, maybe Erlang too.
• I wonder if/how Google App Engine will affect Ruby on Rails momentum? If there's a significant lag before App Engine supports Ruby, will that drive developers to Python web stacks like Django? (Django is included in "the box" with App Engine)?@ PyCon, I was surprised at the intra-language animosity I observed. I wonder how many Python developers are secretly hoping Google never ships Ruby support. I highly doubt Google would do that - they want to tap the exploding RoR market like everyone else - but I'd bet it would really take the wind out of Rails' sails if they did.
• Today's Michael Foord Link: Embedding IronPython 2, Examples of the DLR Hosting API. You can read the DLR Hosting spec, but it's pretty out of date so Michael's article helps fill in some of the gaps.
• Looks like PowerShell has gotten the open source community treatment in a project called Pash. While I'm sure others are excited about PS on Linux or Mac, I'm excited to see PS running on Compact Framework. I wonder if it would work with XNA?
• Speaking of XNA, XNA Console is a new CodePlex project that provides an IPy console to manipulate your XNA based game on the fly. Python is no stranger to game development - Civ IV for example provided mod capabilities via python. Alas, the compact framework can't run IPy today, so neither can XNA on Xbox. But wouldn't it be cool to hack your game in IPy running on a 360 using the messenger kit? (via IPy URLs)
• Bart De Smet gets functional, writing type switch and pattern matching in C# 3.0. I guess it works, but it sure is ugly. Why not just use F# and be done with it?
• Soma announces that the VC++ Feature Pack has shipped. Somewhere, I assume, there is much (some?) rejoicing.

Morning Coffee 161

• Huge perk of the new job: new hardware. I had to give up my Dell workstation but I got a Lenovo T61p dual core widescreen laptop, an HP dc7800 dual monitor quad core desktop and a Polycom CX700 IP phone. I'm really digging the Lenovo's integrated fingerprint reader - no more password login - but I'm most impressed with their integrated driver management software. Sure beats the heck out of hunting for dozens of updated drivers all over the place like most vendors for you to.
• Minor downside to all my new toys: I spent most of my first week on the job installing and configuring said new toys.
• Caps will face the Flyers in the first round of the playoffs which starts Friday. I have a feeling that I'll be feeling poorly Friday around 3pm and have to head home early. :)

DyLang Stuff

• Apparently, Michael Foord isn't getting enough exposure on this blog. :) He left a comment to remind me to mention the IronPython URLs link blog he writes along with Mark Rees and Seo Sanghyeon.
• Speaking of Michael, his employer Resolver Systems just launched a new product: Resolver One Quant.
• Still speaking of Michael, he's quoted in the InternetNews article Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise.
• My teammate Jimmy Schementi posts a preview of his spare time project "Silverlight on Rails". This RoR plugin lets you declaratively specify if you want your RoR controller code to be accessed remotely via AJAX and run on the server or if you want that code to be downloaded to the client and run in SilverLight. Very cool stuff.

Other Stuff

• Don Syme provides some insight into the F# producization process. There's going to be an update to the "Research release" later this month and a CTP of the "Product release" later this summer (Brian McNamara has the CTP details). I am looking forward to these releases, though I'll probably be too busy w/ IPy to experiment much with them.
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki continues his adventures with F# with a look at tuples, records and discriminated unions. Of the three, I find discriminated unions the most interesting since there isn't anything like it in other languages I've used.
• Gregori and Chris both announce the release of Unity 1.0. Congrats guys! But if I don't have time to hack around with the latest F# release, you can imagine I won't be getting to Unity any time soon...
• Jeff Atwood recommends you build your application UI first. Furthermore, he does a good job selling the value of paper prototyping as well as introducing the concept of PowerPoint prototyping. Money quote: "You don't want something too powerful."
• Via LiveSide I discovered James Hamilton's blog. Normally, hardware infrastructure isn't really my bag, but I find his ideas around using ISO standard shipping containers as modular data center building blocks fascinating. For example, check out this post that suggests sticking modular data centers in condos would be cheaper than building data centers!Subscribed.
• Speaking of ISO, you may have heard Open Office XML was ratified as an ISO standard. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy around this, but Miguel de Icaza lists of what he considers major community wins from the standardization process. Anything that "pushed Microsoft into more open directions" is a good thing IMO.

