I see from Jim, Rory and Scoble that there’s a “Weblog Meetup” on Wed. evening. It’s at a bowling alley. I hate bowling. I mean, I really hate it. As in I’d consider lighting myself on fire to get out of bowling. But this bowling alley has good beer and Wed is not karoke night. So I think I can make it.

Two ex-teammates, Tim Mallalieu and Jeromy Carriere, have a new article on Enterprise Interoperability between .NET and J2EE posted on MSDN Architecture Center. Combined with Simon’s book and the Patterns and Practices interop guide, there’s alot of good guidance on this topic.

I’m kicking around SharePoint Syndication again. There are a variety of reasons. I got email from someone @ the SP Web Component Directory about it. According to Scoble, the Front Page team is interested in RSS. And the primary kicker, there’s a project going on in my group internally that is using WSS and wants to expose RSS feeds.

Glad to know it’s popular. Too bad it’s not done and I’m not sure how to finish it.

Generic feed generation works just fine. The problem is customization. I need a user-friendly way (i.e. not hacking XML in the config file) to configure the feeds. Currently, the config file specifies which lists and webs expose feeds as well as the format of the feed for different list templates. I want to move that config so that it can be managed by the administrator using a simple UI, not the XML file. But that leads to questions: Do I try and stash my config data into the existing web and list configuration via the standard object model or do I bite the bullet and store it somewhere else (i.e. another DB)? What’s the best way to add admin of the feed to the existing admin pages? Frankly, I don’t know the answer to these questions.

One way to solve this problem would be to completely refactor the solution. Instead of relying on the WSS object model, I would leverage the WSS web services. This would let me run the feed generator outside of the confines of WSS. Basically, I’d just be translating formats – the output of the web services into RSS and OPML. This would be really great for hosted WSS since it wouldn’t require any change to the WSS site itself. However, doing the security right for this scenario would be a pain in the ass. WSS web services use transport level authentication which means it’s difficult to “hop” credentials across servers.

I don’t know if the answers to these dilemmas are out there in the blogosphere, but I figured I might as well put the questions out there.

My old teammate Rick Culpepper quit working for Microsoft several months ago because he couldn’t hack the travel. Of course, neither could I - but there are alot more non-travel positions in Redmond, WA than Nashville, TN. Good news for Microsoft, Rick’s back as a TAM for the healthcare vertical.

Welcome back, Rick!

Update: Apparently, I can’t spell “Culpepper” or “months”. Corrected.

I finally made the decision to dump SharpReader. The massive memory utilization (100+ MB) combined with the myriad of alert toast popups finally sealed the deal. Currently, I’m using intraVnews and I’m going to try out the new NewsGator when it’s available.

Reading blogs in Outlook does take some getting used to. Search Folders makes it easier, but then my feeds are sorted alphabetically rather than by the feed category (i.e. the parent folder). Is there a hotkey or shortcut for jumping to the next unread item (even if it’s in a different folder) when using the reading pane? Also, I’m used to deleting emails after I’ve read them but I’m used to letting posts get deleted when they are a couple weeks old. IntraVnews supports this option, but maybe I’m better off treating posts like email and deleting them when I’m done.

Don mentioned he was going to roll his own blog engine so he can use it for experimentation. (I’d link to the entry bu permalinks seem to be broken in his current blog engine). I keep thinking of the same thing about news readers.

Update: thanks to Wesner Moise for pointing out to me in my comments how to turn off the alert toast popups. However, I’m still going to stick it out with an Outlook based solution. Luckily, I’m not like most ‘softies w/ a ton of unread email in my inbox so the built-in search folder works fine.