Afternoon Coffee 174

You know, this gets pretty long when I go a week between morning coffee posts.

Dynamic Language Stuff

• There's a new version of the DLR Hosting spec. One of the biggest changes is the removal of DLR's pre-canned knowledge of IPy and IRuby. Now, you use app.config to specify DLR languages and map them to extensions. Sesh has the details and a sample. If you only care about hosting IPy, you can use our language specific hosting API which doesn't require app.config.
• Jimmy pushed out a new version of the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK. He's on the lookout for a better name, one of his commenters suggested "SilverWhisper Kit".
• Srivatsn shows how to pass Python keyword arguments to a C# method using ParamDictionaryAttribute, similar to how C# supports the params keyword via the ParamArrayAttribute. Unfortunately, there's no syntactic sugar for calling param dictionary methods from C#. I wonder, do most people like or dislike the idea of language level support for keyword arguments in C#? I'm guessing most would be against, though I think it's a cool idea.
• Maybe it's me, but I've noticed an uptick in twitter posts containing "ironpython" of late. For example, via Summize I discovered Joseph Jude's blog finally{} where he has posted a time tracking tool he built in IPy as well as his initial IPy learnings.
• Michael Foord, as usual, has been generating quite a bit of good IPy content. He did a tutorial on IPy at PyCon UK,  his book is almost done, he has some interesting thoughts on dynamic language performance and even admits that he likes C#, though not as much as he likes Python.
• Vernon Cole announced that the adodbapi project now supports IronPython 2.0 as well as CPython. This library is a DB-API 2.0 compliant interface for any database that support ADO (note, that's native ADO not ADO.NET). I love to see Python projects with explicit support for IPy.
• My boss - who apparently will be called "Rem" from now on in the office - saves you "gazillions" by explaining non-positional negotiating strategy and draws the comparison to agile software development. Not exactly related to dynamic languages, but I'd like to see him further explore the relationship super-optimal, non-positional, significantly-hyphenated negotiation and software design. (OK, I made up "significantly-hyphenated")

Other Stuff

• Don Syme blogs about an update to the F# CTP, a mere week after the original release. One week? That's more often than even IPy releases. I can't wait to see what they ship in next week's release! :) Seriously, I hope they can keep the release sprints short, but every week would be a bit crazy!
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki updates FsTest for the F# CTP and posts about Extension Everything in F#. Unlike C#, which only supports extension methods, F# also supports extensions properties, static methods and events, though like Matt I can't think of a good use for extension events.
• Still speaking about F#, Andrew Kennedy has a three part series on the new units of measure feature of F#. If you were going to use F# to build the physics engine of a game, I would suspect UoM would be extremely useful. (via Don Syme)
• Oh look, Chris Smith built an F# version of artillery game that uses Units of Measure for the physics code. I'll bet UoM was extremely useful. :)
• Talking about Live Mesh at TechEd Australia - where much to my surprise frankly they were demoing Live Mesh Apps - I pointed out to Scott Hanselman that Mesh is running an embedded CoreCLR (aka the same CLR from Silverlight 2). Scott went poking around and posted what he discovered. Looking forward to finding out what he digs up on using CoreCLR outside the browser.
• Speaking of Scott, I need to set up a family video conference solution like Scott's before my next trip.
• Congrats to Glenn Block and the MEF team for their initial CodePlex source drop! I've been hearing about this possibility since Glenn joined the team, so I'm really excited to see it happen. I need to take a look at it in detail (in my copious spare time) because I want to find out how to make it work with IPy.
• Bart de Smet has a whole series (starting here) on Dynamic Expression Trees. However, given that he specifically writes "This blog series is not about DLR itself" makes it seem pretty conceptual to me. Why not talk about DLR expression trees instead Bart?
• I'm sure you noticed ASP.NET MVC preview 5 dropped last week. I really liked Brad Wilson's discussion of the new view engine design.
• Tomas Restrepo has started publishing his source code on GitHub. Personally, I haven't published any source code lately but I am using Git for all of my non IPy core work (which is stored in TFS). Like Tomas, I'm still getting the hang of Git but I'm really digging it's speed, it's branching and the fact that there's zero infrastructure requirements. SVN provides the lightweight svnserve, but Git is even lighter weight than that.
• I liked Steve Yegge's post on typing. I am a touch typer, but I doubt I type 70 words a minutes. I do know where the number keys are without looking though, so I guess that's pretty good. I remember seeing Chris Anderson demo Avalon WPF long before it was public and being impressed at how fast he could type.

Morning Coffee 173

I'm on my way out the door for New Zealand and Australia, but I wanted to push out a few things.

• F# August September CTP is out! Don Syme has the announcement, Jomo Fisher has the link roundup and details are on the brand-spanking-new MSDN F# Dev Center. Major congrats to the F# team. I've been running a pre-release version of these bits, and they are a huge step forward if you're an F# developer.
• I've got an article on IronPython in the latest issue of CoDe magazine. Also check out Brad Wilson's IronRuby article, Ted Neward's F# article and Neil Ford's Polygot Programming article.
• Via Michael Foord I discovered that IronPython tester Dave Fugate is back on the blog. He starts with a couple of posts about measuring IronPython performance.
• Speaking of blogging teammates, I think the dynamic languages team has the highest percentage of bloggers in any group at MSFT. All four Program Managers (Dave (lead), John, Jimmy and me), four of five developers (Shri (lead), Dino, Curt and Oleg) and all three Testers (Jim, Dave and Srivatsn). The only non blogger right now is Tomas - who at least has a home page - and  the lead tester which is an open position right now. 11 bloggers out of 12 team members equals 91.67% team blogger coverage.
• I was really impressed with Newspeak when I saw it at Lang.NET so I'm very excited to see they have a new website. No public bits yet, but I like the part where they point out Newspeak "can be implemented independently of Squeak, Smalltalk or any particular VM or IDE". How about implementing a version on DLR guys?
• Maurice de Beijer shows off embedding IronPython inside a WF application. Kinda cool, but he's primarily showing off implementing a CLR interface in IPy. How about a WF activity that execute arbitrary IPy code. That would be cool. (via IronPython URLs)
• Ironclad has reached their 0.5 milestone, being able to import numpy from IronPython. BTW, guys - I'm not sure commenting out one line that appears to be unreferenced qualifies as a "monstrous caveat". Congrats guys! (via IronPython URLs)

Five Minutes Past Noon Coffee 170

• Ben Hall announces IronEditor, a simple dev tool for IronPython and IronRuby. Pretty nice, though fairly simplistic (as Ben readily admits). For example, it doesn't have an interactive mode, only the ability to execute scripts and direct the output to IronEditor's output window. However, it is a good start and I'm sure it'll just get better. One thing he's apparently considering is a Silverlight version. (via Michael Foord)
• Speaking of "Iron" tools, Sapphire Steel have had an IronRuby version (in alpha) of their Ruby in Steel product for several months now. I wonder if John's had a chance to play with it.
• Speaking of John, the ASP.NET MVC / IronRuby prototype he talked about @ TechEd is now available on ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 via Phil Haack.
• Ted Neward has an article exploring the IronPython VS Integration sample that ships in the VS SDK. As I mentioned the other day, we're starting working on a production quality implementation of VS Integration for IPy.
• Ophir Kra-Oz (aka Evil Fish) blogs Python for Executives. I like his "Risk, Recruiting, Performance and Maturity" model - four boxes, perfect for keeping an executive's attention! :) Plus Ophir has some nice things to say about IronPython. (via Michael Foord)
• Ronnie Maor blogs an extension method for PythonEngine to make Eval simpler. I especially like how he uses string format syntax so you can dynamically generate the code to eval. I wonder what this would look like in IPy 2.0 with DLR Hosting API. (via IronPython URLs)
• Speaking of DLR Hosting, Seshadri has another great DLR hosting post, this time hosting IPy inside of VS08 so you can script VS08 events (document saved, window created, etc) with Python.
• Justin Etheredge has a bunch of IronRuby posts - Getting IronRuby Up and Running, Running Applications in IronRuby, Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 1. (via Sam Gentile)
• Don Syme links to several F# related posts by Ray Vernagus, though he's apparently also experimenting with IronRuby. I'm really interested in his Purely Functional Data Structures port to F#.
• Speaking of F#, Brian has a teaser screenshot of F# upcoming CTP. However, he chooses the New Item dialog to tease, which looks pretty much like the current new item dialog (the new one does have fewer F# templates). However, if you look in the Solution Explorer, you'll notice a real "References" node. No more #I/#R! Yeah!
• The interactive graphic in Kevin Kelly's One Machine article is fascinating. It really highlights that the vast vast vast majority of power, storage, CPU cycles and RAM come from personal computers on the edge. Even in bandwidth, where PC's still have the highest share but it looks to be around 1/3rd, the aggregate of all edge devices (PCs, mobile phones, PDAs, etc.) still dominates the data centers.

Morning Coffee 169

• Check out the crowd for a the Washington Capitals developmental camp scrimmage last week (My parents are in their somewhere). Standing room only in the practice facility to watch a bunch of kids, most of whom won't ever make it to the NHL, in July. If you think Washington can't be a hockey town, you are sorely mistaken.
• Speaking of the Caps, they are establishing a "spirit squad"? Is that really necessary? (short answer: no). Peerless' take is hilarious.
• Seshadri Vijayaraghavan is a tester on the DLR team and he's been writing quite a bit about the DLR hosting API. He's got a series of posts about hosting, invoking and redirecting output from IronPython in a C# application.
• I haven't seen an official announcement, but mobile access to Live Mesh is available by pointing your phone browser to http://m.mesh.com. It's mostly a web view of the Live Desktop, though there is a feature to upload photos from your phone. However, for some reason that feature doesn't work for me right now. I don't get the "browse" button.
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 is available for download. Phil Haack has a few details that ScottGu didn't cover. Scott Hanselman shows off some AJAX stuff.
• Speaking of Scott Hanselman, he highlights the return of Terrarium from Bil Simser. Scott mentions that most Terrarium animal implementations were big collections of nested if statements. I wonder if F# pattern matching would be a cleaner approach?
• Ted Neward obviously never "even tangentially" touched politics, as I think they have far worse flame wars far more often than we have in the software industry. However, certainly the Scala flame war he's commenting on seems fairly counterproductive.
• Brad Wilson runs into a wall trying to convert a string to an arbitrary Nullable<T>.He doesn't find an answer, but I found reading thru the steps he took to try and find an answer strangely compelling.
• Jeff Atwood argues that Maybe Normalization isn't Normal. It's mostly a collection of information from other places, including a compilation of high-scale database case studies. But it's a useful collection of info and links, with a little common-sense thrown in for good measure.
• I have a hard time imagining Pat Helland camping.

