“The Save”

This is an amazing picture of an amazing save in yesterday’s Capitals/Penguins 3-2 nail biting victory. (video on YouTube) The goalie is Simeon Varlamov who played most of the season at Hershey for the Capital’s minor league team. But he got the call in game two of the Caps opening round series against the Rangers and has posted a 1.5 Goals Against Average since, including two shutouts.

Photo by Clyde Caplan. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Avalanche 4, Caps 1

"We had nothing; we were horrible out there," Boudreau snapped. "Everybody had their bad game at the same time. You win a lot of games in a row, you're going to have a stinker. Today was it."
Capitals Insider

Boy, it’s much more fun to write a Caps wrapup when they win.

Honestly, the less said about this game, the better. I said at both intermissions that the Caps were lucky to be tied/down by only one, and the third period proved me right. Honestly, if I didn’t know the players and the teams, I wouldn’t have been able to tell which team was #2 in the East and which team was #15 in the West.

The only good things I can say about this game are:

1. Perfect on the penalty kill, including 43 seconds of 5-on-3
2. Backstrom’s goal was nice
3. Much better on faceoffs – as a team, we won 60% of them. Only Nylander was below 50%. Steckel won 9 of 10
4. Err, did I mention the Caps were perfect on the PK?

Japers pointed out that “the frequency with which these "efforts" are happening that is more than a little disconcerting.” After last night’s effort plus the 3rd period effort against Montreal, “more than a little disconcerting” is spot on.

Next up, Caps play the Penguins tomorrow. The Pens just beat the Flyers 5-4. I didn’t see the whole game but Biron totally botched the play that lead to the Pens game winning goal. So we have the Pens riding a big win and the Caps coming off a lackluster performance on national TV. Should be interesting to say the least. Unfortunately, I’ve got a morning flight home to Seattle tomorrow, so I’m going to miss it.

Caps 4, Canadians 3 (SO)

I don’t get the chance to see many Caps games, being as I live over 2000 miles away from Washington D.C. I got to see them tonight live and in person for the first time in like four years, and it was awesome. Awesome to be there that is, even if the Caps were less than awesome in the third period. Frankly, I think the Caps were lucky to get one, much less two points in this game.

But before I talk about bad, let’s start with the amazing. Ovechkin’s goal was the most amazing a goal I’ve ever seen live. He leaves Hamrlik in the dust by banking the puck off the boards to himself while he does a 180 to reverse direction. Then he gets knocked down by Chipchura but still manages to slide the puck into the net under Price while lying on his side on the ice before Chipchura’s momentum knocks the net off it’s moorings. You’ve got to see it to believe it.

Honestly, I think this is even better than “The Goal” from Ovechkin’s rookie season. The goal itself maybe wasn’t quite as amazing, but the bank pass to himself while reversing direction that set up the goal was literally jaw-dropping. That with the knocked down goal in succession was truly a work of art. They showed it about a dozen times on the jumbo-tron, several times on the NHL network highlight show and I’ve watched the embedded video maybe a dozen times while writing this post. Anyone who thinks Ovechkin isn’t the best player in the league is frakking crazy.

Backstom’s give and go with Federov for the second goal wasn’t bad either.

But here’s the stat of the game that should give Caps fans nightmares: All three of Montreal’s goals came on the powerplay. Caps did fairly well in the penalty taking department – only taking four penalties on the night. But going 25% on the penalty kill? There’s no way to spin how ugly that is. To add insult to injury, two of the three goals came less than ten seconds into the penalty – Montreal scored before the Caps could even get their kill set up. Ugh. The first was had two Caps getting tied up in the faceoff circle, leaving Higgins open to score. The second I think went off Erskine’s stick and over Theodore. And the third looked like one Theodore should have had.

The third period, the Caps looked totally flat until Steckel’s nice tip in to tie the game. They didn’t seem to be winning any one-on-one battles for the puck. I know the Caps have talent to spare, but they need to win on the boards if they’re going to win on the scoreboard. They picked it up for the last three minutes of the third and Overtime (except for very scary giveaway by I think Nylander near the end of OT that the Habs couldn’t capitalize on).

Giveaways were a problem – Caps had 12 to Montreal’s 6 – and Backstrom got slapped around in the faceoff circle, winning only 6 of 18. Nylander had a bad night on the dot, going 2 of 8. On the plus side, Caps had 17 takeaways to Montreal’s 7 and Gordon, Steckel and Laich and Federov all were over 50% on the faceoffs (team as a whole won 27 of 58, or 47%.)

As I said, I don’t get to see the Caps often, but I hear they aren’t that good in the shootout, which is kinda surprising given the surplus of offensive talent on the team. They were 2-3 in the shootout going into tonight, while the Habs were 7-4. But the Caps were perfect, Semin and Backstrom scoring while Theodore stoned Plekanec and Markov.

