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 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.