Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Morning Coffee 75

• 3D Printing is going to be huge. According to the NYT, we'll be looking at around $1,000 for one within four years. For the impatient, check out Fab@Home and build one right now.
• It's been a while since I experimented with the P2P stack in Windows, but it looks like it's getting the managed treatment in VS "Orcas".
• The managed Ruby hits keep on coming. Last week was DLR and IronRuby. This week it's a new drop of Ruby.NET which includes VS integration.
• Looks like Sun is trying to get back into the Ajax/Flash/Silverlight fray with JavaFX Script. I wrote over a year ago that "In platform portability, Flash has succeeded where Java failed." I can't help but believe JavaFX is too little too late. Also, it's yet another Java technology name that sounds like it's been blatantly copied from MSFT. JDBC, JSP, JDO ... What's next? JINQ? (via TechMeme)
• Steve Maine has a great series of posts on the new Web Programming Model that's coming in .NET 3.5 and is currently being previewed as part of the BizTalk Services SDK. But it was his Balancing reach and rich post that I found most illuminating. The first version of WCF feels hopelessly bound to the WS-* view of the world, which makes it difficult to incorporate alternative messaging models into the same programming model. I've run into this trying to use SSB with WCF. In the next version, that WCF / WS-* marriage looks like it's getting a little more open. In my current role, I'm not so interested in the web programming model, but I am very interested in how they are integrating these alternative models.