Morning Coffee 160

I took most of last week between jobs and have spent much of this week getting machines setup, access to builds, etc. Furthermore, RSS Bandit ate my feedlist and I am still soldiering on sans mobile phone so I was pretty much unconnected for about a week and a half.

IPy Stuff

• Laurence Moroney demonstrates how to configure a web site project in VS08 to use Dynamic Silverlight’s development web server Chiron. I looked at turned it into an exported template, but I think the Start Options are stored in the suo file and I’m not sure how to include that in the template. Maybe it could be set w/ a macro or at worst a GAX recipe?
• If you’re a regular reader, you might as well get used to the name “Michael Foord”. He’s a developer @ Resolver Systems, makers of the IPy based Resolver One app/spreadsheet hybrid I’ve written about before. He’s also the author of the upcoming IronPython in Action book and the maintainer of Planet IronPython and the IronPython Cookbook. I’m going to try very hard to only link to Michael at most once per day. Frankly, that’ll be tough.
• Today’s Michael Foord Link: Michael turned his PyCon talk on IPy + SL2 into a series of articles entitled IronPython & Silverlight 2 Tutorial with Demos and Downloads.
• Ken Levy (who now sits just down the hall from me) clued me into the 1.0 release of IronPython Studio, which is a free IDE based on the VS08 Shell for IronPython (based on code from the VS SDK). Big new feature in this release is support for the integrated VS08 Shell, which means it’ll snap into your existing VS08 installation (well, not express) rather than forcing you to install the 300 MB isolated shell.

Other Stuff

• Caps had a BIG win last night when they needed it most. Now they’re tied with Carolina for the SE division lead, but they lose the tiebreaker so unfortunately, they can’t make the playoffs without help. ‘Canes have to head back home last night to play Tampa Bay, they have to win tonight and Friday to clinch. Loss in either gives the Caps control of their own destiny. Caps are only one game back of Ottawa, Boston and Philly, none of whom have played well down the stretch. It does mean I have to root for the frakking Penguins to beat Philly, twice.
• Now that I'm in a job where I'll be traveling occasionally, I really appreciated Scott Hanselman's travel tips, though I'm not sure "Don't look like a schlub" is in the cards for me.
• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Scott Guthrie blogged that the ASP.NET MVC Source Code is available on CodePlex. The project name is “aspnet” not “aspnetmvc” which makes me wonder if they might release the source to more ASP.NET stuff over time.
• Speaking of Scott Guthrie, today he blogged about unit testing in SilverLight. Jeff Wilcox appears to have the definitive post on the subject, including links to the SilverLight testing framework (it’s included in the SL Controls source code release). He also provides a prebuilt “SilverLight Test” project template for easy download. Personally, I really like the in-browser test runner. I wonder how hard it would be to hook that up to DySL so you could write your tests in IPy? (given that IPy doesn’t have attributes, I’m guessing there’d be at least a bit of work involved in making this happen)
• Speaking of SilverLight, apparently the next version of Windows Mobile (i.e. 6.1) will support it. Since I'm in the market for a new phone anyway, I'm thinking of getting one of these. Also, it's nice to see a marketing site for WM 6.1 using Silverlight instead of Flash like WM 6.0 marketing site does.(via LiveSide)
• Ted Neward turns the news that MSFT is releasing XAML under the OSP into a long and fascinating history lesson that is well worth the read. I’m going to skip commenting on it, beyond advising you dear reader to read this if you haven’t already, except to wonder: how many sides does a “Redmondagon” have?

Morning Coffee 159

As you might expect, these morning coffee posts are going to get more dev focused as well as more IPy focused.