In the end, it’s two points which puts us a full game up on the Devils for 2nd in the East and seven games up on Florida who’s technically chasing us for the SouthEast division crown. Not quite in the bag, but making up that much ground in the 24 games remaining is pretty daunting. The Caps trail Boston by four and a half games for the top seed in the east, which is also a daunting task given the amount of season remaining. I’d love to be in first, but I’m pretty happy with where the Caps are right now – except maybe for the PK.

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.

Caps' Season Ends

I should be mad. Angry. Furious even.

The Capitals season ended tonight in large part due to what I think was a horrific non call in the second period. The on-air commentators were stunned that the officials allowed the goal after the Flyers Patrick Toresen took Caps' goaltender Huet out of the play by body checking Shaone Morrison into him. Sami Kapanen had the whole net to shoot at and didn't miss. The NHL quickly trotted out an excuse justification for the call, but what else are they going to say. "Yep, the officials blew the call. It only decided game 7, no big deal"?

As I said, I should be pretty upset. Especially after what sounded like a poorly called game four (no comment from me - I didn't see the game).

However, I can't help but think back to the last Friday in November when the Caps had the worst record in the league @ 6-14-1 and had just promoted their minor league affiliate's coach to the big leagues. If you had told me then - almost exactly five months ago - that the Caps would go 37-17-7 over the remaining 3/4ths of the season, win the division in their last game and take battle back from a 3-1 series deficit to force a game seven, I would have wondered what you were smoking.

This season has been a gift for Caps fans and I've relished the few games I've gotten to see, even the one that sent us home.

Furthermore, even though they lost, these playoffs are a promise of future success. I tell my kids all the time that the only way to get good at something is to work hard while you're bad at it. Playoff hockey is no different. Most of the Caps had little or no playoff experience going into this series and it really showed thru the first three games. But they kept at it and played much better over the last four games of the series. They went 2-2 in those games, but the two losses went to overtime. A little more luck (or better officiating) and the Caps are headed to Pittsburgh instead of the golf course. 

Speaking of Pittsburgh, look back at the Penguin's performance in the playoffs last year. Like the Caps, Pittsburgh is loaded with young talent that were thin on playoff experience. Also like the Caps, they went home after the first round. However, unlike the Caps, they only managed one win against an Ottawa team they had beaten three times down the stretch in the regular season. Furthermore, when facing elimination, the Penguins laid a goose egg. However, as much as I hate to complement the Penguins, things are very different this year. Here's hoping the early playoff exit has a similar effect on the Caps.

Bumping around my music collection for a song that captured my mood, I came across Getting Better from Tesla's debut album.

All that rain, outside my window
But I'll live on I know
Its gettin' better every day
Soon the sun will shine, through my window
When it's gonna come
You know I really, couldn't say
But I know, it's gettin' better every day

Swapping "season" for "day" kills the rhythm and rhyme, but it captures how I feel.

Thank you Washington Capitals for a great season. I look forward to many more to come.

Thank you Bruce Boudreau for jumping in the deep end unafraid and turning this season around.

Thanks you Washington fans for turning out in such force. Who would have thought the Verizon Center would be considered "most electric arena"?

Finally, thank you to Ted Leonsis for enduring the criticism, for turning Washington DC into a hockey town and for ensuring I'll be able to wear my #8 Ovechkin jersey until my kids are in high school.

'rents Rock the Red

My brother saw this picture on The Peerless Prognosticator and noticed something cool.

Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty Images

Those are my parents, screaming their head off after Brashear scored in game one. I especially like my mom rockin' the old school Caps gear.

Flyers Knot Series @ One

Ever hear the phrase "if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all"? That's about how I feel about the Caps effort in this afternoon's loss to the Flyers.

There are two possible explanations for today's game:

1. After going 11-1 to finish the season and coming from behind in the third period of game one, the Caps were just emotionally drained and couldn't get up for today's game.
2. The Flyers have figured out how to shut the Caps down completely.

Personally, I think it's explanation #1. If it's #2, it's gonna be a short series.

I had written a bunch of observations, but go read Japers instead. He hit all the points I was going to and more.

Update - I almost forgot, good to see Patrick Thoresen (the Flyer who took a Mike Green Slapshot to the groin Friday) wasn't as seriously hurt as initially thought.

Caps Win Game One With a Three Goal Third

OK, I'll admit it. When the Caps were down 4-2 after two I started having, you know, unsure thoughts. Thoughts like:

"We should be proud to have even made the playoffs".

"It's a young team, they're just getting started, this year doesn't matter much".

Oh me of little faith. :)

The Caps took game one of their best-of-seven series with the Flyers in fairly dramatic fashion, scoring three goals in the third period, including a nifty steal by Ovechkin for the game winner. Game winning goal, assist and eight hits on a supposedly more physical team == quite a first playoff game for Alex the Great.

