Friday, July 25, 2008

Morning Coffee 171

• Big news for IronRuby out of OSCON. John and Jim have the details. Congrats to the IronRuby folks on reaching these milestones and paving the way for others (i.e. IPy) to follow some of the same paths.
• One of those OSCON announcements, is a project my teammate Jimmy Schementi has been working on: Silverline, which "let's you write Rails code that can run on the client".
• Shri Borde - the dev manager for IPy, IRuby and F# - tackles a tricky subject of static compilation of dynamic Python code. This came up on the mailing list recently as one of the outstanding requests for IPy to do is support custom attributes, which requires static compilation. Shri lays out some of the big issues with this approach. However, the community has been fairly clear on this, so it's obviously something we need to look at.
• I met someone from MS Research at the MS Product Fair who pointed me to the Institute for Personal Robots in Education, a joint effort between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College and sponsored by Microsoft Research. Their Myro software (myro == my robot) is written in CPython, but there's an effort underway (aka Miro 3.0) to build a .NET version that uses IronPython. Must investigate.
• Seshadri shows how easy it is to extend C# types in IronPython. It's also shows how simple it is to host DLR code in your app - it's like 6 lines of code!
• Early reviews of IronPython in Action are good.  
• If you want to run an IronPython IDE in your browser with Silverlight, check out SilverShell from Dan Eloff.
• The XNA team has announced their business plans for community games. Basically, you set a price point between 200 and 800 points (aka between $2.50 and $10) and receive a "baseline" of 70% of the revenue the game generates. More details are available in the FAQ. This is pretty excited. I'd like to build some co-op kids games.
• Speaking of XNA, Caligari is now offering TrueSpace 7.6 for free . David Weller and Glenn Wilson provide an XNA viewpoint on the announcement, Chris Pendleton shows how to upload your models to VirtualEarth.
• Congrats to the CodePlex team on their latest drop, which features that a cool new feature - Mailing Lists! IronPython has had a Mailman mailing list for years, so I'm not sure we'll use this feature on IPy, but I'll investigate it
• Two PDC notes: First, Rick Rashid - VP of MS Research - will be delivering a PDC keynote. Second, the PDC team has put up a video podcast on Producing a Ginormous Conference in 10 Minutes or Less! It's the "inaugural episode" so watch for more Countdown to PDC video podcast episodes in the future.
• I recently discovered Chris Smith's F# blog. He's got recent posts on Mastering F# Lists and Guidelines for Readable F# code. For the F# novice, check out his F# in 20 Minutes posts (part one, part two)
• Pat Helland is moving to the SQL team. Good luck Pat!
• I like Nick Malik's formal definition of use cases, but I can't help be reminded of Charlie Alfred's Value-Driven Architecture article in Architecture Journal 5 where he said use cases were "easy to teach and explain" but that "if simplicity were the only goal that counted, we'd all still be walking or riding horses to get from one place to another."