I’ve been playing in the Microsoft Flag Football league for the past few weeks. Today was the first time I knew anyone on the field other than my teammates. Tony Goodhew is a PM in the VS.NET group. He’s worked with VC++ (Here’s an interview with new MSFT employee Robert Scoble), J#, plus he does stuff with standardization of CLR. Tony’s Australian, which means he plays more rugby than football, a fact that was clearly obvious as I blew past him and the rest of his team’s offensive line to sack the QB in the end zone for the safety that turned out to be the margin of victory. I’d love to see Tony start a blog. He’s been kicking around the .NET team so long he’s got a bunch of good stories to tell. I brought him to a .NET student user group meeting at U of Washington and he was awesome. I’m hoping that if I talk enough trash about him here, he’ll start a blog just to respond in kind.

In other news, I need new business cards. Given that Scoble credits his weblog with getting him hired, I’ve decided to put my weblog on the business cards. Anybody else do this?

I’m working on adding individual list support to my SharePoint RSS Feed Generator. This allows me to pass the name or ID for a specific list on the query string and return that list as a channel. However, it is possible to pass invalid data on the query string. For example, I could subscribe to the RSS feed for a list only to have that list be deleted. The next time my news aggregator updates, the requested list will be invalid. I’ve decided to return HTTP 404 if this happen. Is this the right behavior?

Second question: can an RSS feed have multiple channels? In SharePoint, a web is a collection of lists and a list is a collection of list items. If the user requests the RSS feed for a web, they get back a channel with the title/link/description of the web and an item element for each list item in every list in the web. That means that when the user requests a web’s RSS feed, the list grouping is being flattened out (though I do put the list’s name as the category of any list item). Wouldn’t it make more sense to return multiple channels? According to the spec, there can only be a single channel element under the rss element. If that’s the case, why even have a channel element? Why not just put all of channel’s children directly under the rss element?

I’d like to see a revision to the RSS spec to add optional support for multiple channels and for optional title/link/description elements as direct children of the rss element. Of course, if we can’t agree on a namespace, I assume we’ll never get my suggestions added.

I just added a project page for my SharePoint RSS Feed Generator. Please feel free to download and test the code. It’s very early code – v0.1 – and I know there are issues. It passed a basic smoke test with Matt, but he found some irregularities. He also suggested enabling RSS feed for individual lists rather than just for sites. That will be the primary enhancement of a v0.2.

If there’s interest, I can create a GotDotNet Workspace for this project.

With apparently no fanfare, the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (or BPEL) spec has been reved to 1.1. You can get it online from MSDN, IBM developerWorks and BEA dev2dev. For those who haven’t seen BPEL, it: “BPEL4WS represents a convergence of the ideas in the XLANG and WSFL specifications.” XLANG is the language that powers Microsoft BizTalk Server.

In other personal programming news, even though I’m in a Phoenix hotel, I didn’t work on my weblog infrastructure. I’m waiting to see what comes next from blogX. With Chris and Don working on it, my time is better spent in other places. I did build a tool to download my weblog entries and store them in a single XML file on my local system. Even converts from HTML to XHTML via SgmlReader. So I’m ready to migrate to something else.

Since I’m not building blog tools, I spent my hotel evening last night with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). The more I play with this product, the more impressed I am with it. One of the features of WSS is the ability to be notified via email when something changes (a doc, a folder, a list, etc). Of course, those of us in the blogsphere would rather have an RSS feed to tell when something changed. So I built an RSS feed generator for WSS. I will post it after it undergoes some basic smoke testing (I sent it to Matt to see if he could get it to work). Since Office SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is built on the same technology, it should work there as well (I asked Matt, who has an SPS up and running, to try this out too).

Finally, welcome Robert Scoble to MSFT. Interesting to see that he credits his weblog for helping him get hired. Glad to have you on board!

Just got back from seeing Dreamcatcher. Didn’t get to see it when it first came out for obvious reasons. My wife Julie read the book and enjoyed it – which is surprising since she doesn’t typically like Stephen King books. I liked it – looking forward to going back and reading the book myself.

One of the primary reasons to see Dreamcatcher now was because of the AniMatrix short “Final Flight of the Osiris“. I was reading the EW cover story on Matrix Reloaded which also talked about the AniMatrix DVD. It mentioned that “Osiris” was a lead-in to the events of Reloaded and the Enter the Matrix game so I had to go see it. Didn’t disappoint. Worth it to see even if you walk out before Dreamcatcher starts.

Chris points out the Japanese trailer which I missed – pondering if I should go check it out. If it’s got a spoiler, I might just give it a pass until after I see Reloaded.