Morning Coffee 167

• If you're a gamer, you're probably already well aware that E3 is this week. The Too Human demo has already been released. I have a friend who's been working on "something" that will be announced today (I think).
• Live Mesh folks pushed out an update Friday. Among the new features is the ability to sync folders among peers but NOT up to the cloud. This is cool because it means I can sync my many many GB of pictures and music on my home machine backed up with Carbonite. This means I can sync them without blowing thru my 5GB Mesh storage limit.
• It looks like there's a new F# drop - 1.9.4.19 - but as usual there is no announcement or details as to what's new. Release notes guys, look into it.  UPDATE - Don Syme blogged the release, and it's pretty minor. a .NET FX 3.5 SP1 bug fix, a fix for Mono, and they removed WebRequest.GetResponseAsync to make F# work on Silverlight. And the release notes are in the readme. My bad.
• Speaking of F#, it was "partially inspired" by OCaml, so when I see papers related to OCaml, I immediately wonder if I an apply the described techniques to F#. "Catch me if you can, Towards type-safe, hierarchical, lightweight, polymorphic and efficient error management in OCaml" is one such paper. (via LtU)
• Speaking of functional programming, Matthew Podwysocki posted a bunch of FP links as well as a Code Gallery Sample on FP in C#. Good stuff.
• As per Scott Guthrie, it looks like there's a new ASP.NET MVC drop coming this week.
• Based on posts by Ted Neward, Dare Obasanjo and Steve Vinoski, Google Protocol Buffers sounds like it's going to be a dud. Note, I haven't looked at it depth personally, I'm just passing on opinions of some folks I read and trust.
• Speaking of Dare, both he and James Hamilton take a look at Cassandra and come away impressed. I wonder how easy it is to code against from Python and/or .NET?
• Bart de Smet has a cool sample of calling out to PowerShell from IronRuby via the backtick command. Pretty cool, but it would even cooler to show how to call out to PS and return .NET objects to Ruby (though that would probably not be spec compliant for the backtick command).
• Here's a MS code name I had never heard before - Zermatt. It's "a framework for implementing claims-based identity in your applications." (via Steve Gilham)

Morning Coffee 166

Yes, I realize it’s been a while. I tried in vain to catch up with my blog reading after my Hawaii vacation and finally just gave up and hit “mark all as read”.

Dynamic Languages

• There's a new version of the DLR hosting spec available (doc, pdf). The DLR implementation is still in motion, so there are some inconsistencies between the spec and the code, but the spec should give you the high level overview you need if you want to host DLR languages inside your app.
• Oleg Tkachenko recently joined the dynamic languages team. He's the creator of the Interactive IronRuby Web Shell, an IronRuby version of Try Ruby. Of course, it’s not as cool as using SL2to execute the code directly in the browser. Michael Foord has his Python in the Browser and my teammates John and Jimmy demoed a Silverlight version of Try Ruby @ TechEd.
• Jim Deville, also of the dynamic languages team, recently started blogging.
• I have a new boss, Dave Remy. He doesn't have a blog - yet - but you can follow him on Twitter as daveremy. When Twitter is actually working that is.
• There's a new homepage/wiki for IronRuby though I’m not sure why there's a picture of Matz wearing a Python shirt on the home page.
• My teammate Jimmy Schementi provides some "continued hope" for a better (heck, I'll take current) ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC story for DLR languages.
• Via Michael Foord, sounds like IronClad is making good progress. V0.4 can run the bz2 module "in its entirity" (maybe run a spellcheck on your site, guys?) and now apparently, it's now able to load numpy.core. Very exciting!

Other Stuff

• Pat Helland, who has blogged even less than me for the past few months, has a post up about controller and doers in the IT department. After 18 months in MSIT, put me in the doer camp, please.
• The F# team has pushed out a spec for v1.9.4 of the language. Don Syme says it's not official, but it's a huge improvement over the old informal spec
• Speaking of F#, my friend Matthew Podwysocki recently published FsTest, a testing DSL for F#. I wrote about F# unit testing as part of my PEG parsing series, and I really like the direction Matthew has taken this project. You can pull it down from CodePlex.
• When I did my PEG talk @ Lang.NET, Gilad Bracha mentioned I should check out oMeta. It looks really cool, though with the job change I haven’t had the time to play with it. Now I discover that Jeff Moser is working on a version for CLR called oMeta# that I’ve got to spend some time with. And in the comments to that post, I discovered pyMeta from Allen Short, though it apparently doesn’t work on IronPython (must investigate why).
• James Kovacs introduces psake, a PowerShell based build automation tool which uses a rake-inspired internal DSL syntax similar to one I blogged last year. I'd love to see this take off, but given MSBuild's tool integration, I wonder if that's feasible.
• I upgraded my home wireless network almost exactly a year ago. I've been happy with the range and coverage, but not so happy with the Buffalo Tech firmware. The built-in DHCP server is pretty flaky. So I upgraded to the open-source Tomato firmware. Upgrade was smooth, though I did need to reset my cable modem. But even that was smooth - Comcast has an automated service for that now,

Morning Coffee - Post Vacation Edition

It's been exactly a month since my last post. A crazy month, hence the lack of blog posting around here. Sorry about that. My wife has been much more regular in her blogging than I have of late - she's posted a dozen times since my last entry.

Since I'm so far behind on blog reading, and email, and work, and pretty much everything, this is going to be a slightly different Morning Coffee - more forward looking than backwards. Back to normal Morning Coffee posts in a day or so.

• Hawaii was awesome. I was going to post a trip summary, but my wife beat me to the punch. My personal favorite part was the air tour, but frankly it was all good.
• I hear the weather in Seattle was awful while I was gone. My wife's best friend called it "Juneuary". However, the weather since we got back has been pretty awesome. I take full credit for bringing the good weather to Seattle from Hawaii. :)
• I was in Amsterdam for work and I didn't have my family with me, but it was pretty good all the same. My good friend Matt lives in Amsterdam full time, so I got to spend a lot of time with him. I also discovered that I have a new favorite beer - Kwak.
• I'm sure you're aware of these, but I should post the links anyway: IronRuby on Rails, IronPython Beta 3, Silverlight 2 Beta 2, Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK Beta 2, ASP.NET MVC Preview 3.
• I have 419 mails in my inbox - and I've been fairly diligent about deleting stuff that I didn't need to keep even on vacation. That's about 400 more than I'd like to have in there. Most of today will be spent digging out my inbox. Small miracle: I have nothing currently on my calendar for today.
• I'm one of the content owners for PDC08. After getting my inbox cleaned up, my #1 priority is to see where we are on PDC planning. I have a feeling that's going to take up the majority of my time for the next couple of weeks.
• I mentioned above that we shipped the latest beta of IronPython while I was away. As you can imagine, there's a bunch of PM work to be done as we get down to the release of IPy 2.0 (sometime this fall) as well as early work on the next version of IPy.
• Outside of work, I've got a lot of writing to do. I'm finishing up an article on IPy and starting to really hunker down on a book that I'm writing.

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.

Morning Coffee 149

• Big news yesterday was Microsoft announcing "Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability". More details available at the new Interoperability website and this interview with Bob Muglia.
• The videos from Lang.NET 2008 are now available, including mine.
• Mix08 is just under two weeks away, and the news is ramping up. Scott Guthrie provides a "first look" at the Silverlight 2.0 beta (aka the one with .NET) that will release @ Mix. He also provides a set of eight tutorials where he demonstrates building a Digg client for Silverlight 2.0. I've been doing a little Silverlight 1.0 experimentation recently, but I think I'm going to scrap it in favor of waiting for 2.0.
• Shorter Nick Malik: IoC is cool, but isn't a silver bullet. Go read the whole thing.
• Brad Wilson has a new laptop with a solid-state hard drive. VS08 installs in under 10 minutes? I gotta get me one of those...
• In addition to the XNA news, Microsoft also announced Gears of War 2, Fable 2 and Ninja Gaiden II and Too Human will all be available this year exclusively on Xbox 360. Of those, I'm most interested in Fable 2, though Too Human is looking interesting. But what about Halo Wars? When is that shipping?

Morning Coffee 148

• As I predicted yesterday, Microsoft announced that "For the first time, community games will be distributed through Xbox Live." I haven't seen a press release yet, but it looks like this will allow any XNA developer to publish on XBL. Joystiq has a few details. According to Major Nelson, six community games will be available on XBL later today. Also, it looks like you'll be able to make XNA games for your Zune as well. Details to follow.
• Speaking of yesterday, I referred to President Bush as "President 30% Approval". This was incorrect. From now on, I'll refer to him as "President 19% Approval".
• Speaking of politics, two more big wins for Obama yesterday. The Clinton camp, looking more desperate every day, unveiled a new website purporting to provide the "facts and myths about the race for delegates". Memo to HRC: "Florida and Michigan should count" isn't a fact, it's an opinion. I can't see how this site helps her cause.
• Joel on Software, who used to work on the Excel team, provides a facinating look into why the Office File Formats are so complicated. Nothing more to add, I just thought it was an interesting discussion of "real-world" complications to something that seems like it should be simpler.
• Scott Guthrie provides a client product post .NET 3.5 roadmap, much like he did for web products a few months ago. Unlike the web roadmap, which includes exciting stuff like Silverlight 2.0, IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET Extensions (including MVC), the client roadmap includes: better setup, better perf for WPF, better memory utilization and startup time, WPF designer improvements, and some new WPF control. Color me under whelmed.
• My old team recently launched the Software + Services Architecture Center. S+S guru Gianpaolo Carraro recently wrote about the different perspectives this new site is trying cater to. S+S hasn't been on my personal radar, but it's something I really would like to dig more into.
• In a recent charity hockey game, Team Cure beat Team Hope 2,250 to 2,223. No, that's not a typo. The two teams of twenty faced off for 240 straight hours of hockey in sub-zero weather to raise $300,000 for cancer research. That's frakking dedication to a cause.

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 146

• The writers strike is officially over. Everyone goes back to work today. Thomas Cleaver has what I thought was the best post summarizing how the writers won. TV Guide has a rundown of how and when various shows will resume. I can't wait to see Daily Show and Colbert Report tonight. Lost - aka the best show on TV - looks like it will be getting five more episodes (in addition to the eight shot before the strike).
• Speaking of TV, Battlestar Galactica Fans: circle April 4th on your calendar.
• Obama won all three "Potomac Primaries" yesterday, and is now the Democratic front-runner, though there's a long way to go before the convention. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has a great take on presidential experience - I'm guessing he's an Obama fan.
• In minor acquisition news, Microsoft is acquiring Caligari, makers of 3D modeling tool trueSpace. The Caligari folks are joining the Virtual Earth team, though I wonder what the XNA folks think of the acquisition. This isn't the first 3D modeling product Microsoft ever acquired - we owned Softimage for four years in the '90s.
• Scott Hanselman and Tomas Resprepo both write about PowerShellPlus, which I saw week before last @ Lang.NET. Scott really likes it, for both PS novices and gurus, but Tomas thinks the UI is busy, based on the screenshots. Personally, I'm not doing much PS work lately - occasional one off stuff, but that's it - so it doesn't seem worth the effort.
• Speaking of Scott & Tomas, Scott also has a nice gallery of VS themes. I'm partial to Tomas' Ragnarok Grey. Is there a VSThemesGallery.com site somewhere?
• Still speaking of Scott, he points to the new ASP.NET Developer Wiki (beta). I poked around, but didn't find anything shiny. I was very surprised that searching for "MVC" returned no results.
• Speaking of MVC, Scott Guthrie has a rundown on what's coming in the MIX preview release of ASP.NET MVC. Biggest news IMO is that it's /bin deployable - i.e. you don't need your hoster to do anything special to support MVC (assuming they already support ASP.NET 3.5). Also big news, they're releasing the source so you can build and patch (and enhance?) it yourself.
• Chris Taveres continues is ObjectBuilder series and Tomas continues is DLR Notes series. BTW, my F# based DLR experimentation continues, albeit slowly (frakking day job). Hope to be able to post on this soon.
• One of the things driving my interest in F# is manycore. An interesting tangent to manycore is general purpose programming on graphics processing units (aka GPGPU). MS Research just released a new version of Accelerator, just such a GPGPU system. I personally haven't played with it - I've been focused on writing parsers, not parallel code.
• Is XQuery really "a promising technology of the future" as Don Box suggests? I see exactly zero demand or use for it in my day-to-day work. Of course, Don's paid to build future platform goo, so maybe it is promising and Don's afore-mentioned goo will leverage it, though I remain skeptical. As for XML being "Done like a well-cooked steak", I'd say XML is like a great steak cooked perfectly, except it's done exactly how you don't like it. You can appreciate its quality, but you don't really enjoy it as much as you could have.

