Morning Coffee 172

• I took the kids to see Fly Me To The Moon recently. We had to trek to Monroe (about 30 minutes away) because it's a special 3D movie, and it was only playing there and in downtown Seattle. The movie's story is insipid - three flies stow away on Apollo 11 - but all the space shots were actually kinda cool. It sure felt like they wanted to be scientifically and historically accurate about the the actual mission (well, other than the part about the flies). Patrick really liked it (he wants to build a rocket in the back yard) and Riley sat thru the whole thing with a minimum of fussing.
• I'm a big fan of Joe Biden, so I'm really happy Obama picked him to be his running mate.
• I know it's old news but what the frak was John Edwards thinking? I like his policies, but the arrogance it takes to run for president when you know you've got that skeleton in your closet is mind-boggling.
• On the other hand, watching the Sean Hannity and guest's hypocrisy on Edwards' affair, only to watch them scramble like cockroaches when Colmes points out McCain had admitted to having an affair was frakking hilarious.

OK, onto geek stuff:

• My new boss Dave Remy has moved to a new blog. If you're curious what he was up to for the 10 months he was away from Microsoft, he's happy to share.
• IPy and IRuby developer Curt Hagenlocher (aka Iron Curt) is blogging. Cue the Ozzy...I AM IRON CURT. Or don't. Anyway, he dives in the deep end of the pool - no "hello world" lollyblogging for Iron Curt - digging into the stack implications of rethrowing exceptions and debugging emitted IL.
• Srivatsn writes about static compilation of IPy scripts. Note, we're not talking about static typing - it's still the same good-old dynamically typed IronPython, just packaged up as an assembly, rather than as a bunch of .py files. Note, if you're interested in compiling IronPython, you should check out the PYC sample we published as part of Beta 4.
• Speaking of IPy Beta 4, Shri Borde posts about the COM dispatch support which is enabled by default as of Beta 4. If you're driving COM automation clients (like Office) from IPy, this is a huge improvement over the old mechanism.
• Jeff Hardy has released a new version of NWSGI, a managed version of Python's Web Service Server Gateway Interface. My understanding is that this would allow any Python web stack written against WSGI to run in IIS with IronPython (subject to IronPython's compatibility with CPython). Jeff's been documenting his efforts getting Django running with NWSGI on his blog. Awesome work Jeff! (Thanks for the correction Seo!)
• I never really bought into the "Attention Economy", but Chris Anderson's economic analysis of his DIY Drones site traffic was fascinating.
• Lutz announces "it is time to move on" from Reflector and there was a collective horrified scream in the .NET community. He's handing it over to Red Gate, who promised they "will continue to offer the tool for free to the community".
• I missed this when he posted it in June, but I really liked Nikhil Kothari use of the DLR in Silverlight to cut down on the XAML verbosity in his ViewModel action binding.
• Brian McNamara previews the new Add Reference and file ordering support in the upcoming F# CTP. I'm really looking forward to the project-to-project reference support. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten burned because my main project recompiled but my test project didn't. You just get used to hitting Rebuild All instead of Build. As for file ordering, it's a bit of a bummer that F# requires it, but the new experience is hella better than editing the project file by hand. I'm really looking forward to the new CTP.

Nobody Cares That I Called McCain a Dick?

In Febuary, when I said "Romney's a real douche bag", several upset commenters vowed never to read my blog again. I was even called a bigot (though Dale jumped in and explained how wrong a charge that is). Frankly, anytime I run a political post, especially ones where I call prominent Republicans names, that's the reaction I expect.

So it kinda surprised me that the response to calling McCain a dick and his campaign an embarrassment was so tepid. No outrage. No promises to unsubscribe nor predictions that others would do likewise. Dale sounds like he agrees that McCain's campaign is an embarrassment, even though he clearly supports McCain. RandyG doesn't have anything to say about McCain one way or the other, but he thinks Obama is a "pompous dick". Only BigJ provides any defense of McCain at all, but it's an extremely weak defense. He described McCain as "not afraid to tick off a powerful, influential, big money contributor", which I would expect is hard to say out loud with a straight face. Given that McCain has raked in millions in contributions from the oil industry after flip-flopping on offshore drilling, describing the Hilton's $4,600 contribution as "powerful, influential, big money" is laughable. Hell, McCain is returning ten times that amount in "unusual" (read: possibly illegal) contributions because they "just didn’t sound right".