I'm sure folks that more regularly blog the Caps than I do will recap the game better than I will. Peerless Prognosticator already has and I'm sure Japers will by tomorrow. But here are a few of my thoughts.

• The stats say we did well in the faceoff circle, winning 58% (36 of 62). However, their first goal was scored when the Flyers got a clean faceoff win in our end, so I was acutely attuned to every faceoff loss from that point forward. My gut impression was that we hadn't done as well as we did.
• Remember, I don't get to see the Caps very often. So it was kinda surreal to see a Caps team able to cycle the puck down low so well. The Flyers seems fairly helpless to stop us.
• On the other hand, we didn't seem to do so well getting the puck out of our own zone. On Philly's second goal, we managed to get it out of the zone, but turned it over in the neutral zone which lead to a 3-on-2.
• With the exception of the second half of the second (where the Flyers scored three times in under four minutes), I thought the Caps out played the Flyers most of the way. The third period was especially good for the Caps. Not only did they score three, the held the Flyers to a mere three shots, and NONE after Ovechkin scored what turned out to be the game winner. My mom always says a two goal lead is the most dangerous lead in hockey. that sure was true tonight.
• Both Ovechkin and Brashear showed great patience on their goals. There's a great picture of Ovechkin waiting for Biron to commit over @ Off Wing Opinion.
• The refs pretty much let them skate. There was what I thought was a missed tripping call at one point and my brother pointed out Richards was standing in Huet's way in the crease on Briere's second goal, but frankly it was such a pretty pass I doubt Huet could have gotten it. Caps do need to do a better job clearing their crease.
• There's a bit of a controversy surrounding the Caps' fourth goal. The Caps were on the power play and Green unleashed a shot that hit Flyer's winger Thoresen in the groin. The refs didn't whistle the play dead and the Caps scored while Thoresen writhed on the ice in pain. Apparently, the rules are that you don't blow the whistle unless the player's life is in danger, so it looks like a good non-call. But I'm guessing Philly fan doesn't agree.

Game two, Sunday 2pm Eastern/11am Pacific. You'll know where I'll be.

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.

Rock the Red

Japers says all there needs to be said: CONQUE(RED)!

With a 3-1 win over the Panthers, coupled with a Hurricanes' 4-3 loss to the same Panthers the night before, the Washington Capitals are the Southeast Division champions.

These words are music to my ears: Capitals Playoff Tickets On Sale Now!!!

The win was their 7th straight, and they went 14-4 since the trade deadline @ the end of February. They finished the season 43-31-8 after starting the season 6-14-1. That's a 20 game swing (from 8 games under .500 to 12 games over) in 61 games. That's frakking amazing. Had the Caps played at that clip all season, they would have ended up with around 109 points, which would have been good enough for first in the east, though still short of Detriot's 113 points (and they still have a game to play). Ovechkin isn't the only Cap who should be a shoo-in for a trophy. Coach Bruce Boudreau should be a lock for the Adams.

I just spoke to my parents, who were at the game and have almost no voice left after no doubt screaming their frakking heads off or chanting M-V-P in the stands. I also spoke to my brother, who lives in 'Canes country these days but was on his way back home from England. Until he talked to my father earlier today, he didn't even know the 'Canes had lost last night. He sounded slightly stunned, but that might be a by-product of being on a plane all day.

What an amazing year. Can't wait to see what they do in the playoffs.

Go Caps Go. Rock the Red.

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 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 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 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 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 143