Morning Coffee 145

• Saturday, I participated in the Washington Democratic caucus, which was handily won by Obama. Much has been made of the record Democratic turnout in this race for the nomination, my local caucus location was no exception. It appeared that attendance outstripped expectation about 2-to-1. My precinct alone had 56 attendees, which went overwhelmingly for Obama.
• I had never participated in a presidential caucus or primary before - the race has always been decided by the time it got to my state. I really enjoyed being a part of the process. So I'm going to play amateur pundit today, and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled geek blogging tomorrow. If I insult your favorite party or candidate, please feel free to leave a scathing comment explaining that I'm an idiot and how you're never going to read my blog again.
• Obama not only won the WA caucus, he also won Louisiana, Nebraska and Maine over the weekend. And he didn't just win, he won big. He won by 37% in WA, 36% in Nebraska, 21% in Louisiana and is leading by 15% in Maine with 70% of the vote counted. Momentum hasn't meant much in this campaign, but five double-digit Obama wins in a row (with three more likely Obama wins tomorrow) can't be good for the Clinton campain. Polling that shows Obama matches up against McCain better than Clinton doesn't help. 
• Speaking of McCain, he sure had a shitty day Saturday. He lost Kansas by a whopping 36%. Louisiana was close, but McCain still lost. And in Washington, it looks like the state Republican Party simply stopped counting with 1500 votes still left to be counted. I'm guessing the local GOP party leads were trying to keep McCain from going 0-3 on the day. Had they simply counted the votes and McCain lost, everyone would have forgotten by the time he got the nomination. However, this little helping hand makes McCain look weak and keeps Saturday's butt-kicking in the news for several more days.
• Of course, McCain is the presumed Republican nominee because Romney dropped out suspended his presidential campaign last week. The Daily Show's coverage Thursday night was hilarious. Jason Jones is right, Romney's a real douche bag.
• Apparently, McCain is "eager" for President 30% Approval Rating to "embrace" him. Furthermore, the President apparently thinks McCain would be the best to carry forth his agenda. I gotta agree with Steve Benen on this - "Could Dems really be this lucky?"
• In the wake of McCain's Super Tuesday victory, Rush Limbaugh said he and other right-wing talk show hosts are "trying to stop the wanton destruction of the [GOP] party". Limbaugh and his cohorts aren't going away, but certainly they've been reduced to irrelevant status, standing on the sidelines and stamping their feet while the Republican rank-and-file hand the nomination to McCain. Sure is hilarious to watch. Has anyone considered that Republicans are rooting for the wonton destruction of what their party has become?

Morning Coffee 144

• I finished Mass Effect last night. I definitely need to play thru that one again, though I'll probably wait until the new Bring Down the Sky DLC ships next month.
• Caps won again last night, improving to 20-10-4 since changing coaches at Thanksgiving. They're now at 57 points, taking the lead in the SE division with a full game on Carolina, Atlanta and Florida. Still a ways to go - 27 games left in the regular season - and things are far from "sewn up" but we're a damn sight better off than we were in November.
• Speaking of a horserace, looks like Clinton and Obama are in one after Super Tuesday. Their estimated delegate counts are basically tied. On the other side of the aisle, McCain opened up what is probably insurmountable lead - even though he has the right-wing media stars and Christian leaders against him. Money quote of the day:

“The real story of the night, when you look at their rallies and their turn-out numbers, is that the Dems have two strong candidates either of whom could lead a united party to victory. Forget the gaseous platitudes: in Dem terms, their choice on Super Duper Tuesday was deciding which candidate was Super Duper and which was merely Super. Over on the GOP side, it was a choice between Weak & Divisive or Weaker & Unacceptable. Doesn’t bode well for November.”
- Mark Steyn, National Review 
(via Carpetbagger Report, lest you think I regularly read National Review)

• Charlie Calvert is starting a new series on the future of C#. First up: Dynamic Lookup. Probably most interesting is the news that the DLR "will be the infrastructure on which the C# team implements dynamic lookup". Does this mean C# will target the DLR? Sure sounds like it. I think it's a good addition, but I'm not a fan of the proposed syntax. (via Bitter Coder)
• Brian McNamara saw me present @ LangNET and sent me a link to his blog. He's building up a monadic parser combinator library in C# 3.0. This is basically the same concept that FParsec implements, though C#'s syntax is much less attractive than F#'s for this kind of code. However, Brian does a very good job explaining why monadic parser combinators are useful and making the idea accessible to the C# programmer (i.e. you don't have to learn F# or Haskell to understand what he's talking about). He also points to Luke Hoban's C# 3.0 monadic parser implementation.

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.

Morning Coffee 140

• I only posted one Morning Coffee post last week. It wasn't a lack of content, it was a lack of drive on my part. I had 20-30 items flagged in my news reader, but for some reason I couldn't work up the interest in posting them. So some of these are a bit old.
• I'm at the Language.NET Symposium this week, so look for lots of language blogging. I've already chatted with Tomáš Petříček and John Lam. If someone kicks Ted Neward's ass because he hates Perl, I'll try and liveblog it.
• Speaking of Ted Neward, he discusses the question "Can Dynamic Languages Scale?" without devolving into a flame-fest. I agree 100% with his point about the difference between performance scaling and complexity scaling. Personally, I tend to err on the side of better complexity scaling, since buying hardware is easier than hiring developers.
• Nick Malik responds to me calling his shared global integration vision flawed. He points to NGOSS/eTOM as an example of a shared iterative model that works. I know squat about that shared model, so I'll refrain from commenting until I do a little homework on the telco industry.
• Speaking of shared interop models, Microsoft is joining DataPortability.org. Dare Obasanjo and Marc Canter are skeptical that so far this effort is all hype and no substance. Reminds me a bit of AttentionTrust.org. But if DataPortability.org can get off the ground, maybe there's hope for Nick's vision (or vis-versa).
• Don Syme lists what's new in the latest F# release. As I said, this release is pretty light on features. Hopefully, I'll get some details
• Tomas Restrepo shows how to change your home folder in PowerShell. I need to do this.

Morning Coffee 139

• Big news on the WGA strike front: the AMPTP reached a deal with the Directors Guild last weeks. Initial reaction from United Hollywood is mixed, but I'm hopeful this will at least get the AMPTP / WGA talks started again.
• Speaking of new media, Xbox 360 Fanboy has a rundown of 45 short films from Sundance that are getting released on Xbox Live Marketplace. That's pretty a-typical content for XBLM. Typically, new content on XBLM has been from "Hollywood Heavyweights". I'm pretty excited to see them branch out content wise.
• Speaking of Xbox 360, seems they had a good year. Congrats!
• Still speaking of Xbox 360, everyone gets a free copy of Undertow this week.
• Scott Guthrie announces the availability of the .NET Framework Source Code. Shawn Burke has instructions for how to use it with VS08. So far, they've made the core base class libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF, ADO.NET and XML available. LINQ, WCF and WF are expected to become available "in the weeks and months ahead".
• Ted Neward wonders if Java is "Done" like the Patriots, or "Done" like the Dolphins? If you want my opinion (I'm guessing yes, since you're reading my blog), definitely done like the Dolphins. OpenJDK was a desperation move to make Java "cool" again, but it won't work. People who want an open source stack are using LAMP and language wonks who saw Java as mainstream SmallTalk have moved on to Ruby. The question will be if Sun buying MySQL will make Sun cool or MySQL uncool by association. I'm guessing the latter.
• Speaking of Ted, he's got a great post about the relevance of game programming to the mainstream or enterprise developer.
• Speaking of game development, David Weller points to all the new XNA GS 2.0 content up on Creators Club Online.
• There's a new version (1.9.3.14) of F# out, but no announcement from Don regarding what's new. I reviewed the release notes, seems like this is primarily a bug-fix release with only very minor feature additions.
• Speaking of F#, Don points to Greg Neverov's implementation of Software Transactional Memory in F#. This immediately reminded me of Tim Sweeney's Next Mainstream Programming Language talk. Tim suggested said language would need to support a combination of side-effect free functional code and software transactional memory. F# is looking to be closer to that language all the time.
• Still speaking of F#, Don Syme's Expert F# book is out. I read the draft version - it rocks - but I'm still going to get my own real copy. You should too.
• With their win Saturday, the Caps are back to .500 for the first time since late October. Since Thanksgiving, the Caps are 15-7-4. Only four teams in the league have a better record over that time span. We play one of them tonight - the Penguins - and it's on Versus, so I'll even get to see it. In HD no less.