I figure there are two main possible reasons for the lack of outrage:

• All my readers who are willing to unsubscribe because I don't agree with their political view have already left, leaving only those who agree with or simply ignore my political posts.
• The number of people willing to stand up and defend McCain, even anonymously in my small corner of the Internet, is very small.

Personally, I probably a little of both, but I'm guessing it's more the latter than the former.

McCain's Dick Move of the Week

This segment on last night's Daily Show was fantastic.

At the rate McCain's going, Jon Stewart is going to have to change this segment to "McCain's Dick Move of the Day". I don't know which is more embarrassing, McCain's campaign or the mainstream media coverage of the campaign.

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 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)

Experience vs. Change

My wife and I usually watch The Daily Show a day late and yesterday was no exception. Hillary Clinton was the guest Monday night in advance of yesterday's big primaries in Ohio and Texas which Jon Stewart called the "Ultimate Last Final Showdown (Unless Hillary Wins One or Both of the Larger States)". If you missed it, you can watch the interview online (part 1, part 2).

I haven't seen much 'raw footage' from either Democratic candidate in quite some time, and through most of the interview all I could think was "I may have an Obama flair on my website, but I'd be happy with Hillary". However, there was a section of the interview where she was trying to draw a distinction between her and Obama that didn't sit well with me. She's been on this whole "action not words" kick of late, trying to take the wind out of Obama's sails. For example, in her speech last night in Ohio, she said this:

Americans don't need more promises. They’ve heard plenty of speeches. They deserve solutions and they deserve them now.

America needs a president who’s ready to lead, ready to stand up for what's right even when it's hard. And after seven long years of George W. Bush, we sure are ready for a president who will be a fighter, a doer and a champion for the American people again.

To be clear, this kind of talk doesn't bother me on it merits. Some folks aren't happy with Clinton because she's "dumpster diving" or they think that she's ripping the party apart. I think she's fighting for her political career and I would hope any Democratic candidate would go down swinging as it were. Besides, as Howard Dean said, the negative campaigning we've seen so far is a "tea party" compared to what the Republicans will throw at the eventual nominee. I'd also make the argument that it's better to get as much of this stuff "out there" now so that it's old news by November. That that doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?

However, I do think Clinton is painting herself into a general election corner with this experience vs. change strategy.

I get why Clinton played the experience card - she had to do something to take the wind out of Obama's sails after 11 straight victories. If the popular primary vote results from Tuesday are any indication, the experience message is working for her. So I would expect we'll hear a lot more about how we "don't need more promises" but that we need a president "who's ready to lead" in the next seven weeks ahead before the Pennsylvania primary.

However, if she does win the nomination, she'll have to to argue the exact opposite position in the general election. I'm certainly no fan of McCain, but there's no question his 25 years in Washington will cast him as the "experience" candidate (even though he hasn't accomplished much in that quarter century). Plus, with the Howard Dean already framing McCain as "four more years of George Bush", it's pretty obvious either Democratic candidate will be cast as the "change" candidate.

Will Clinton have credibility running as the candidate for change when she's spent the spring arguing that experience matters most? I don't know. Combined with the rabid anti-Clinton (both her and her husband) emotions her candidacy is assuredly going invoke among conservatives, I'm much more concerned about her ability to win in November than Obama's.

In the end, I doubt it will matter. Obama's roughly 160 pledged delegate lead seems pretty insurmountable. Even with Clinton's impressive victories yesterday, estimates are that she's going to only net around ten delegates total, meaning the delegate math is largely unchanged. With only 561 delegates left in the remaining twelve contests, she would need to win almost 65% of the remaining delegates just to draw even. Frankly, that's not possible given proportional delegate allocation method that Democrats use. At this point, her only hope is to cut the margin as much as possible and hope the undeclared superdelegates break her way. Hope isn't a strategy, but I don't see how she has any other option.