• I've been sick for three days, hence the lack of posting around here.
• As a Redskins fan, it's hard to root for any other NFC East team. On the other hand, it sure was easy to root against the Patriots. Congrats to the Giants on their Super Bowl victory. Favorite headline: 18 and uh-oh!
• Sounds like there's cause for optimism regarding the writer's strike. But is it already too late? Will the 9% drop in viewers ever come back? Personally, I think the studios have hastened their own irrelevance.
• With last night's win, the Caps are one game above .500. In and of itself, that's nothing to be proud of - Coach Boudreau remarked when we reached .500 that the Caps had "officially reached mediocrity". However, the Caps are the only team in the SE conference that's above .500. If hockey used baseball standings, Carolina, Atlanta and Florida would each be 1/2 game back of the Caps. It's going to be a fight to the finish.
• In fairly big managed Ruby news, Wayne Kelly has decided to contribute to the IronRuby effort, effectively walking away from the Ruby.NET which helped get off the ground. One the one hand, obviously this is great for IronRuby. On the other hand, I liked the idea of multiple managed implementations of Ruby, so here's hoping Ruby.NET doesn't fade away.
• Speaking of the DLR, I know I mentioned Martin Maly's blog in my Lang.NET Morning Coffee Post, but I didn't actually get to read his posts on targeting the DLR until I unexpectedly had several days off sick. If you are at all interested in writing your own language for the .NET platform: Go. Read. Now. You should also check out Tomas Restrepo's blog, he has also started writing about targeting the DLR.
• Larry O'Brien's blog is currently offline, but he commented that he doubted my ToyScript F# parser would be more than 600 lines of code. Currently, the parser is clocking in at 287 lines of code plus about 50 more for the AST. It's not done yet - see earlier statement about being sick - but I'm fixing bugs not writing additional code at this point. To be completely accurate, that's 287 lines of FParsec code. It's taken me a little bit to learn FParsec, but so far I'm pretty happy with it.
• Scott Hanselman points to the new MS Deploy project, a tool for managing content and configuration on web servers. I've never understood why this wasn't a standard part of IIS. It seems every hosting company I've used has rolled their own web-based management tool like DotNetPanel.
• Oh yeah, Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 shipped Monday. Congrats!
• I fired up Inside Xbox the other day, and there was a page about the new Disney Channel show "Phineas and Ferb". Of course, with two kids under five, anything new on the Disney Channel is notable in my house. What made this blog-worthy is the fact that it's directed and written by Dan Povenmire, who I knew from my USC days. I used to go see his band Keep Left and groan loudly at the bad puns in their song "PSA". Dan, if you found this searching for yourself online: Awesome work, my kids love the show!

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.

Caps 6, Penguins 5 (SO)

NHL.com Game Summary NHL.com Game Recap

It wasn't a pretty win, but I'll take the two points just all the same. Especially given the long history Washington has of losing to the Penguins - they had lost the past six meetings before tonight. Japers' roundup mirrors my own thoughts, though On Frozen Blog's roundup was funnier - they made a drinking game out of the number of times the on-air announcers referenced Sid the Kid. Certainly, there's no love lost for Crosby among Caps fans, but the amount of on-air time spent discussing an injured player bordered on ridiculous - Sid the Kid was mentioned 27 times by OFB's count + five in the post game. Worst was probably Malkin's first goal - he hadn't even stopped celebrating and the announcer was already talking about Crosby.

Caps were pretty dreadful on special teams tonight. Pens had three goals on eight penalties while the Caps had only went one for six. However, the penalty kill came thru in overtime overtime with the Caps down 5-3 for 1:07. The Caps won both defensive zone face offs and blocked four shots - Quintin Laing had three of those blocks - and kept the Pens from registering a shot on goal for the entire power play. That was money. If they gave out game stars to unsung heroes, Laing would have gotten one.

For all the great young talent on the Caps, there's got to be real concern about goaltending. I love Olie the Goalie, but he didn't get it done tonight. The Penguins had a grand total of 15 shots (14 if you don't count the one from beyond the blue line with one second left in overtime). 5 goals on 15 shots == a pretty crappy save percentage. Malkin's first goal was very impressive skating, but he didn't so much shoot as throw the puck at the net. And letting Talbot's  open the scoring by stuffing the puck in at the post was weak sauce as it were. I'm not so much worried about it for this season, but with Kolzig talking retirement as his struggles, I'm not sure who the Caps have in the pipeline between the pipes. 

It sure was fun getting to watch an entire Caps game in its entirety with my family. Patrick and Riley watched most of it. Patrick wanted to know who the bad guys were - he figured it out after I pointed out the Penguins were wearing black...like Darth Vader. :) Julie wanted to know how I'd handle it if Patrick grew up to be a professional hockey player, but was drafted by Pittsburgh. My love for Paddy Boy far exceeds my hatred for the Penguins, though that's the only scenario I could imagine rooting for the Penguins. My boy Patrick, however, protested and said he wanted be a Capital and play with Alex the Great. Patrick will be 18 by the time Ovechkin's contract is over. It could happen. Guess I gotta teach him to skate!

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.

Superman Signed

Big news yesterday for Washington Capitals fans. Alex "the Great" Ovechkin (aka Superman) signed the biggest contract in NHL history - $124 million over 13 years. According to Eric McErlain, that's an average of over $300k per hour of ice time and $5k per shift. Nice work if you can get it.

Actually, all kidding aside, this is a great move for the Caps.

The financial bar was set last summer when Sid "the Kid" Crosby signed a 5-year $43.5 million contract extension - about $8.7 million a season. Since then, Caps fans have had to suffer thru rumor after rumor that our man Alex wasn't going to be playing in DC much longer. However, the suggestion that Ovechkin would be leaving never made any sense to me. He was slated to become a restricted free agent this summer - meaning the Caps would have the opportunity to match any offer. Furthermore, the max any player can get under the new CBA is 20% of the salary cap - currently about $50 million. So it was pretty obvious Ovechkin was going to stay a Cap and get paid somewhere between $8.7 and $10 a season. 

