Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Morning Coffee 34

• Old news, but Reflector 5.0 is out. W00t! Not sure when Scott Hansleman became chief Reflector cheerleader, but he's got the rundown on the new features.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: OpenCongress. Sort of like Wikipedia for government. If we can disseminate information on bills and resolutions via the Internet, couldn't we collect votes on them as well?
• I got my hardcopy of Powershell in Action while I was on vacation. Highly recommended.
• Sam Gentle is starting to dig into WF, and he posts about the difficulty getting data in and out of workflows. He's using the ExternalDataService infrastructure which I don't like very much. I recommend getting friendly with the WorkflowQueuingService which is the low-level communication infrastructure that ExternalDataService builds on top of. The WQS docs are severely lacking, but it's fairly straight forward to figure out.
• Speaking of WF, Tomas Restpro reviews Programming WF. Sounds fairly introductory. Personally, Essential WF is one of the best tech books I've read in a long time, so I'll be skipping this book.
• My teammate Dale is continuing his daily posts on his blog.
• Joe McKendrick wonders if EDA is the new SOA. Frankly, both terms are so poorly defined that it's hard to determine exactly what each term means, much less how they're related. If you're an IT industry analyst, you probably can make a ton of cash describing the differences between them. Maybe it's me, but I don't see that much value in SOA without EDA. In fact, I'd go so far as to say service orientation without events isn't much a new architecture paradigm at all. It's just the Same Old Architecture with better support for interop.