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Monday, August 27, 2007

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.

Posted By Harry Pierson at 10:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time

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Architecture | LINQ | Morning Coffee | Virtual PC | XNA

Friday, August 24, 2007

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.

Posted By Harry Pierson at 9:46 AM Pacific Daylight Time

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