More impressive than the dollars is the length of the contract. Not only is it the wealthiest in the league, it's the second longest (Islanders goalie signed a $67.5 million 15 year contract before the start of last season). This contract means Ovechkin is slated to spend at least 16 years in a Caps uniform. In this era of free agency, more often than not you end up "rooting for the laundry" since the players come and go so quickly. It's nice to know the #8 Caps jersey I got for Christmas will be relevant until the 2020's.

Also, signing Ovechkin for that long makes massive financial sense, even if some "experts" can't (won't) see the value. The salary cap increased from $39 million for the 2005-06 season to $50 million this season. Can the league sustain 13% revenue growth for the foreseeable future? If so, the salary cap will be in the $100 million range by the time Crosby's deal expires. Even if revenues only grow at half that rate, we're still looking at a salary cap in the low $70 millions by 2013. So Crosby will be looking to make at least $14 million and maybe as much as $20 million per season when he resigns. Viewed that way, getting Ovechkin for "only" $9.5 mil a season makes good financial sense.

Of course, the last time the Caps committed this kind of money to a superstar, it didn't work out so well. But unlike Jagr, who got his new contract before skating shift one for the Caps, we know what #8 can do while wearing the Eagle. Owner Ted Leonsis isn't paying for potential on blind faith, he knows what Ovechkin can do and how much he means to this team. Based on the past two and 1/2 seasons, I think Leonsis is getting his money's worth.

Speaking of Ted, my father ran into him @ the seasons ticket holder's event they held last night. When he mentioned that he's "Devhawk's Dad", Ted recalled how I "reamed him a new one" as well as meeting me. For the record, I still think trading Bondra was a mistake, though time has demonstrated it was a fairly minor one. More importantly, it was an isolated mistake. Since then, I think Ted and the Caps have done almost everything right, both on and off the ice. If you're reading this Ted, keep up the good work and I take back that whole "abomination to the sport of hockey" thing.

And don't look now, but the Caps are 12-6-4 since the changing coaches. Had they been playing at that pace all season, they'd have around 55 points and the second best record in the Eastern Conference right now. Good to know, but not very relevant since they did, in fact, start the season 6-14-1. However, if they can stay on this pace for the second half of their season, they would end with around 93 points - probably enough to get them in the playoffs. (Last year's eighth seed ended with 92 points.) Furthermore, Carolina currently leads the Southeast Division, but they're only on pace to reach 86 points. So even with the horrific start, the Caps are still poised to make a playoff run.

In the press release announcing the contract, Alex is quoted saying "I want to bring the Stanley Cup to Washington". Even if they do make the playoffs, I think the Caps are still a year or two away from honestly being competitive for the Cup - though I'd love to be wrong about that. Either way, it's nice to know Alex has 13 years to make the Caps' Stanley Cup dreams a reality.

To quote Mike Vogel, "It feels like morning in Washington." I may be displaced in the "wrong" Washington, but I feel it just the same.

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 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)

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 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 117

• Quick update to the DevHawk 2007 World Tour: I won't be making it to the SOA & BP Conference. Riley's having her tonsils out. As much as I'd like to hang with my geek peeps, family is the priority. But I can still make an evening event or geek dinner later in the week if anyone is game.
• Caps season-opening winning streak continues. Still 100% on the PK, though the power play is pretty anemic. As I said yesterday, it's WAAAAY to early in the season to start bragging, but starting strong is much better than starting weak.
• Speaking of hockey, looks like the NHL Network is launching in the US this month (it's been available in Canada since 2001). Also, NHL.tv is up and running. Those wishing to see Caps highlights can go directly to Capitals.NHL.tv. Unfortunately, if you want to see full games, you've got to subscribe to Center Ice or Center Ice Online to the tune of $150. But I don't want to get "up to 40 games each week", I just want the Caps games. Between the time zone difference and kids, it's not like I have time to watch that much hockey anyway. Why can't I subscribe to just the Caps games online for say $25 a season?
• Finished Halo 3 Sunday night. Fun game and a great end of the trilogy. Looking forward to what the newly-independent Bungie does next. Something tells me we haven't seen the last of Master Chief. However, I do think Bioshock has better and more original storytelling. Mass Effect looks like it'll be better still.
• Sam Gentile pointed out that his Neudesic colleague David Pallmann has posted a series of WCF tips. Several of them are right on the money like "Take Advantage of One Way Operations" and "Use a Discovery Mechanism to Locate Services". However, I can't agree with "Maintain a Service Catalog". David warns that if you don't, "The left hand won’t know what the right hand is doing." Of course, that's probably the case regardless of how you maintain your service catalog. And "Retry on minor failures"? That's fine, if you've got an idempotent operation. Unfortunately, most non-read operations aren't idempotent unless you take the time to design them that way. And most people don't.
• Speaking of Sam, he's blown up his CodeBetter blog and walked away from the ALT.NET crowd. I've not been a fan of this ALT.NET stuff since it surfaced - as Sam said, "ALT.NET is a divisive thing" - so I'm happy to see my good friend walk away from it.
• Speaking of ALT.NET, Scott Hanselman blogged about previewing the new ASP.NET MVC Framework at the ALT.NET conference. Like Sam, Scott thinks the term ALT.NET is "too polarizing". I like Scott's suggestion for Pragmatic.NET. Oh, and the MVC framework stuff looks cool too.
• Reading Dare's description of OAuth gave me a distinct sensation of deja-vu.

