Thursday, June 28, 2007

Morning Coffee 96

• My friend David "LetsKillDave" Weller writes a long post on corporate blogging, responding to comments on the subject from Penny Arcade. Andre "Ozymandias" Vrignaud also responds. David is specifically talking about blogging within the gaming division, but they apply pretty broadly to Microsoft as a whole when it comes to blogging. "I don't want to get fired", "I don't want to do things that needlessly hurt my company" and "We can say things that PR or marketing people can't.  Or won't." all ring true to me.
• Speaking of gaming, there seems to be more that your average cool games coming our for Xbox 360 this summer. I just picked up Forza 2 which rocks with the Racing Wheel. The Darkness looks very cool and I laughed my ass off playing the Overlord demo. Both shipped this week and have gotten good reviews. On their way in August are Bioshock and Blue Dragon. Of course, there are a few other big games coming this holiday. A good, but expensive, year to be a gamer.
• I laughed my ass off reading Larry O'Brien's Top 10 Things To Do With Your Petaflop Supercomputer, esp. #9.
• WSDL 2.0, it's official. Nick Allen has the news. Personally, WSDL seems to be the spec most responsible for driving RPC-style request/response web services, so let's just say that I am not a fan.  
• Joe McKendrick thinks something is "holding back SOA"? I don't think it's any one thing, but certainly the RPC style that most web service toolkits pretty much force down your throat isn't helping.
• Nick Malik thinks Acropolis is promising as a SOA service consumer, but Udi Dalan thinks it doesn't support multi-threading well enough. I lean towards Nick on this one since I see multi-threading as a language problem, which a library like Acropolis can't solve on it's own.
• Jon Flanders has been busy building the BizTalk Server 2006 extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (June CTP) SDK Sample. I'm not sure why the marketing folks gave this such a long and involved name, but the sample does look pretty cool. Paul Andrews has the project overview and demo video. However, given that the WF workflows are hosted in BTS, is it accurate to say "No Biztalk Experience Required"?
• Speaking of WF, Tomas Restrepo takes a detailed look at the new WF service hosting in .NET FX 3.5. Mostly, he likes what he sees. I have the same problem he does with the message correlation IDs. I'd like to have other options here, including support for what I call "message data correlation" (Tomas describes this as "natural correlating identifiers") and "address correlation" which is basically the REST model.