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 137

• Note, I somehow duplicated Morning Coffee 135. So I've skipped 136 to make up for it.
• Congrats to Hillary Clinton for her unexpected win in the New Hampshire primary. As I said last week, I think Obama has a better chance of winning in November, but I've got nothing against Clinton or her politics.
• Speaking of winning, congrats to LSU on winning the BCS. Are they the best team in college football? Personally, I don't think so - there are at least three other teams (Georgia, West VA and of course USC) who can make a persuasive argument that they should be #1. But losing to teams like Penn Pitt and Stanford, neither WVA and USC have an argument they should have been in the championship game. But that's what makes the BCS such BS. If nothing else, at least the "we need a playoff" meme is picking up steam.
• This is sort of cool: Eye-fi is a wireless enabled SD card so you can wirelessly upload pictures from your camera to your PC or favorite photo service. However, I think the price needs to come down a bit. I recently bought a 2GB SD card for my wife's new camera for $20. A 2GB Eye-fi card is $99. Not sure wireless upload is worth 5x per card.
• With all the focus on LINQ providing type-safe queries, it's easy to forget that some apps do need to build their queries at run time. Scott Guthrie points at a Dynamic LINQ C# sample (also available for VB) that builds LINQ expression trees from strings. It kinda takes you back to the bad-old-days of embedding SQL strings in your code, but there are scenarios - especially BI scenarios - where you need this capability.
• Soma announces the VC++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta. This is the long-awaited (by who?) MFC update as well as support for the C++ TR1. TR1 provides some FP-esque support like function objects and tuples, so maybe this is worth a look. On the other hand, given that much (all?) of TR1 is lifted from Boost, maybe we should just use that.
• Speaking of cool libraries, check out C5 (aka the Copenhagen Comprehensive Collection Classes for C#). It's basically a complete redesign of System.Collections.Generic (or SCG as they call it). I've read thru their online book and I'm very impressed. Of course, with me focused on F# of late, I'm primarily using immutable collections, so I'm not sure how much use I have for C5 right now.
• There was a free CoDe magazine in my DevTeach bag back in November with a fascinating article on where LINQ goes from here - LINQ 2.0 if you will. One of things the article discusses is tier-splitting, which has seen the light of day in Volta. Will Volta also deliver External Relationships, Reshaping Combinators and Join Patterns or will those come from different projects?
• I had to pave my workstation yesterday. I was running an interim build of Vista x64 SP1 and I couldn't make Virtual Server work with it. As part of the repave, I discovered I needed to update the firmware of my SCSI controller, but the update had to run under DOS. Freaking DOS? My workstation doesn't even have a floppy drive to boot DOS from! However, I was able to boot from a USB thumb disk instead. That's damn useful.

Morning Coffee 135

• Bill Gates does his last CES Keynote, and we announce a PC that looks like a purse?
• News that Warner Brothers is going exclusively Blu-Ray is disappointing. However, I'm convinced that neither side will win this format war but that online downloads will trump both. Obviously, XBLM is a significant player in this space, but the market is crowding up quickly. Netflix apparently will unveil a new set-top box @ CES to let you watch HD movies via the Internet.
• Don Syme has a roundup of posts by John Liao about F#. Mostly, WPF + F# with a couple of ASP.NET 2.0 posts and one on XML .
• Speaking of F#, Stephan Tolksdorf has been working on an F# port of MS Research's Parsec library called FParsec. Parsec is a "monadic parser combinator library", something I have little experience with, so I've gone back to some source research on the topic, which I hope to blog at length about soon.
• Steve Vinoski talks about serendipitous reuse in his latest Internet Computing article. I'm not a believer in reuse in the enterprise, serendipitous or otherwise, but I liked the conclusion to Steve's article when he wrote "It's highly ironic that many enterprise architects seek to impose centralized control over their distributed organizations. In many cases, such centralization is a sure recipe for failure." Also, his point that "control without controlling" works sounds vaguely familiar.
• Update - This is really Morning Coffee 136, but I don't want to change the title since it's part of the URL

Morning Coffee 135

• Congrats to Barack Obama for walking away with the Iowa Democratic Caucus, which set turnout records. Frankly, I'm pretty cool with any of the democratic front runners but I think Obama has the best chance of winning in November. I'm not sure Edwards second time around will be any more successful than the last and I believe Clinton would drive the GOP GOTV campaign better than any of the actual GOP candidates would.
• Obviously, I like to play M-rated games like Bioshock and Mass Effect. But I also like games I can play with my kids like Lego Star Wars. There are two new Lego games coming out this year: Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. I can't wait.
• Speaking of gaming, Xbox LIVE had some issues over the holiday break, due to record setting sign-ups and concurrent users. Record setting numbers is a nice problem to have if you're on the business side, but a not-so-nice if you're a customer or work in operations. The XBL GM announced they're offering a "token of appreciation" for everyone's patience - a free XBLA game. Assuming it's not a crappy game, it's a classy move.
• I watched Transformers on HD-DVD last night. Fun movie with lots of action, but man is it dumb. John Turturro is the only real stand-out.
• Dustin Campbell implements cons, cdr and car from Scheme in C# and VB. While of limited production value (Dustin specifically warns readers not to use any of his code), it really demonstrates how different the functional world is from the object/imperative one, right down to the concept of type. Cons doesn't return a tuple, it returns function with two bound variables. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee 134

• Bill de Hora responds to a few of my Durable and RESTful ideas. He points out that relying on a client-generated ID can be troublesome, and recommends using multiple identifiers - one created by the sender, one by the receiver and one representing the message exchange itself. However, the sender ID is vulnerable to client bugs & tampering as Bill points out, and neither the receiver ID nor the exchange ID can be used to determine if a given message is a duplicate. If you don't trust the sender, is it even possible to determine if a given message is a duplicate?
• Pablo Castro confirms that there are "practical limits" to what ADO.NET Data Services can do with respect to idempotence. Nothing in his post was surprising, though I hope it will be more explicitly called out in the final docs. Developers used to the comforting protection of a transaction may be in for a rude awakening.
• Dare Obasanjo has a great post comparing the new features in C# 3.0 to dynamic languages like IronPython. I believe many of the productivity aspects of dynamic languages have little to do with being dynamic.
• Pat Helland noodles on durability and messaging, two topics near and dear to my heart (probably from working with him for a couple of years). I'm not sure where he's going with this - his conclusion that "Basically, big, complex, and distributed system are big, complex, and distributed" isn't exactly ground-breaking. But his point that "durable" isn't a binary concept is worth more consideration. Also, his description of IMS only looking at the effects of a committed transaction is very similar to how web sites work, though obviously HTTP isn't durable so you can't make event horizon optimizations like IMS did.
• Tangentially related, Werner Vogels discusses the idea of eventually consistent distributed databases. Today, that's a problem mostly only Internet-scale sites like Amazon deal with. In the near future of continued data explosion + manycore, we'll all have to deal with it.
• Nick Malik argues that categorizing enterprise applications by lifecycle is much less useful than categorization based on organizational impact. He might also need a new chair.
• Jesus Rodriguez digs into one of SSB's new features in SQL 2008: conversation priorities.
• Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz and Sam Gentile are mixing it up over the definition of SOA. Sam thinks SOA has to include business drivers and Arnon doesn't. I'm with Sam on this, defining "SOA" independently from "Applying SOA" seems pointless. Then again, rigorously defining SOA - much less arguing about said definition - seems like a waste of time in the first place IMHO.
• Wow, this guy Zed is mad at the Ruby community.
• Andrew Baron has 8 Reasons Why The TV Studios Will Die. Personally, I think reason #2 - Expendable Middle-Person - is the most important. If content producers can reach consumers directly, what value-add will the networks provide? (via United Hollywood)

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?

Morning Eggnog 132

• My parents are coming into town tomorrow so I'm off for the remaining week or so of the year. Blogging will likely be non-existent, unless I blog something I come up with while geeking out with my dad.
• Juergen van Gael demonstrates how to use TPL from F#. He wrote this once before using F#'s async workflows feature. I like the TPL version, though the "new Action<int>(RowTask)" is a little wordy. I'm guessing the eventual F# syntax will probably become something compact like "action RowTask". (via Don Syme)
• Andrew Peter ported RoR's Haml view engine to ASP.NET MVC, calling the result NHaml. I haven't played around with the new MVC stuff much, but I'm guessing ASP.NET's control-based approach doesn't work well when you separate out the controller code. If I'm manually authoring view templates, I'd much rather type NHaml's syntax than the standard ASP.NET <% ...%> syntax. On the other hand, there aren't any design tools out there today handle the NHaml syntax. Also, I wonder if Andrew is working on a Sass port. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee 131

• On a recommendation from my mother-in-law, I've been watching Torchwood. Sort of Men in Black, the series and set in Cardiff. Since it's made in England, it'll be one of the few shows still running in the new year due to the WGA strike.
• A while back I pointed out that many DotNetKicks articles were submitted by their authors. I submitted a few of my own, just for kicks (har har), with mixed results. Today, I discovered that the parse buffer post from my Practical Parsing in F# series was submitted, picked up some kicks, and made it to the home page. That's pretty cool. I guess writing more dev-focused articles is the way to go to get attention on DNK.
• Amazon has rolled out a limited beta of SimpleDB, which appears to be S3 + query support. Cost is based on usage: 14¢/hour for machine utilization, 10¢/GB upload, 13-18¢/GB download and $1.50/GB storage/month. I'd love to see SimpleDB software that I could download and install, rather than hosted only. Even if I was going to use the hosted service, I'd like to develop against a non-hosted instance.
• Research for sale! I was checking out the MS Research download feed and discovered a link to the Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL) library. This was previously called GLEE (Graph Layout Execution Engine) and was "free for non-commercial use". Now, you can buy it for $295 from Windows Marketplace (though the previous free version is still available). The idea of directly commercializing research like this strikes me as pretty unusual. It must be a really good library.
• Scott Guthrie shows off the new Dynamic Data Support that will ship as part of the ASP.NET Extensions. I'm like, whatever. Scaffolding wasn't that that interesting to me in RoR, so it's no surprise that it's not that interesting in ASP.NET.
• Jeff "Party With" Palermo blogs about the IoC support in the new MVC Contrib project. Also looks like they're porting RoR's simply_restful. (via Scott Guthrie) 
• I need to try out some of Tomas Respro's VS color schemes (also via Scott Guthrie)

Morning Coffee 130

• Michael Klucher announces the release of XNA Game Studio 2.0 and Major Nelson points to the press release announcing the release. You can get the bits from XNA Creators Club Online (the XNA dev center has yet to be updated).
• Speaking of XNA, David Weller points out the warm-up challenge for Dream-Build-Play 2008. I assume networking will be a big part of this years' entries, but the warm-up challenge is to "Create a new and innovative use of Artificial Intelligence in a game".
• Still speaking of XNA, Gamasutra has an interview with XNA GM Chris Satchell where he hints at a publishing channel for XNA games on the Xbox 360, with "full details" coming sometime in the new year.
• The Capitals beat the Rangers in overtime last night. Since changing coaches on Thanksgiving, they're 6-3-1. That's great, but they're still five games under .500. The good news is that even though the Caps tied for last in the league, they're only six points out of a playoff spot with about fifty games left in the season.
• My old team puts on an event every year called the Strategic Architects Forum. It's invite-only, but they've posted some of the videos, slides and transcripts from this year's event.
• J.D. Meier discusses the new Guidance Explorer release. They're now up to 3,000 "nuggets" of guidance and they've moved the guidance store to MSDN. (via Sam Gentle)
• Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz explains further why arbitrary tier-splitting is bad. I'd also suggest reading Chapter 7 of PoEAA which provides another version of the same story: You can't take an object that's designed for fine-grained local access and make it remote without really screwing yourself up.
• Eric Lippert thinks immutable data structures are "the way of the future in C#" so he's written a series on immutability. Posts include kinds of immutability, an immutable stack, an immutable covariant stack and an immutable queue. As I've discussed, immutable data structures are HUGE in functional programming. Eric's immutable stacks and queues are similar to F#'s native list type. (via Jomo Fisher)

Morning Coffee 129

• Short coffee this morning, as I'm home with a tweaked ankle.
• I started playing Indigo Prophecy over the weekend. It's an original Xbox game, released as part of the new Xbox Originals program. It has a good metacritic score (84), though apparently it wasn't much of a retail success. I'm enjoying it, though it's not very challenging. It's more an interactive movie than a game. Good story, though.
• The ASP.NET MVC preview dropped today, Scott Guthrie has the details. Scott Hanselman has a 40 minute how-to video and Phil Haack has several articles up already.
• Speaking of ASP.NET MVC and Scott Guthrie, he's got another post in his series on ASP.NET MVC. This time, he's covering how to handle form input / POST data.
• Erik Meijer has posted some of his thoughts on Volta. He's one of the guys behind Volta, so it's worth a good look. (via Dare Obasanjo)
• Late Addition - the ASP.NET Extensions is more than just the MVC stuff. It also includes AJAX improvements, Silverlight support, ADO.NET Data Services and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support. Data Services (formerly Astoria) let's you easily expose your database via RESTful services. I think Dynamic Data Support used to be code named Jasper. It's a "rich scaffolding framework" for ASP.NET. I assume that's to compete w/ Ruby on Rails.