• One of the cool things we showed @ PyCon was Django running on the latest drop of IronPython. IPy lead developer Dino Viehand posted a blog entry (for the first time in 28 months!) showing the basic Python DB provider for SQL Server he put together. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another two and a half years for Dino's next post.
• Speaking of IronPython, some of my new teammates pointed me to Michael Foord's Planet IronPython aggregate news site. Michael is IPy developer for Resolver Systems (the cool spreadsheet app hybrid I wrote about @ Lang.NET) and he's working on an IPy book.
• Still speaking of IPy, Jeff Hardy dropped his first release of NWSGI, an port of Python's Web Service Gateway Interface spec to ASP.NET and IPy. I can't wait to see NWSGI combined Django running on IPy like Dino demoed @ PyCon. Congrats Jeff!
• Scott Hanselman's post on Twitter reminds me that I recently started twittering myself. I haven't worked it into my daily routine, so it gets updated only occasionally, but after reading Scott's post, I'm thinking it's cooler than it appears on the surface. 
• In surprising news, Microsoft is going to start collaborating with IBM's Eclipse Foundation, to make it easier to it easier to write apps for Windows in Java. I would think this is a very cool thing, but apparently Ted Neward - who's knowledge of JavaWorld far eclipses (ha ha) my own - thinks "the skin here is just too sensitive" and that this move might cause more controversy between MS and Java. However, he seems to imply the controversy would be between MS & Sun (Eclipse is obviously named as a jab @ Sun) rather than between MS & the Java community.

Lunchtime Coffee 158

• My friend (and hopefully my next representative) Darcy Burner is leading a group of congressional challengers in publishing A Responsible Plan To End The War In Iraq. I haven't read the plan itself in detail, but I sure like what I'm hearing about it.
• Speaking of politics, Obama's speech today "A More Perfect Union" was fantastic.
• Bioshock is getting a sequel. 'nuff said.
• There's a new version of FolderShare out and I've got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I've been a regular user of FolderShare for a while so it's nice to see it get a face lift. On the other hand, it's been over two years since Microsoft bought FolderShare and we're only just now getting a new version, which is literally nothing more that a face lift - this version introduces no new functionality at all.
• I was hoping to geek out vicariously via someone else's hacking around with Singularity. Luckily, Matthew Podwysocki provides just such an opportunity.
• Looks like "Prism" is the new CAB. Glenn Block has two extensive posts covering a project overview and their first drop. I think it's interesting that the Prism team is focused on building a reference implementation, and letting the framework eventually fall out. Reading thru the description, it sounds awesome. However, based on the massive increase of inbox throughput I'm experiencing since I accepted the new job, I can't imagine I'll have time to play with it. Maybe Matthew will start playing with Prism too! (via Sam Gentile - btw, thanks for the kind words on the new job Sam!)
• Speaking of Sam, he points to a series by Bob Beauchemin entitled LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework: Panacea or evil incarnate? With a title like that, who can resist reading the whole series? Err, I can because LINQ 2 SQL & EF performance just fell off my radar entirely. However I gotta agree with Sam's point that he "can't think of anyone more qualified than Bob" to tackle these questions.
• Tomas Restrepo blogs his dev environment PS script as well as a PS fortune script. Personally, I use Chris Tavares' vsvars wrapper for PS, though I'll gladly take an "official" PS based dev environment.
• I wonder if Ted Neward will get jumped for admiring Mort the way Nick Malik did. Given that Ted called himself Mort while Nick compared Mort to agile developers, I'm guess Ted will have to go back to his Vietnam analogy if he wants to create controversy.
• Speaking of Ted, I agree with his point that conferences are about people. As a python pre-newbie (I figure I'll reach full newbie status by the time I actually start my new job), I spent most of my PyCon time connecting with people rather than trying to learn technical stuff. Also, I love Ted's WHISCEY acronym.
• Speaking of PyCon, my soon-to-be new teammate Srivatsn Narayanan blogs his thoughts on PyCon. I'll try and get to my PyCon thoughts soon.