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?

Ovechkin as Superman

Just saw this over on Japers' Rink and had to share. This video won a three 2007 Golden Matrix award from the Information and Display and Entertainment Association (IDEA): Best Music Video, Best Overall Video Display (hockey) and Best Overall Video Display (overall). More details on Kukla's Korner. Congrats to the Caps PR team.

Next season is only a little under three months away. Given the moves the Caps have made this off season, next season should be a sight better than last season. Playoffs? Maybe. Contending for playoffs? Probably? Cup Contenders? Check back in a couple more years!

Morning Coffee 97

• For the first six months of 2007, I posted 158 times in 181 days. I'm obviously off the pace I set in January of averaging a post a day, but I am averaging just under nine tenth of a post per day. Not bad. At this rate, I'll post almost as much this year as I did the last two years combined.
• It was a great family weekend. Saturday, three of my friends helped me move an upright piano that we got used for a great price. Luckily, one of said friends is also a physics teacher, otherwise I don't think we could have gotten that heavy thing in the truck. To say thanks, we BBQed for them Saturday evening. Then yesterday we took the kids to see a Sesame Street Live show. Both days were beautiful, which my wife greatly appreciated.
• The Caps hit the free agent market running yesterday, picking up Tom Poti (four years, $14 million) and Victor Kozlov (two years, $5 million). They weren't the A-list free agents, but they both seem like solid pickups. According to Japer's Rink, the Caps were about $6.5 million under the new cap minimum. These two signings just about close that gap, but it doesn't sound like they're done. That's good news for Caps fans.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on LINQ to SQL. While I've seen most of this before, the cool thing Scott shows is hovering over the LINQ to SQL result and bringing up the exact SQL statement in a debugger window. That's pretty cool.
• Nick Malik is now "Mr. SOA" inside MSIT. As you might imagine, I'll be working with him fairly closely. Actually, he's late to a meeting with me as I type this.
• John Shewchuk announces a new version of BizTalk Services coming soon. The big new feature is access control for services exposed via the BizTalk Services. If you can't wait, you can try out the new stuff in their pre-production environment right now, before it's live. Is this a beta of a beta?
• Soma announces the MSDN Small Business Developer Center. I took a quick look thru the site. Strangely enough, it doesn't cover Dynamics - Microsoft's business software primarily targeting small and medium size businesses.
• Ted Neward called object/relational mapping the "Vietnam of Computer Science". David Chappell gives us our next war / technology analogy, declaring that the REST vs. WS-* war is over, ending in a truce like the Korean war rather than "crushing victory for one side".
• Like Jeff Atwood, I didn't realize About Face has been updated, twice. I am a huge fan of the first edition, but Jeff calls About Face 3 "the best edition of this classic yet". I just ordered a copy for myself.
• David McGhee transcribed a fantastic session with Dr. Don Ferguson at the Australian Architecture Forum on SOA/ESB integration in the real world. Go read the whole thing. Udi Dahan pulls out the quote "there is no such thing as a centralized ESB." Amen to that. My other favorite quotes from this discussion is "The temptation is often to get everything in a repository, but often you cannot rely on people to put everything in the registry" and "there is sometimes the “Highlander” philosophy of there can be only one service". If you're design depends on centralization and/or significant change in human behavior, it's doomed from the start. Frankly, it's amazing how often that happens.
• In response to my What is the Rails Question post, Hartmut Wilms wonders why "the .NET community (for the most part) ignores Open Source Projects". I wonder the same thing, though I don't think you can lump the whole .NET community together on this. While some parts of the community ignore anything they can't download from MSDN, other parts strongly embrace open source projects.