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.

Morning Coffee 127

• I'm back at the office today after almost two weeks away. So "catch-up" is the official hyphenated word of the day.
• Big news last week was an update on Silverlight. The next version (the one with the embedded cross-platform CLR in it) was rebranded Silverlight 2.0 and will include higher-level UI framework features and richer networking support. Look for a go-live beta Q1 next year.
• According to Scott Guthrie, there should be a CTP of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions this week, including the new ASP.NET MVC framework that many folks await with baited breath. Scott posted the second in new series on this framework, this time covering URL Routing.
• After a long blog silence, Pat Helland posted four presentations that he delivered @ TechEd Barcelona. They're pretty much required reading as far as I am concerned. Here's hoping the TechEd Barcelona folks recorded at least the audio of these sessions.
  • Metropolis: Interchangeability of Operations
  • Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion
  • Data on the Inside versus Data on the Outside
  • The Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects
• There's a new drop of F#, v1.9.3.7. Don Syme calls it "a release candidate for F# 1.9.3". Full release notes are over on his blog.
• Speaking of F#, Douglas Stockwell explains how to roll-your-own F# Express by combining the F# download above & the VS08 shell.
• Still speaking of F#, Robert Pickering has written an article on Active Patterns as well as a series on concurrency in F#. So far he's covered Async Workflows (twice), Erlang style messages and message queuing.
• Speaking of concurrency, Soma announced the CTP of ParallelFX last week. This includes Parallel LINQ (aka PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (aka TPL). Also check out their whitepaper, team blog and dev center.
• I'm a big fan of the Architecture Journal. Now you can get all that great content in a great WPF-based app. Simon Guest has the details.

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.

Morning Coffee 125

• So I wasn't quite as close to the end of Dead Rising as I thought I was. Those who've played the game thru will understand.
• After their promising start, the Capitals lost yet again. At the 20 game point, they're now 6-13-1 for a league-worst 13 points. I think we're at the point where they need to fire Glen Hanlon. Nothing personal Glen, but it's not getting done. The only problem is who you would replace him with? Bob Hartley? Uh, no thanks. I think most Caps fans want Dale Hunter, but I think he's too involved with the London Knights - he's co-owner, president and head coach. But if we could get Dale, I'm guessing Glen would be gone in a heartbeat.
• The XNA team blog announced that XNA Game Studio 2.0's beta has released. The download is available from Creators Club Online. The big new feature in this release is network support, and they've shipped a new starter kit to get you started.
• In addition to shipping VS08 & .NET FX 3.5, a new CTP of SQL 2008 shipped yesterday. I couldn't find a good overview of what's new, but the SQL Express team has a post on what's new in just their corner of this release. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
• In more "I know it's Thanksgiving week, but we're shipping anyway" news, the Ruby.NET folks have shipped v0.9 - the first release since transferring control to the community. Does it run Rails? Not yet, but apparently they're "close to getting Ruby on Rails to run successfully". One thing that caught my eye is that it includes VS integration. Nice.

Morning Coffee 124

• While my blog was down last week, I finally finished Gears of War. I played thru on hardcore, but had to throttle back to casual to beat the last boss. I'd like to try and finish on hardcore, but I've moved on to Dead Rising - another game from last year I never had time to finish. I'm almost done the main play mode, though I understand there are other play modes that get unlocked when you finish it.
• I'm forbidden from buying any new games before Christmas, so Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed and The Orange Box will have to wait. My next game will either be Blue Dragon, which a friend let me borrow, or R6:Vegas, yet another (but the last) game from last year I never got time to play.
• I'll skip the "giving thanks" jokes and point out that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 have shipped.  Soma has the announcement and both Scott Guthrie and Sam Gentile summarize what's new. The Express editions are available from the new Express Developer Center. The VS SDK doesn't appear to be released yet, but I'm sure it will be along in due course.
• Speaking of VS SDK, CoDe Magazine did an entire issue on VS Extensibility which you can read online or download as PDF.
• Nick Malik took a bunch of heat back in June for what some thought was a redefinition of Mort, one of the Developer Division personas. Now Paul Vick thinks it's time to retire the Mort persona, primarily because of the negative connotation the name carries. His suggestion for a replacement is Ben (as in Franklin). And did you notice how similar Paul's description of Mort is to what Nick described? I'd say some folks owe Nick an apology.
• I said Friday I was going to take a closer look @ OpenID and OAuth. There's an intro to OpenID on their wiki and Sam Ruby's OpenID for non-SuperUsers seems to be the canonical source on implementing OpenID on your own blog. Frankly, reading the OpenID intro reminded me a lot of WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile. Does OpenID have the equivalent of an "active" mode?
• Likewise, the Beginner’s Guide to OAuth series of posts by Eran Hammer-Lahav is a good intro to OAuth. The phrase "Jane notices she is now at a Faji page by looking at the browser URL" from the protocol walkthru makes me worry that OAuth is vulnerable to phishing. Having one of the OAuth authors call phishing victims careless and wishing for Karl Rove to "scare people into being more careful and smarter about what they do online" makes me think my fears are well grounded. I'm thinking maybe OAuth and OpenID aren't quite ready to nail down WS-*'s coffin.
• In researching OpenID, I came across this presentation hosted on SlideShare. I had never seen SlideShare before - it's kinda like YouTube for presentations. Sharing basic presentations is kinda lame - there doesn't appear to be any animation support, so the slides are basically pictures. However, they also support "slidecasting" where you sync slides to an audio file hosted elsewhere. That I like. I have a bunch of old decks + audio, maybe I'll stick them up there.

Afternoon Coffee 123

• Morning Coffee is late this morning because we went for our Christmas portrait this morning and it took forever. The pictures turned out great though.
• Nick Malik finishes up his series on business operation models by covering the diversification model. Also, Nick's points about the synergy between a diversified model and the coordinated model are spot on. I happen to be a big fan of those models (aka the models with low standardization) which probably drives some of the  more my "unique" perspectives on SOA.
• Scott Guthrie starts out a new series and future technology, this time it's ASP.NET MVC Framework that gets the series treatment. The first entry in the series is a general overview. I wonder why there's no cool code name for the MVC framework? Whatever it's named, I like the auto routing and action rules - it seems very Rails-inspired.
• Over the weekend, Don Box points out that the REST authentication story "blows chunks". I've recently given up on the reliable part of the original "Secure, Reliable, Transacted Web Services" vision - and I never believed the transacted part. Security, on the other hand, is the one part of that original vision that has worked out IMO. My experience with the WS-* security stack has been pretty good, though Dare Obasanjo thinks that OpenID and OAuth are the final nail in the WS-* coffin.
• Speaking of Dare, he goes on to say WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice. He makes the point that "The only times I encounter someone with good things to say about WS-* is if it is their job to pimp these technologies or they have already “invested” in WS-* and want to defend that investment." I gave up pimping evangelizing technology a while back and I don't want to be in the position of defending a bad investment, so I'm spending lots of time looking at REST.
• Jesus Rodriguez takes a look at the Managed Services Engine and comes away excited. Jesus is a self-described "strong believer" in SOA governance. I'm a self-described strong disbeliever in SOA governance, so MSE sounds like more of the Worst of Both Worlds to me.
• A little light reading: I pulled Applied Cryptography and A New Kind of Science out of my garage last weekend. Plus my copies of RESTful Web Services and Programming Erlang just arrived yesterday.

Morning Coffee 122

• Sorry for the posting lag. Had a few technical difficulties around here. In the process of moving hosts, so expect more glitches.
• My talk at the p&p Summit on Monday went really well. At least, it felt good and the applause at the end felt genuine. I recorded the audio on my laptop, so I'll be posting a Silverlight version as soon as I figure out how to adjust the levels so their somewhat consistent. Paraesthesia and #2872 have reactions.
• Speaking of the p&p Summit, Scott Hanselman posted his ASP.NET MVC demo from his talk. Said ASP.NET MVC bits aren't available yet, so you can't, you know, run the demo for yourself. But at least you can review what the ASP.NET MVC code will look like.
• I stopped by the SOA/BPM conference last week and saw Jon, Sam and Jesus among others. Spent quite a bit of time talking to Sam and his Neudesic colleagues about this "physically distributed/logically centralized" approach that I think is hogwash. It sounds to me like Neudesic approach is really federated not centralized, though I'm not sure David Pallmann would agree. Federated makes much more sense to me than centralized.
• Nick Malik continues his series on SOA Business Operations Model. I especially like his point that this isn't a series of choices, you need to "look at your company and try to understand which model the business has selected. "
• The first CTP of PowerShell 2.0 is out! Check out what's new on the PowerShell team blog and Jeffrey Snover's TechEd Presentation. (via Sam Gentile)
• Soma announced updates to VC++ coming next year, including TR1 support and a "major" MFC upgrade to support creating native apps that look like Office, IE or VS. I get supporting TR1, but the idea that people are clamoring for MFC updates is kinda surprising. Many years ago when I first came to MSFT, a friend asked "But don't you hate Microsoft?" to which I responded "No, I just hate MFC". Obviously, not everyone agrees with that sentiment.
• Steve Vinoski thinks there's no hope for IT. Funny, I keep agreeing with Steve's overall point but disagreeing with his reasoning. I still don't buy the serendipity argument. I like compiled languages. And I think he's overstating the amount of "real, useful guidance" for REST floating around. Basically, there's "the book".
• In widely reported news, Windows Live launched their next generation services. Don't bother with the press release, just go to the new WL home page.
• Speaking of WL, Dare Obasanjo points to the Live Data Interactive SDK page where you can experiment with the WL Contacts REST API. It gives you a good sense of how the Web3S protocol works. Pretty well, IMO. However, how come WL Contacts Schema doesn't include some type of update timestamp for sync purposes? If you wanted to build say a Outlook <--> WL Contacts sync engine, you'd have to download the entire address book and grovel thru it for changes every sync.
• Speaking of Web3S, I'd love to see some info on how one might implement a service using Web3S. Yaron Goland positions Web3S as an alternative to APP that WL developed because they "couldn't make APP work in any sane way for our scenarios". I'm sure other folks have similar scenarios.