Morning Coffee 157

• My Xbox 360 started flashing the dreaded Red Ring of Death on Friday. <sigh> I'm not going to have much time to play in the next week, so it's not the end of the universe, but I did have to dig an old DVD player out of the garage for interim duty.
• My Caps really stepped in it over the weekend dropping two games they had to have and by most reports (aka according to my dad) that they dominated most of the way. Caps Playoff Math isn't as dire as say Clinton's Nomination Math, but they are three games back of the Hurricanes with twelve to play.
• Ted Neward has a pretty good F# overview article in the most recent MSDN Magazine. I say pretty good because I wonder if someone with no functional programming experience will "get it". As much as I like F# and functional programming, I think some of the basic concepts don't pass Don Box's two beer test.
• Speaking of Ted, somehow his feed fell off my radar (bad DevHawk!) and I missed several great posts like Modular Toolchains (note to Ted, check out A Research C# Compiler), Why we need both static and dynamic in the same language (note to self, check out Cobra) and The Fallacies Remain.... (recently, I'm the guy shouting about risks).
• Speaking of MSDN Magazine, have you seen their new site redesign? I can't find any announcement of it, but man the site looks great.
• If you missed MIX, the sessions are all online already. That was fast.
• John Lam blogs about the availability of the Dynamic Silverlight bits. Apparently, Dynamic Silverlight includes more recent bits than the Silverlight 2 SDK, which does includes binaries and tools for IronPython, IronRuby and Managed JScript (quickstart). So you can get started with dynamic languages on Silverlight using the SL SDK alone, but I expect that the Dynamic Silverlight bits will be updated more regularly than the SDK.

Morning Coffee 156

• My hockey team won last night 4-2. No points for me, but I was even on the night. I did spend some time in the penalty box, but I was serving a two many men on the ice bench minor. We only had nine skaters, not enough for two full lines, so I'm pretty tired today. However, I'm not as tired as I was two weeks ago - that's a good sign.
• Politics 2.0 watch: The Obama campain announced yesterday that they raised $55 million in donations in the month of February. That's significantly more than Clinton ($35 million) and McCain ($12 million) combined. Even more impressive is that $45 million of that was raised online, of which $40 million were from donations of $100 or less and $22.5 million were from donations of $25 or less. I guess in Politics 2.0, individuals contribute more than online punditry and video parodies of political commercials.
• TextGlow is a Sivlerlight 2 based Word docx file viewer, created by James Newton-King. Nice, but what I really want is "SlideGlow", a SL2 based PPTX file viewer. (via DNK)
• Speaking of Silverlight, Windows Live launched an experimental site called PhotoZoom which will let you create DeepZoom photo albums. (via LiveSide)
• Charlie Calvert has created a home for Language Futures discussion on MSDN Code Gallery. If you'll recall, back in January he asked for input on Dynamic Lookup. Now he's looking for feedback on Call Hierarchy, a proposed VS IDE feature to help you visualize how your code flows. Great idea, but the Call Hierarchy dialog mockup isn't very intuitive. Couldn't we put these visualizations into the code editor window directly, like CodeRush does?
• John Lam continues his Dynamic Silverlight series, first building a Flickr image browser in Managed JScript then showing how to integrate an IronRuby version of the Flickr image browser with an ASP.NET MVC app.
• EdJez is inspiring. Subscribed. (via Brad Wilson)

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.

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 152

• I was slammed Friday, so I didn't get a chance to post the results of last Thursday night's hockey game. I'm sure you've all been eager to hear. We lost, bad, 8-2. Personally, I was -3 and had no points, but I played much better than last week. We had three full lines of forwards, which was a big help, but I have started to find my ice-legs so to speak.
• Charlie Calvert has the now-definitive list of LINQ to Everything. Of all of them, I found LINQ over C# fascinating, especially given my recent efforts in parsing.
• Chris Tavares blogs about a distributed source control system called Bazaar. Unlike most version control systems, Bazaar is distributed which means you can use it without a server. According to Chris, you can share branches as easily as mailing a file. I wonder if you could make Bazaar work over a P2P network.
• While looking up the MSDN link for the previous coffee item, I noticed an entire new section in the MSDN Library for Open Protocol Specifications. Not much to add, just wanted to highlight their existence.
• Admitted non-designer Scott Guthrie shows off using the new version Expression Blend to build a Silverlight 2.0 app. Personally, I was most interested in seeing some of the new of built-in controls.