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.

365 and Counting

Steve Benen points out:

You may have noticed, on bumpers or t-shirts, the “1.20.09” slogan. It denotes, of course, Inauguration Day for Bush’s successor.

I just thought I’d mention that after seven painful years, the Bush presidency will end exactly one year from today. It’s obviously something to look forward to.

It’s an awkward period in Democratic politics right now — a contentious presidential primary, a frustrated Democratic Congress — but looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, and knowing it’s probably not a train, might serve as a morale booster.

From the morale perspective, it's worth noting the voter turnout in the primaries so far. Yesterdays' Democratic Nevada primary is the third in a row to set turnout records. On the Republican side, Benen points out that McCain won South Carolina yesterday with a 135,000 votes but eight years ago, he got nearly 100,000 more votes in a losing effort. By my calculation, Republican South Carolina turnout was 30% less than it was in 2000.

Voter turnout in early primaries doesn't make this election a sure thing by any means, but it sure is an encouraging sign.

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

• 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

• 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 100

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

A Tough Fourth

As Americans prepare to celebrate the birth of our nation tomorrow, what is arguably the most corrupt administration in a generation - certainly the most corrupt administration that I can remember by far (I was four when Nixon left office) - has provided yet another stark reminder of just how unfathomably corrupt it is by commuting Scooter Libby's prison sentence within hours of Libby losing the appeal to remain free while the original guilty verdict is appealed. It's not a full pardon, but I would expect that's coming sooner or later.

True patriots like myself will have a hard time celebrating America tomorrow. But I will, because America is bigger than this festering administration and the damage it has wrought to our safety and our reputation. I take solace in the landslide Democratic victory last November and the long-term negative effect this rouge lawless president and his freefall approval ratings is having on the Republican party.

As far as I'm concerned, Jan. 20th, 2009 can't come soon enough.

Early Afternoon Coffee 81

These morning meetings are really cramping the "morning" style of these posts. But better late than never, I guess.

• Politics 2.0 Watch: Democrats pwn Republicans online. (via Balloon Juice)
• Roger Wolter writes about integrating SSB with WF, something I've experimented with myself. I didn't find the integration quite as natural as Roger did - transactions are a real PITA, and Roger apparently he hasn't looked into that yet - but I agree 100% with the idea that "most SSB programs end up looking a lot like a workflow." Looking forward to seeing your code, Roger.
• Pat explains his Newton vs. Einstein view of distributed systems and then rants about Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance. In particular, he discusses the evolution of what consistency (and to less extent availability) means in the face of loose coupling. Do yourself a favor and give up on distributed transactions now. Also, Pat points to another paper from CIDR dealing with isolation in services. Haven't read it yet, but I've added it to "the pile".  
• David Chappell writes about Service Component Architecture vs. Service Oriented Architecture. Since I don't "do" evangelism anymore, I don't spend much time watching what our competitors are doing. According to the SCA website, SCA is supposedly a "a model for building applications and systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture." But according to David, SCA 1.0 focuses on "portability, not interoperability, and so they don’t fully define the interactions between components necessary to create composites that cross vendor boundaries." I realize that we don't industry agreement on all the details of what SOA means, but I think we all agree that it's cross platform and cross vendor. Or maybe we can't even agree on that much.

Morning Coffee 67

• Beta 1 of VS "Orcas" and .NET Framework 3.5 has shipped. Get it here. Besides LINQ, I'm most looking forward to experimenting with some of the new WF/WCF integration work. However, I don't think this beta includes DBPro functionality. Not surprising, given that DBPro only shipped a few months ago, but disappointing since I've moved all my database dev work over to that model.
• Korby Parnell introduces Claimspace, part of the Microsoft.Community family. While the other family members are retreads - blogs, forums and tagging - but this seems like something fundamentally new - or at least new to me - and therefore interesting. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman updates the new version of Notepad2 to re-enable Ruby support originally built by Wesner Moise. Ruby is nice, but where's the PowerShell love?
• After his performance in front the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Gonzales is grossly incompetent, lying or both. What does it say about President Bush that he was "