Morning Coffee 121

• My daughter had her tonsils & adenoids out on yesterday. It was a routine procedure and it went by-the-numbers, but any parent will tell you it's hard to see your kid in a hospital bed.
• Given the previous bullet, I'm not at the SOA/BPM conference for the big announcement. Don't worry, there's lots of other folks covering the news.
• It was a crappy sports weekend in the Pierson house. Va Tech snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, Southern Cal never led at Oregon, the Capitals lost twice, and the Redskins got blown out by the Pats. At least the Caps won big yesterday in Toronto.
• Speaking of the Capitals, Peter Bondra retired Monday. I still think it's a travesty that he didn't spend his whole career in DC, but I've made my peace with it.
• Nick Malik has a great series on business operations models and how they apply to SOA. Regular readers should be unsurprised that I favor low standardization, though I can see the value of high integration. That makes the Coordinated Operating Model my fav, though I can see the benefit of the Diversified Model as well. I can't wait to read what Nick has to say on changing models.
• Speaking of Nick, I'm doing a roundtable with him on "Making SOA Work in the Enterprise" @ the Strategic Architect Forum. Should be fun. Sorry for the lack of linkage on this, but it's an invite-only event.
• Jezz Santos has a new series of white papers on building software factories. First up "Packaging with Visual Studio 2005"
• Aaron Skonnard has a new whitepaper on using the WCF LOB Adapter SDK with BTS 2006 R2. I've been building one of these things recently, so I'm looking forward to checking that out. (via Sam Gentile)
• Tim Ewald looks at Resource Oriented Architecture (when did ROA become a TLA?) and wonders "what if your problem domain is more focused on processes than data?" I wonder that all the time. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
• It's not just durable messaging - Libor Soucek also disagrees with my opinions on centralized control. I agree 100% with Libor that centralized management would make operation's lives "much, MUCH easier" as he puts it. However, that doesn't make it feasible at any significant scale. Furthermore, I wouldn't describe an approach that requires that "all services adopt [the] same common management interface" as "pragmatic". Frankly, just the opposite.

Morning Coffee 120

• Doing these morning coffee posts is a lot tougher since I cut back my blog reading. Where I used to have no trouble finding 4-5 coffee-worthy items every day, these days I seem to only get 1-2, if that.
• After starting off 3-0 and 100% on the PK, the Caps dropped four in a row and have been miserable on special teams. The special teams woes continued last night against the Lightning, but they still won. Caps went 0-4 on the powerplay, and coughed up a short handed goal. But they also went 3-3 on the PK, so I guess it wasn't all bad. Maybe my mother will stop calling for Hanlon's job now. It's a long season and as Peerless Prognosticator points out, the rebuild isn't over.
• Jomo Fisher, who helped Scott Hanselman auto-merge assemblies, has been digging around in F# of late. As it turns out, he's joining the F# team so I'm thinking it's not a huge stretch for him. If you're a C# developer trying interested in getting a handle on this new F# thing, his blog is a good place to start.
• Speaking of F#, Don Syme posts about yet another new F# feature: Async Workflows. Workflow is a bad term here IMO since it can be easily confused with WF. Regardless of it's name, Async Workflows is about making .NET's Async Programming model a first class citizen in F#. Robert Pickering has a good post explaining how this new feature works.
• Microsoft sure has a lot of multi-threading / async-programming tools coming out. In addition to F# Async Workflows, there's the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, Parallel LINQ and the Task Parallel Library. I would hope all this work eventually coalesces as a coherent product offering.
• Now that F# is being "producized", I wonder if the language evolution will slow down. Async workflows were introduced in F# 1.9.2.9. Other recent changes include Computation Expressions (v1.9.2), Use Bindings (v1.9.2) and Active Patterns (v1.9.1). F# seems to churn more in minor releases than C# does in major releases. Of course, that's because F# was a research project, not a "real" product. Now that it's going to be a product, will the rate of innovation slow?

Morning Coffee 119

• The biggest news of the week IMHO is Soma announcing the formation of an F# product team. Specifically, they will "fully integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and continue innovating and evolving F#." Though Soma calls F# "another first-class programming language on the CLR", I get the feeling there won't be a "Visual F#" sku. Don Syme has more on the news.
• In other Soma announcement news, Popfly is now in beta. More details on what's new on the Popfly Team Blog. I haven't played with Popfly in depth, but I think it's got huge potential.
• Scott Guthrie details the upcoming ASP.NET MVC Framework. Personally, I'm not building web apps much these days, so I'm not really invested one way or the other. Given the interest in this approach, it's nice to see the ASP.NET team respond to the market, though I'm sure someone will complain that we're trying to kill off the various open-source MVC Web frameworks that have sprung up.
• Over in Windows Live, they shipped a new version of Live Search Maps, upgraded WL Photo Gallery (which I've been digging) to support Flickr and shipped an update to WL Accounts which allows you to link accounts.
• The Clarius folks keep churning out great tools for software factory developers. The latest is the T4 editor, which brings intellisense, color syntax highlighting and property inspector support for Text Templating Transformation Toolkit (aka T4) files. T4 files are used for code generation in both DSL Toolkit and GAT.
• David Pallman (again via Sam Gentile) suggests there are only three choices for infrastructure architecture: None/Point-to-point, Centralized/Hub-and-Spoke and Thin/Bus. I get the first two, but his explanation of the third goes to far into the "magic framework" category for my taste. "Physically distributed but logically centralized"? That doesn't make any sense to me at all.
• Fellowship of the Ring makes its way onto XBLM. Alas, not in HD so I'll stick w/ my extended four hour DVD version thankyouverymuch.

Morning Coffee 118 - ITARC SoCal Edition

I'm not back on blog sabbatical, but between finishing my presentation and attending ITARC SoCal earlier this week - not to mention being sick - I didn't have time to write anything. Normal Morning Coffee resumes tomorrow, here's a summary of my notes from on my two days at ITARC.

• Scott Ambler did the opening keynote on agile enterprise architecture strategy.
• He claims that success is more prevalent in the industry that people think, because the industry has a narrow definition of success. If you change (aka widen) the definition, the success rate goes way up! That's not exactly useful, but he referred to an as-yet-unpublished survey on project success rate that should be up on DDJ "soon". I'd like to see that raw data.
• While I agree with most of his points, Scott's presentation style is very abrasive. For example, he makes the point that there is no one-size-fits-all process, which I couldn't agree with more. But does he say it like that? No, he says "Repeatable processes? What an incredibly stupid idea!" even though the room is full of folks who probably think repeatable process is actually a good idea.
• Scott suggested that unit tests are the best way to specify requirements. I've heard this before from agile practitioners, but something nags at me about it. Certainly, having executable requirements is a huge plus. But how can you be sure they're the right requirements if the stakeholders can't read them?
• This keynote setup what turned out to be a major theme for the conference - traditional vs. non-traditional enterprise architecture. Or as I would characterize it: Industrial vs. Post Industrial architecture.
• Simon Guest presented on user experience in architecture, which is his specialty these days. He lays out a UX model that was very compelling. I'm not sure if there's a whitepaper version of this model (there should be) but you can see the model as he lays it out in powerpoint. I've seen Simon's UX decks, but never actually seen him present it, so that was a treat.
• I skipped Ted Neward's session in order to take in something new. So I went to see Daniel Brookshier of No Magic talk about DoDAF - the Dept. of Defense Architecture Framework. I had met Daniel the night before at dinner and while No Magic primarily sells UML modeling tools, we seemed to agree that UML is most useful (in my opinion "at all useful") when you imbue the vanilla models with custom semantics - aka you turn them into a DSL. So while I liked hanging out with Daniel, his DoDAF session did nothing except ensure I never work for the DoD. There's no amount of money that's worth dealing with the two dozen or so bureaucratic models that are all wholly isolated from anything that actually executes. Daniel kept saying how easy these models are to build. I'm sure they are, but that's not the problem. Since they're not an intrinsic part of a construction process, they won't stay up to date. This was a very industrial approach - Daniel even stated at one point that he was "anti-Ambler".
• David Chappell did the second keynote on grid-enabled SOA.
• When did David join Oracle? I guess I haven't been paying much attention to competitors since I moved to MSIT.
• There's an article version of this presentation available, but I haven't read it yet.
• For me, the best part of this presentation was him acknowledging that there's a need for non-stateless services, something he has blogged about recently. I'm not sure I agree with his framework for stateful interaction, but at least he's admitting that it's needed. Now if I could only convince the Connected Systems Division...
• The rest of his talk was basically a sales pitch for the Coherence product Oracle recently bought. Basically, it's a huge, multi-node, redundant, in-memory database. While I'm sure there are a few high-end problems out there - my immediate thought was travel and David mentioned SABRE is one of their customers - this is not a good general purpose solution, though David was positioning it as such.
• My talk on "Moving Beyond Industrial Software" was after the second keynote. It was good, if sparsely attended. I'm doing it again @ the p&p Summit so I'll post the slides and hopefully a recording after that.
• I skipped the last session of the day to decompress, so the next session I went to was the day two opening keynote by Fred Waskiewicz, OMG's Director of Standards. His talk, unsurprisingly, was on the value of standards - in particular, OMG's standards. This was about as anti-Ambler, anti-agile, pro-industrial a presentation as you could make. I'd heard this spiel before, so I mostly tuned out. I did challenge Fred on his point that the UML models are at a higher level of abstraction than code. They're not - they're a visualization and they're very useful, but they're at the exact same level of abstraction as code. That's why you can automatically generate the visualization in tools like Visual Studio's class designer. Fred didn't have much of a response to my question, though he did point out that some models like Business Process Models are, in fact, higher levels of abstraction.
• Next was what I thought was the best presentation of the entire show, IASA Founder Paul Preiss on what architects need to know. Note, I'm not brown-nosing Paul here - I'm the guy that first decided to commit Microsoft as an IASA sponsor, so he has to like me even if I thought his session was crap. Paul talked about architect as a career, comparing it to doctors. He worries that he's over-using that analogy, but software architect has much more in common career wise than it does with building architects IMO. I wonder where one might do their architecture residency? He also thinks of architects as "living governance", saying that project managers answer to the stakeholders while architects are beholden to the stockholders. I like that approach to governance.
• Finally, I attended Vince Casarez's session on Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Vince is an Oracle VP and this turned into a sales pitch like David Chappell's keynote did. I'm not sure what product it was, but it reminded me of QEDWiki from IBM that I saw at ETech last year, which isn't a complement. If you're going to build an enterprise mashup designer, is it just me or is "lots of code spew" a poor model. Why not go for something like Popfly or Pipes?
• I left early the second day in order to get home before my kids went to sleep (which I failed at due to lack of naptime). Overall, the conference was pretty good, though a bit sparsely attended in part I think because they held it in San Diego. The Orange Country IASA user group is very popular, so I don't understand why they didn't just hold it around there somewhere. Live and learn, I guess. They did have to postpone the DC event until next year sometime. Here's hoping I get invited to that as well as well as ITARC SoCal '08 (note, that *is* brown-nosing a bit)

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 115

• Scott Guthrie has two new posts in his series on LINQ to SQL. The first covers updating the database using stored procs instead of dynamic SQL. I was somewhat surprised that there wasn't the capability to auto-generate vanilla Insert, Update and Deleted procs, but I guess DBA's probably hate that anyway. The second shows how to use ExecuteQuery to execute arbitrary SQL instead of using the cool LINQ query syntax. I'm doing a bunch of loosely-typed SQL work right now, so I'm going to take a deeper look at this.
• Speaking of LINQ, I just discovered this great series on IQueriable by Bart De Smet. It's four months old, but takes an incredibly detailed look at what happens under the hood with LINQ. Bart also has a reference implementation of LINQ's standard query operators as well as LINQ to Sharepoint.
• Dan Maharry has pulled together what looks like the definitive guide for really slimming down and speeding up your VPC. It's XP specific, but I'd bet most of the guidance would also apply to WS03, which is what I mostly use in my VPCs. (via Larkware)
• Jimmy Nilsson thinks it's the operations department that holds the power in today's IT world. I agree 100% That's why I value Dale's input so much.
• Nick Malik wonders if it's time to translate the Federal Enterprise Architecture for use in the commercial sector. My dad just retired from 5 years in the FAA and he thinks FEA is too high level to be particularly useful.
• The 2007 edition version of Scott Hanselman's ultimate tool list is now available.
• A bunch of XNA Gamefest sessions are now available for on-demand viewing.

