I hear Jim Blizzard is having another Portland Nerd Dinner. I wanted to go meet Rory in person, maybe see Scott (who I haven’t seen since KL last year) and continue a conversation I was having with Chris last week on campus. Not going to make it this time. I could use the holidays as an excuse, but the truth is that I’ve got an early morning all-hands division meeting to see Return of the King and I’d like to get more than three hours of sleep.

From Sean Alexander’s Addicted to Digital Media blog, I learned that the Dish Network is planning on bringing a HDTV-PVR system to market in a few weeks. I was just begining to wonder about HDTV + PVR functionallity. I’m really interested in how Media Center systems will incorporate this functionallity. I really dig the new Gateway Media Center with it’s stereo-component form factor. According to the specs, it has Composite A/V inputs to the TV Tuner card. Does that mean it can PVR HDTV too?

I cut my teeth developing for the windows platform with Windows++ by Paul Dilacia. It was about building a framework to wrap the Win32 api. Because of the elegance of Windows++, I never ever liked MFC. I disliked it so much that when I joined Microsoft, one of my ex-coworkers remarked “But you hate Microsoft” to which I replied “No, I hate MFC.”

Anyway, even though most people have moved on to managed code now, Microsoft continues to ship updates to the Windows Template Library. WTL is an extension to the Active Template Library that supports typical Windows applications (controls, dialogs, frame windows, GDI objects, etc). The new 7.1 version support VS.NET 2003, Windows XP and Windows CE.

I wish I had had access to WTL back in the day. I liked it so much better than MFC.

…but to really screw up, you need a computer. Or in the case of the BCS, you need seven of them.

I’m sure the Nokia Sugar Bowl officials are really excited about hosting “The Battle for Second Place”

SQL Service Broker is probably the least known new feature of SQL Server “Yukon”, but I can’t wait for it. It makes messages a first class object in the database. If you’ve ever had multiple processes banging on your database or you’ve ever used a flag on a row to indicate if it’s been processed or not, you want SQL Service Broker too.

While there is huge disagreement as to exactly what “Service-Oriented Architecture” is, I think there is some general consensus around the fact that it is an asynchronous message driven model rather than a synchronous RPC model. This means that the thread you receive a message on will never be the same thread that you process the message on. In fact, typically you will write the message to a persistent data store (hello, Yukon native XML support) in order to be handled by a thread in a different process and probably on a different machine. Today, kicking off the thread to handle the message is a pain in the ass. You probably want lots of threads across lots of machines to handle the incoming messages (assuming you’re getting lots of incoming messages). In order to synchronize message processing across machines, you need a mechanism to make sure each incoming message is handled once and only once. Today, the closest solution is message queue technology like MSMQ (or MQSeries). However, since that’s a different data store from where the data lives (i.e. the database), now you need two phase distributed transactions to get that done. However, since messaging is going to be such a huge piece of architecture going forward, it makes sense to have the concept of messages baked right into the database.

With Service Broker, when the message is received, it is placed into a service broker queue. (It’ll probably get stored for archival and retry avoidance reasons, but that’s a different blog entry.) Now I can have processes that, within the scope of a local transaction, receive the incoming message, make whatever data changes that message implies and send off any new messages. This is both more productive (manually handling local transactions for async processing is this kind of a scenario much easier than using serviced components) as well as more performant.