I really like Jesse Ezell’s.net Weblog Archives (even though he didn’t spell my name right at first! 😄 Here’s my feature request: Filtering. I already subscribe to many of the currently archived feeds. I’d love to be able to filter those out of the RSS feed. Since RSS retrieval is a simple GET, the list of filtered feeds would need to be stored on the server side. Or you POST up the list of filtered feeds and get back the filtered aggregate RSS. Aggregating and archiving RSS seems to be hot right now, so a standard mechanism for filtering would be appreciated. My vote: lets expose a web service to retrieve aggregate RSS information.

Interesting to see that Chris Sells was testifying against the “Open Source Software for Oregon Act (HB 2892)” in Salem on Thursday. Not surprisingly, the response on the blogs I read has been are pro-Chris Sells and anti HB 2892. I have my own take on this, but it the interest of full disclosure:

• I am an Architecture Evangelist for Microsoft, which officially makes me an extremely technical salesman.
• I work for Microsoft’s Industry Solutions Group, which focuses on vertical markets including Government.
• I cover the Pacific Northwest, so the Oregon State Government is one of my customers.
• I was in Salem on Thursday, speaking to a state agency that would be required to “provide justification whenever a proprietary software product is acquired rather than open source software” if HB 2892 passes.
• Employees of said Oregon State agency asked me my opinion of HB 2892.

I’ll post here what I told them: I am completely willing take the Microsoft Platform (Windows + Office + Enterprise Servers + Visual Studio) and do an apples-to-apples head-to-head comparison with any other technology in the industry. The Microsoft platform is easier, faster and cheaper than anything else out there. I say “cheaper” knowing full well that there OSS alternatives that have no cost to acquire. Note that I didn’t say “free”. “Free” software costs money to run. Hardware isn’t free. IT Operations staff aren’t free. Developers aren’t free. Information workers aren’t free. Vendor support isn’t free. Consulting services aren’t free. Migrating isn’t free. Add up all those non-free pieces, and the cost of the initial software purchase is lost in the noise.

The problem with HB 2892 is not that in encourages agencies to look at Open Source Software. There’s no need for a law to do that – every state agency I speak to has budget problems. As millions are slashed from budgets, government IT departments need no additional encouragement to investigate alternatives that might save them money. The problem with HB 2892 is the “justify” statement. That’s not about fair head-to-head comparison. It’s about trying to force agencies to pick OSS products that they don’t want by subjecting them to a painful and costly “justification” process. (Note, I am not implying that agencies never want to pick OSS products. I’m just pointing out what happens if they want something other than OSS.) If agencies are choosing commercial software instead of OSS, even though it must cost more, they must see more value in the commercial software. Where’s the value in legislating that agencies must settle on a lesser product?

Don points out “we’re all lucky there’s a Chris Sells”. I agree completely (and I’ll add on how lucky we are there’s a Mike Sax who asked Chris to go in the first place).

Suddenly the phrase “XPath Enabled” took on a whole new meaning. This is a very cool – and very infoset centric. I like it. Just as I decided to move to blogX too.

After signing up for the BlogX workspace, I decided to also sign up for Dare’s RSS Bandit and RSS Components Workspaces as well. I’ve been using Syndirella, and that’s been OK, but it appears to have gone dark.

Finally home from being on the road all week. And w/o high speed access for half of it! But I spent much of my time talking about Services Oriented Architecture. I think figured out how I want to talk about it since last Tuesday. So I’m starting work on a new deck which evolves my .NET Vision presentation (that I have been delivering for over 2 years now) into something more related to SOA.

Of course, this whole “day job” thing means I’ll have less time for upgrading my blog infrastructure. So I decided to join Chris Andersons‘ BlogX workspace. Would there be any interest in a Site Skinned web front end? Unfortunately, that means scraping some of my past few days experimentation. I was playing around with Konstantin Knizhnik’s PERST Embedded OODBMS for C#. Sort of cool – but I’d like to see something more XML focused – perhaps a lightweight embedded XML storage engine (that’s XPath enabled of course).