Morning Coffee 114 - MoMAAB Edition

• We spent all day yesterday discussing four topics: SaaS, Tools for Scrum, Web 2.0 and Domain Specific Languages. Even though it was just a day, my brain is full. These were deep and challenging discussion. I need to let the discussions stew a bit before posting anything about them here. But I will.
• Next time we do one of these, I'm bringing a video camera. I took notes, but looking over them the next morning they seem woefully incomplete. OneNote's integrated audio/video recording capabilities would nicely augment my notes.
• We ran this meeting using Open Space, and it worked very well. Of course, we only had 8 people, so we didn't need a lot of process to self organize. However, it did whet my appetite for having a larger Open Space style un-conference for architects. Is that something other folks might be interested in?
• Major thanks to the folks at Clarity Consulting who graciously gave us space to meet and fed us yesterday. Their CTO Jon Rauschenberger sat in on most of our meeting, and drove our Web 2.0 discussion. I said I wanted to stew a bit on the discussions, but Jon's slides are available on line if you're interested.
• Scott Colestock showed me Diigo, a social annotation tool. Where del.icio.us lets you tag and annotate individual pages, Diigo lets you annotate and highlight specific parts of the page. They also have blogging tools, where these annotations and highlights become blog posts, but they don't support dasBlog. However, since FeedBurner doesn't support Diigo for link splicing, I'm afraid my use of it will be limited.
• Jim Wilt introduced me to Virtual PC's command line. He recommends using "-pc <vpc name> -launch -singlepc" which launches a single virtual environment without the VPC console. I rarely run more than one VPC at a time and I hate stuff cluttering up my taskbar and notification area, so I like this a lot.
• Loren Goodman demonstrated the SharePoint Explorer Client. SharePoint & MOSS came up several times in all of our topics, so this is going to get a second look. I always thought it was strange that MSFT ships a smart client for editing WSS & MOSS, but not viewing it. SP Explorer looks like it fills that gap nicely.
• Shannon Braun sent us all a link to the 50/70 rule, which seems like a good rule of thumb. Of course, assuming that things won't progress linearly is almost always a good rule of thumb. But the 50/70 rule has reasoning behind the assumption.
• Chicago is nice, but the weather has been a little freaky. It's either been hot & humid, downporing thunderstorms or tornados. Keith Powell showed me FlightAware, which shows you flight departure and arrival history. My flight hasn't left within an hour of scheduled departure in a week. I'm going to try and grab an earlier flight, but I have a feeling it's going to be a long trip home.

Morning Coffee 113

• I'm in Chicago today and tomorrow for a reunion of sorts. In my last job, I managed a group of external architects called the Microsoft Architecture Advisory Board (aka the MAAB). We discontinued the program a while back, but the core of the group found the program valuable enough they have continued to meet anyway. I found the MAAB meetings incredibly valuable and insightful, so I'm really excited to be invited to continue my involvement with the group.
• I picked up Bioshock Tuesday (Circuit City had it on sale) on my way to my bi-weekly campus excursion. My meetings were over around 2pm so I headed home early, expecting to surprise the kids. But Jules had decided to skip naps and go shopping with them. Her cell phone was dead, so I ended up at home with a couple of hours to myself and a brand new copy of Bioshock. Wow, is that a good game. Certainly deserving of the amazingly good reviews it's garnered.
• Speaking of reviews, this transparently biased review of Bioshock over at Sony Defense Farce Force is frakking hilarious. Somehow, I doubt their dubious review will stem the tidal wave of Bioshock's well-deserved hype. Can't wait to read their Halo 3 review.
• Pat Helland writes at length on master-master replication. I reformated it into PDF so I could read it - the large images were messing up the text flow on my system. As usual for Pat, there's gold in that thar post. His thoughts on DAGs of versions and vector clocks as identifiers are very exciting. However, I think he glosses over the importance of declarative merging. I would think programmatic merge would likely be non-deterministic across nodes. If so, wouldn't you end up with two documents with the same vector-clock identifier by different data?
• Joe McKendrick points to a few people who predict the term "service-oriented" will eventually be subsumed under the general heading of "architecture". Not to brag, but I made that exact same prediction almost three years ago.
• Erik Johnson thinks that SOA 2.0 centers on transformational patterns. The idea (I think) is that if systems "understand each other more deeply", then we can build a "smarter stack" and design apps via new constructs to promote agility and simplicity. Personally, I'm skeptical that we can define unambiguously system semantics except in the simplest scenarios, but Erik talks about using "graph transformation mathematics" to encode semantics. I don't know anything about graph transformation mathematics, but at least Erik has progressed beyond hand waving to describing the "what". Here's looking forward to the "how".
• New dad Clemens Vasters somehow finds time to implement an XML-RPC binding for WCF 3.5. I was encouraged that it didn't require any custom attributes or extensions at the programmer level. Of course, XML-RPC fits semantically into WCF's interface based service model, so it shouldn't be a huge surprise that it didn't require any custom extensions. But did it need WCF 3.5? Would this work if recompiled against the 3.0 assemblies?
• Phil Haack writes a long post on Duck Typing. VB9 originally supported duck typing - the feature was called Dynamic Interfaces - when it was first announced, but it was subsequently cut. I was really looking forward to that feature. Between it and XML Literals, VB9 was really stepping out of C#'s shadow. I guess it still is, even without dynamic interfaces.
• Since I've been doing some LINQ to XML work lately, I decided to go back and re-write my code in VB9 using XML literals. While XML literals are nice, I don't think they're a must have. First, LINQ to XML has a nice fluent interface, so the literals don't give you that much cleaner code (though you do avoid writing XElement and XAttribute over and over.) Second, I find VB9's template syntax (like ASP <%= expression %>) clunky to work with, especially in nested templates. Finally, I like the namespace support of XNames better. As far as I can tell, VB9 defines namespaces with xmlns attributes just like XML does. So I'm not dying for literal XML support in a future version of C#. How about you?

Morning Coffee 112

• The Lee Holmes over at the Powershell Team Blog writes about alternatives to the "decades-old" Windows console host. Powershell Plus looks awesome. PoshConsole also looks pretty cool (though far from finished yet) and is free.
• WL ID Web Authentication SDK has been released. Details on the WL ID team blog. It looks like what Passport SDK provided for quite some time, but now it's free. There's also a client auth SDK in development. (via Dare Obasanjo)
• Libor Soucek leaps to the wrong conclusion about not differentiating enterprise & support systems. Of course, different systems will have different availability requirements. But what happens when we connect them together? We can't let the support system effect the availability of the enterprise system, right? To me, that implies either a) the support system now needs to conform to enterprise system availability requirements or b) we need some other mechanism (like async durable messaging) to act as a buffer between them. Personally, I like "b".
• Nick Carr points to an article The Trouble with Enterprise Software by Cynthia Rettig. Cynthia writes that while the massive complexity of enterprise software, especially large-scale ERP systems like SAP, significantly hinder it's value. It's a must read. Choice quotes:
• "It is estimated that for every 25% increase in complexity in the tasks to be automated, the complexity of the software solution itself rises by 100%."
• "The notion of reusable software works on a small scale. Programmers have successfully built and reused subroutines of standard functions. But as software grows more complex, reusability becomes a difficult or impossible task."
• "Hope, unfortunately, has never been a very effective strategy."
• "Is enterprise software just too complex to deliver on its promises? After all, enterprise systems were supposed to streamline and simplify business processes. Instead, they have brought high risks, uncertainty and a deeply worrying level of complexity. Rather than agility they have produced rigidity and unexpected barriers to change, a veritable glut of information containing myriad hidden errors, and a cloud of questions regarding their overall benefits."

Morning Coffee 111

• I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry at Nick Malik's definition of politecture. I mean, it's funny so I'm laughing, but it's so true that it makes me want to cry.
• Don Box comments on retiring the tenets. It's good to see him say "please God tell me we can do better" than CLR interfaces or WSDL.
• Looks like the P2P APIs are finally getting the managed treatment in .NET FX 3.5. A long time ago, John deVadoss asked me what an enterprise system like CRM might look like if it used a peer-to-peer approach instead of client-server. If I had any free time, I'd prototype one out on this API. (via Mike Taulty)
• Scott Guthrie goes back to his LINQ to SQL series to tackle Stored Procs and UDFs. Being able to use UDFs inline with LINQ queries is very cool. However, it seems to me that LINQ discourages the use of stored procs. As a developer, I'd rather write LINQ queries than stored procs, if I can. The probably puts me at odds with DBAs who'd rather all DB access be via stored procs they control.
• Soma writes about new MSBuild enhancements in VS08: multi-targeting and parallel build.
• I just discovered Vista Battery Saver. Basically, it turns off Aero and Sidebar when you're on battery. I'm traveling to Chicago next week, so we'll see if it has much impact on my battery life. (via Plenty of Code and Larkware)