Morning Coffee 151

• Unity's first CTP was just over two weeks ago, but according to Grigori Melnik, it's shipping just over two weeks from now. That seems pretty speedy to me. By the time I get a change to take a closer look at Unity, it'll probably have shipped.
• I discovered Matthew Podwysocki blog via DNK. I don't typically subscribe to blogs that I discover via DNK, but Matthew has written about IoC/Unity, F# and DLR lately so I'm thinking I should be a regular reader.
• Corporate VP David Treadwell has an extensive post on updates to the Windows Live Platform Services that are being unveiled at MIX next week. The updates include the new WL Messenger Library, a new SDK for WL ID Delegated Authentication, a new WL Photo API, a new CTP of WL Tools, standardized support for AtomPub, updates to WL Contacts API and Sivlerlight Streaming and a new "experimental" service called Application Based Storage that "allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the WL data centers on behalf of a user". I'm sure there'll be more WL news at the MIX conference proper, but that's quite a good chunk of features to start digging into. Personally, I'm particularly interested in WL Delegated Auth, esp. how it deals with phishing, something I don't think OAuth handles very well.
• Windows Live isn't the only group making announcements in advance of MIX. Adobe announced a research project that allows "cross-compiling existing code from C, C++, Java, Python, and Ruby to ActionScript." This seems pretty obviously a response to Silverlight 2.0's embedded CLR, announced last year @ MIX. Support for C++ is very interesting - Adobe evangelist Ted Patrick claims they were even able to cross-compile Quake 1 to Flash. Interesting, but this is an internal research project @ Adobe with no projected release date while Silverlight 2.0 goes into beta next week.

Morning Coffee 150

• Yesterday was the NHL trading deadline, and the Capitals were very busy. They obtained Huet from Montreal, Federov from Columbus and Cooke from Vancouver. Given they are fighting just to make the playoffs, going for three soon-to-be unrestricted free agents seems like an odd choice. However, the consensus (among my parents anyway) was that it's critical to get this very young Caps team some playoff experience. Even if all three walk at season's end, it'll be worth if the Caps make a playoff run. Besides it's not like we gave up much: an extra second round pick in '09, a 19 year old defensive prospect (who was apparently 14th on the depth chart) and an underachieving winger.
• Speaking of the Caps playoff chances, they are currently one and a half games back of the division leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eighth seed Flyers. Yes, I rank hockey teams using baseball's standings system. Otherwise, you have to talk about games in hand (i.e. the Caps are five points behind Carolina with two games in hand).
• The writer's guild ratified the new contract, so Hollywood labor strife is now officially behind us. At least until July when the the actors may go on strike.
• It seems like a slow week for Microsoft geek news, which is odd since WS08, VS08 and SQL08 all launch today. I'm guessing it's the calm before the Mix storm next week.
• After going dark for six months, Linq to XSD has been re-released to work with the RTM version of VS08. Scott Hanselman demonstrates Linq to XSD by applying it to OFX, an XML Schema he calls "goofy" but apparently helped develop. OFX uses derivation by restriction, which has no direct corollary in C#, but Linq to XSD's  is able to translate between XML and objects without loosing any of that type fidelity. Nice to know Linq to XSD can tolerate OFX's level of goofiness, though I'm guessing most people use much more straightforward schemas.
• Speaking of Linq, I discovered LINQPad via a comment on Rob Conery's blog (which I found via DNK). It's basically a code snippet IDE for C# 3.0 and VB9, with it also has built in database connection support, so it can fulfil much the same role as SQL Management Studio. I only played with it for a few minutes, but I was really impressed.  This is definitely going in my utilities folder. I wonder if they're interested in supporting F#?
• Not sure how I missed this, but you can get MSDN Magazine via same Syndicated Client Experience as Architecture Journal. Unlike AJ which is divided into issues, the MSDN magazine client is divided into topics which is harder to square with the physical magazine. On the other hand, since MSDN Mag has been around longer, perhaps topics + search is a better discovery mechanism.
• Soma announces the Visual Studio Gallery, a repository of VS Extensions. It's kinda cool, but the whole discovery mechanism is clunky. I might like to experiment with some free or even free trial products, but there's no way to filter on cost so finding them is a hassle. Also, there's no way for community members to vote, rate or comment on the products in any way.
• Nick Malik can't answer the question "how does Enterprise Architecture demonstrate value?" I could be snarky and say "it doesn't", but that's only half the answer. It doesn't, but it should. My opinion, since you asked Nick, is that EA fails to deliver value because it tries to control the uncontrollable. Trying to gain efficiency thru establishing standards and eliminating overlap via reuse are pipe dreams, though literally millions of $$$ have been poured into those sink-holes. There are a few areas where centrally funded infrastructure projects can solve big problems that individual projects can't effectively tackle on their own. EA should focus their time there, they can actually make a difference. Otherwise, they should stay out of project's way.