Morning Coffee 94

• By most accounts, the Capitals had a good draft this weekend. They started the day with ten picks across the seven rounds. The ended the day with ten prospects as well as three extra picks next year, including two second rounders. According to the GM George McPhee (aka GMGM), next year's is "supposed to be a terrific draft" which is probably true but what you always say when you trade down for future picks. On the other hand, if the guys you want are available further down, why not stock up on the future picks?
• John Lam reports on Steve Yegge's Rails port to JavaScript that he saw at Foo Camp. Google (aka Steve's employer) wasn't interested in adopting Ruby or Rails since they already use C++, Java, JavaScript and Python. So Steve ported Rails to JavaScript. Wow. However, it does beg the question which is more valuable, Ruby or Rails? If you could have just one or the other, which would you choose?
• Speaking of dynamic languages, Powershell Community Extensions v1.1 is out. I want to check out the new Elevate function. Currently, I'm using the Script Elevation PowerToys, but I would rather have a pure PS solution. (via Powershell Team Blog)
• I always know it's a slow day when I decide to check TechMeme while writing my Morning Coffee post. Usually, I get plenty to write about from just my news reading. However, right now, even TechMeme seems mostly uninteresting. Only thing remotely interesting to me is Samsung's new 64GB solid state drive.

Morning Coffee 93

• The Washington Capitals unveil their new jersey tonight, though they have a picture on their web site. I've got mixed feelings, though I'm trying to reserve judgement until I see it "in action". I like that they're back to the traditional Caps colors. But the Caps have jersey change fatigue. They only had the screaming eagle jersey for twelve years, and they swapped out the blue jersey for the black one (that started life as a third jersey) somewhere along the line.
• Lawrence Lessig hangs up his IP spurs to go after the deep corruption of the political process. He points out that after a decade focusing on IP, he's learned all he is going to about these issues so he decided (among other reasons) that it was time to start fresh learning about something new. I keep telling my kids that "always keep learning" is one of the secrets to life. This move by Lessig is the embodiment of that principle. Good for him. (via John Lam)
• My old team keep chugging along. They've recently added "special coverage" sections on Agile Development and Enterprise Architecture.
• Miguel de Icaza details the three week "hackathon" (his words, not mine) they went thru to get a working version of Silverlight on Mono - aka Moonlight - in time for ReMix 07 in Paris. It's an impressive engineering achievement, to say the least. Also, it's nice to see the folks from Microsoft France invite Miguel to come be a part of their keynote. (via Larry O'Brien)
• Rob Bazinet points out VisualSVN in response to my question about SVN clients other than Tortoise. Like AnkhSVN, VisualSVN snaps into Visual Studio. However, where AnkhSVN is a native SVN implementation, VisualSVN depends on Tortoise. Scott Bellware wrote "VisualSVN takes a novel approach to bringing SVN into the Visual Studio IDE... it brings Tortoise into the IDE!". So it still sounds like Tortoise is the SVN client everyone cares about.
• Scott Berkun details a variety of immature development and management methodologies, including Development By Denial (DBD), Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) and my personal favorite Asshole Driven development (ADD). Scott Hanselman suggests looking around and making sure you're not said asshole. I tend to be somewhat...how should I say it?...strong willed about the direction projects I work on should take. My current project is about driving a paradigm shift to service orientation, and I don't think you can't drive that kind of change without being somewhat strong willed. It's a thin line between strong willed and asshole and hopefully I come down on the right side of that line more often than not.

Morning Coffee 4

Recurring 8am Friday meetings are not my style.

• I've been tracking WCF for a long time. Yet, it's still a dauntingly large topic. Yesterday I spoke to a friend who works in Windows Live who is just beginning to learn about WCF and it's literally overwhelming him. His reaction reminded me of my early reactions to COM. It feels like no matter how much you learn about WCF, the "pile" of stuff still to learn doesn't shrink. In contrast, while my initial exposure to the .NET Framework was overwhelming, eventually I got to the point where I felt like I had a good handle on what was in there. 
• With all the configuration settings in WCF, the number of valid combinations is astronomical. While WCF's configuration based approach is arguably more flexible than a code based approach, it's also more complex and harder to debug in my experience. Config debugging seems to be an endless cycle of tweaking the config file and running the app to see what the effect is. We need better tools than SvcConfigEditor.
• Responding to yesterday's Morning Coffee, Jon Flanders confirmed via email that the built-in SQL WF persistence service "doesn't recover from faults to the last good persistence point" and that "when a fault happens, the instance closes and...is removed from the persistence database." Is this the right behavior? I'm thinking it depends on the workflow. More on this later.
• I'm trying to get my teammates to start using the Beyond Bullet Points approach to the various presentations we build as a team. Interestingly enough, it's been easier to get my team to adopt an agile development methodology than to adopt the Beyond Bullet Point presentation methodology. I would have expected the opposite.
• The Caps trounced the Canadiens last night, ending a five game losing streak. I'm not that worried about the losing streak - the Caps have had several players out with the flu. But beating Montreal, who came into the game twelve games above .500, so badly is a good sign. And how about Nycholat? Two goals and four assists in seven games since he was called up from Hershey. Even more impressive, he's +2 even though the Caps were 2-5 and outscored 24-18 in those seven games while averaging nearly 21 minutes of ice time per game. Here's hoping Nycholat stays hot.