Morning Coffee 110

• Monday @ Gamefest, the XNA team announced XNA Game Studio 2.0. The two big new things are support for the entire VS product line (1.0 only works on VC# Express) and the addition of networking APIs. Let's Kill Dave has a good wrapup of the announcements from Gamefest Day One.
• Speaking of Xbox 360, I played thru the demos of Stranglehold and Bioshock. Two thumbs up on both. It's gonna be an expensive year for Xbox gamers.
• Mark Cuban noodles on taking your house public. "Why not create a market or exchange where homeowners can sell equity in their homes?" I've thought about this myself from time to time. However, Mark thinks making it happen would "probably take the country's biggest banks working together". I wonder if there's a more Web 2.0 social lending approach that would work better.
• Jeff Atwood calls virtualization as "the next great frontier for computer security". I agree 100%. But I don't think the action is going to be in "full-machine" virtualization like Virtual PC. Rather, it's going to be sandbox virtualization. Jeff mentions GreenBorder (now part of Google) but it's not the only solution. Some time ago, Microsoft acquired SoftGrid which uses sandbox virtualization for application deployment, but using SystemGuard for security sandboxing seems like a logical step.
• The WCF LOB Adapter SDK has released. Sonu Arora has the details. As part of the Integration team @ MSIT, I have a feeling we're going to become fairly familiar with this technology. (via Jesus Rodriguez).
• Speaking of Jesus, he thinks the six new SCA4SOA committees are "going to help". Why? Because inventing technology in committee has turned out so well in the past?
• John deVadoss cements BPM's fad du jour status by contrasting "big" BPM and "little" BPM. It's fairly obvious to me that big *anything* just doesn't work in the enterprise. But I worry that little *anything* doesn't work that well either. So how long until someone (probably Nick) starts arguing for "middle out" BPM?
• David Bressler wonders "What is it about registries that everyone thinks is a panacea for all things SOA?" Amen, Brother! Joe McKendrick claims it's required for governance, but then gets to what I think is the *real* reason for focus on registries: the "registry is a tangible offering" that vendors can sell. Just because it's productizable doesn't mean you need it.
• Hartmut Wilms responds to my retire the tenets post, but he seems to contradict himself. On the one hand, he suggests that "the four tenets just expressed, what “almost” everybody outside the MS world knew already". But then he goes on to dispute that the SO paradigm shift has even occurred! Hartmut, I'll grant you that WCF (among other similar stacks) are way too focused on "you write the classes, we'll handle the contracts and messages". On the other hand, if you don't provide a productive interface that most everyone can pick up and run with, the technology won't get adopted in the first place.

Morning Coffee 109

• I forgot to add a number to my last morning coffee post. However, after extensive research, I have determined that it was #108. So thing are continuing as usual today with #109. On the other hand, do you really want development and architecture opinions from a guy who can barely count? :)
• The finalists in the Dream-Build-Play contest have been announced. I haven't played any of them yet (some are available for download) but they several of them sure look good.
• And speaking of gaming, MS announced an Xbox 360 price drop yesterday. So if you want to get in on some of the XNA action, here's your chance (or you could just build for your PC - take your pick).
• Finally on the gaming front, if you're not busy Monday you can watch the first day of Gamefest 2007 online. Get the scoop on XNA 2.0 as well as the new XNA networking support. I, alas, am busy Monday so I'll have to catch it on demand.
• On to, you know, actual geek stuff things. Scott Guthrie seems to have retired his LINQ to SQL series and moved on to LINQ to XML. He shows how to build an RSS reader application with LINQ to XML. An oldie demo, but a goodie.
• Wanna learn F#, there's a whole site of samples up on CodePlex. (via Don Syme)
• Jeff Atwood is annoyed at how many different products you have to install to get a current & complete setup of VS 2005. Of course, MS shipped two parts of that stack since VS05 shipped (TFS & DBPro), three service packs (VS05 SP1, SQL 05 SP2 and DBPro SR1) and a major OS upgrade (VS Vista update). Doesn't the same thing happen with any shipping product after a few years? BTW, if this is such a huge hassle, I wonder why Jeff doesn't create a slipstreamed VS installer?
• Udi Dahan has a great post on estimation where he claims "Developers don’t know how to estimate." No argument, but the way he phrases it sounds like it's the developer's fault they suck at estimation. It's not. Developing - by definition - is building something you've never built before. Is it any surprise we suck at estimating how long it will take us to do something we've never done before?

Morning Coffee

• Libor Soucek continues our conversation about durable messaging. We still don't agree, but he says he "fine" with durable messaging. He does go out of his way to differentiate between *enterprise* and *supporting* systems. But when you're building connected systems, does that differentiation still matter?
• After taking a few months off, John deVadoss is back at the blog. Check out his Big SOA/Little SOA post. I especially like his snowball analogy "How do you build a big snowball? You start with a small snowball.") though he's also on this "middle out" bandwagon. Do we really believe "middle out" works, or are we just saying it because we know top down and bottom up don't? And John: You're welcome!
• Anyone coming to the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference this fall? Maybe we can have a shindig / blogger dinner / unconference / something?
• Remus Rusanu writes about SSB's dynamic routing. One of the (many) cool things about SSB is that all the addressing is logical, not physical. Routing is what binds logical addresses to physical addresses, and it's extensible.
• Martin Fowler discusses the value of sticking to one language. I agree with his points about large frameworks being as difficult to learn as a new language. I've said for a long time "If you build a framework, build tools to make it easy to use your framework". Language is obviously a core example of a tool. Another interesting point Martin makes is the traditional "intimate relationship" between scripting languages and C, but that the rise of JVM & CLR makes them impossible to ignore. Does the need to play well in a managed environment hinder a C based language like Ruby when compared to a natively managed scripting language like Powershell? Finally, Martin's "jigger of 80 proof ugliness" quote made me laugh.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: EJ Dionne says that DailyKos is doing for Democrats what Rush Limbaugh did for Republicans almost twenty years ago: mobilization. Josh Marshall points out that "what's happening today is vastly more participatory and distributed...than anything happening back then."

Morning Coffee 107

• The last day of the service factory workshop was much like the second, primarily focusing on stuff p&p built to integrate GAT and DSLs. We also got a briefing in what's coming for factories after VS08 (can't blog about that). We ended with a look at the DSL Editor Power Toy, which provides additional views on a given model and allows you to completely replace the graphical editor with a Windows Forms UserControl. I wonder if you could use ElementHost in order to build a WPF based editor?
• Finished the last Harry Potter book last night. My wife finished it last week but kept quiet about it until I got to the end. No spoilers here, but I wasn't exactly surprised by how it played out. I wonder what J.K. Rowling will write next?
• As promised, Silverlight 1.0 RC and Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh were released last week. Also finishing out this beta wave were Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Tools for VS08 and a new preview of Expression Blend 2. Scott Hanselman has all the details on all the releases.
• In one of his articles on LINQ to SQL, Scott Guthrie mentioned the LINQ to SQL debug visualizer in passing. Now, he drills into that feature in more detail. Apparently, this isn't a built-in feature of VS08 - it has to be installed separately. Make sure you do that, this seems like a must-have extension for LINQ to SQL development.
• Jeff Atwood is worried that he spends more time talking about programming than actually programming. That's exactly why I left evangelism to join MSIT.
• I'm still way behind on blogs, but if I don't post this soon, it's going to be an afternoon coffee. I've also got this day job thing that I've been away from for several days. So more old news tomorrow.

Afternoon Coffee 106

Lots of meetings today, so my coffee post is late...

• The Big News^tm: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 is available for download. Soma and Scott have more. Silverlight 1.0 RC and the Silverlight Add-in for VS08 will apparently be available in a couple of days. Finally, there's a go-live license for the framework, so you get a head-start deploying apps before VS08 and NETFX 3.5 RTM. Time to build out a new VPC image.
• Next week, I'm attending the p&p Service Factory v3 Customization Workshop. I'm looking forward to playing with the new Service Factory drop, but I'm really interested in learning more about building factories. I wonder if they're going to discuss their VS08 plans.
• Nick Malik recently wrote about making "middle out SOA" work. I hate that term "middle-out". It feels like we're pinning our hopes on middle-out because we know top-down and bottom-up don't work. My old boss John DeVadoss (who assures me he'll be blogging regularly again "soon") big vs. little SOA, with big SOA being "dead". I like the term "little SOA" better than "middle-out SOA", but just because big SOA is a big failure, doesn't mean little SOA will make any headway.
• There's a new F# drop available. Don Syme has the details. Looks like they've got some interesting new constructs for async and parallel programing.
• ABC announced yesterday that they are streaming HD on their website. So you can check out the season finale of Lost in HD for free. They embed commercials so it's not really "for free", but you don't have to pay $3 an episode like you do on XBLM. I wonder if XBLM might offer this capability in the future? Certainly would increase my use of XBLM. (as would an all-you-can-eat pricing scheme)

Early Afternoon Coffee 105

• My two sessions on Rome went very well. Sort of like what I did @ TechEd last month, but with a bit more kimono opening since it was an internal audience. Best things about doing these types of talks is the questions and post-session conversation. I've missed that since moving over to MSIT.
• Late last week, I got my phone switched over to the new Office Communications Server 2007 beta. In my old office, I used the Office Communicator PBX phone integration features extensively. However, when we moved we got new IP phones that didn't integrate with Communicator. So when a chance to get on the beta came along, I jumped. I'll let you know my impressions after a few weeks, in the meantime you can read about Mark Deakin's experience.
• Matevz Gacnik figures out how to build a transactional web service that interacts with the new transactional file system in Vista and Server 08. Interesting, but personally I don't believe in using transactional web services. The whole point of service orientation is to reduce the coupling between services. Trying two services (technically, a service consumer and provider) together in an atomic transaction seems like going in the wrong direction. Still, good on Matevz for digging into the transactional file system.
• Udi Dahan gives us 6 simple steps to being a "top" IT consultant. I notice that getting well known, speaking and publishing are at the top of the list but actually being good at what you're well known for comes in at #5 on the list. I'm sure Udi thinks that's implicit in becoming a "top" consultant, but I'm not so sure.
• Pat Helland thinks Normalization is for Sissies. Slide #6 has the key take away: "For God's Sake, Don't Normalize Immutable Data".
• Larry O'Brien bashes the new binary efficient XML working group and working draft. I agree 100% w/ Larry. These aren't the droids we're looking for.
• John Evdemon points to a new e-book from my old team called SOA in the Real World. I flipped thru it (figuratively) and it appears to drill into the Foundations of Solution Architecture as well as provide real-world case studdies for each of the pillars recurring logical capabilities. Need to give it a deeper read.

Morning Coffee 104

• I'm presenting at a an internal training conference today and tomorrow, so my Morning Coffee roundup posts will be lighter than usual. On the other hand, I'm taking a bus downtown to the convention center, so I might write something more substantial on the way there and back. Or maybe I'll just read.
• My wife's blogging will also be light, because she's got her nose buried in a book. If I do read something to or from the conference, it's not that book because she won't let me near it until she's done! :)
• Speaking of "that book", Werner Vogel drops a few details about how well Amazon handled 1.3 million pre-orders that were delivered on Saturday (including our copy).
• First drop of IronRuby is available. For now, you can get it from John Lam's blog. Unlike IronPython, IronRuby will be hosted at RubyForge, not CodePlex, but the site isn't set up yet. Other big news is that the IronRuby team will be accepting external contributions. Are these encouraging signs to the Ruby community?
• More MS Research goodness: a new drop of Spec# is available. I've written about Spec# before, but haven't had the time to dig into it. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman takes the red pill. Congrats!
• Speaking of Scott, he forwards on advice to remove a programmatic crutch. Good advice. Not to go all Petzold on Visual Studio, but I would guess the IDE is the biggest crutch out there. As for giving up compulsively checking email, if that