Streaky Caps

Washington Capitals record in the past four games: 4-0
Washington Capitals record in the past ten games: 4-4-2

That is what in the business of hockey you call "streaky".

When your recent winning streak includes wins over Dallas (16-8 at the time, 19-9 now) and Eastern conference leading Buffalo (20-3-2 then, 21-4-2 now), you can feel pretty good about yourself. Being only one point out of the playoffs doesn't hurt either.

On the other hand, the East is a beast this year. Only Florida and Philadelphia are below .500. Everyone else is in the thick of the playoff hunt. Another six game slide would really hurt the Caps' playoff chances. By comparison in the West, seven of the fifteen teams are below .500 (i.e. everyone not currently in a playoff spot). Dallas, at ten games over .500 is 3rd in the Pacific Division behind Anaheim (+18) and San Jose (+12).

Finally, it's always nice to be looking down on the Penguins in the standings. But their not far behind. Their 26 points puts them in 13th place in the East, but they're at .500 (11-11-4) and only five points out of a playoff spot. Next Monday's game should be a good one. It's even on national TV in HD!

Drop the Puck!

The 06-07 NHL season finally starts tonight. This offseason feels longer than most, probably because I've been more involved with hockey this past offseason. But the opening night rosters are set and the Sabres and Hurricanes face off in just over five hours. Here are a few quick thoughts:

• NHL.com has gotten a make over. I don't know who their designer is, but somewhat should clue them into "less is more".
• There's a new beta service called NHL Connect. Looks like forums and blogs and profiles right on NHL.com. Looks cool, but currently it's invite only. I would hope it would open up soon. Nice to see Caps fans representing - the Washington Capitals Official Group is tied with the Kings for most number of members (so far).
• Via Off Wing Opinion I found this article by Dave Fay about the NHL's point system. His recommendation: "winning a game in regulation should be worth three points, winning in overtime should be worth two, winning in a shootout should be worth one. Losing at any time should be what the reward has always been for losing -- zero." I could live with that. I'm also cool with two points for a win and none for a loss, regardless if it goes to overtime or shootout. I'd even be OK (but not elated) with three for a win in regulation, two for a win in overtime or shootout and one for a loss in overtime or shootout. But the idea that you had out more total points for an overtime game than a non overtime game is just stupid.

Tonight's Caps Game Live on the Web

This just came across my news reader:

Washington Capitals will face the Philadelphia Flyers in preseason exhibition tonight. Bummed that the game is not being televised? Never fear, WashingtonCaps.com is broadcasting the game via broadband off their website. However it is restricted to the Washington area only.
[Caps Live Via Web - Puckhead's Thoughts]

Wow! I mean, I still can't watch the game <grumble grumble> and it is still pre-season, but this is pretty significant. More details in the press release:

The Washington Capitals exhibition game against the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday, Sept. 26 at 7 p.m. will be broadcast live on WashingtonCaps.com through the use of B2 Networks. This will mark the first time in NHL history that a game can be viewed exclusively via broadband.

The game can be seen free of charge on the Capitals’ website, WashingtonCaps.com. Fans will need a high-speed internet connection and Windows Media Player 9 or higher. Capitals’ radio network play-by-play announcer Steve Kolbe will call the game with Mike Vogel, senior writer from WashingtonCaps.com, providing analysis. Due to NHL broadcast restrictions, the game can only be viewed by fans living within the Capitals broadcast area.

B2 Networks is a provider of secure international television and video broadcasting systems, pay-per-view and billing systems. During the past 12 months, B2 has broadcast more than 3,000 hockey games from all levels including the championships from four leagues. B2 is the digital distribution rightsholder for the United Hockey League, American Hockey League, ECHL and USHL, along with baseball’s Northern League. B2 recently broadcast the National Lacrosse League championship to fans on four continents.
[Capitals Preseason Game to be Broadcast on WashingtonCaps.com via B2Networks]

The Caps and their owner are aggressively pursing avenues outside of the main stream media (which for the most part ignores hockey). First, they come up with Guidelines For Issuing Press Credentials To Bloggers and now this.

Of all the major sports, hockey seems to have the most to gain from both the HD revolution and media decentralization. Hockey is so fast and the puck is so small, you spend most of your time tracking the puck when watching in standard definition. In HD, you don't have to watch the puck, you can watch the play. This isn't to say that other sports aren't gorgeous in HD, but the difference in the experience between SD and HD just isn't as significant for other sports. As for media decentralization, the reason hockey has the most to gain is because it has the least coverage in the mainstream media today. So there's no where to go but up.

However, the NHL broadcast restrictions stuff has got to go. Come on Ted, you're a "pioneer of the Internet and new media". Get those guys at the NHL to wake up and embrace the new media! How come EVERY game isn't available this way?