I finally got around to updating my blog rolls from my news reader. I keep three separate ones – my team & architect evangelists bloggers, other MS bloggers and other non-MS bloggers – which is a pain to maintain (which explains why I haven’t updated  them in a long time).

Two new architect bloggers to report. Javed Sikander is an architect on the Architecture Strategy Team focusing on RFID. He links to a pair of articles about Microsoft and RFID plus provides his thoughts on why RFID is a big deal. David Solivan is an architect advisor and an ex-teammate from my old .NET Adoption Team days. So far, David appears to be blogging at conferences. He started in July at MGB and then went dark for a few months. He picked back up at SAF. I hear he’s at a conference this week, so maybe we’ll see some more from him.

That brings the total number of bloggers from my team to 14. That’s over half of the team and I know at least two more coming down the pipe.

I hadn’t realized how cool the Halo 2 stats site on bungie.net is until Scott blogged it . This really brings the online experience to a new level. It’s so cool, that I had to create a new flair for my blog linking to my stats page (I also put up a link to my games RSS feed). Granted, my stats so far are pretty lame – I’ve only played one multiplayer game so far and I came in 5th. (I did spend most of last night playing the campain.) Maybe the public nature of the stats will drive me to improve them. I haven’t joined a clan yet, but when I do I’ll create a flair for that too.

The coolest thing about this is that it sets a new bar for online experience. ESPN Video Games and EA Sports are nowhere near this level of detail, but I imagine they are taking notice.

I just installed Konfabulator as I’ve seen several people, like Scoble, blogging about it. I think I need to dig thru the widget gallery. Of the preinstalled ones, I only like the Battery Level and WiFi Signal widgets. But I really like them – as in like them enough to keep the software installed just for them. I’ve only played with it for 5 minutes, but already I am not interested in any of the interactive widgits – having a nice partially transparent graphic displaying information at a glance works for me the best.

Esp. after the launch of Halo 2, I’d love to see a Konfabulator widget with the status of my Xbox Live Friends list. Maybe something for the XboxFriends folks?

Speaking of Halo 2, I’m headed home now to do just that…

Roger Sessions, noted architectural guru, author and Microsoft Architect MVP, has posted his latest newsletter on the WS-* family of specs. In typical Roger fashion, he decides to give them his own name – WS-SCRAM with SCRAM standing for “Secure, Coordinated, Reliable Async Messages”. (I forget where, but I once heard Roger refer to “three-phase transactions” instead of the relatively standard “two-phase commit transactions”.) Roger claims MS et. al. are pushing WS-STAR where “STAR” is an acronym standing for “Secure, Transacted, Async, Reliable”. Personally, I’ve never seen it written out like a an acronym and I always thought the * in WS-* was used as a wildcard, but it is true that we are focused more on transactions than coordination. On the Longhorn DevCenter, Indigo is described as providing “secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability.”

This is actually the second time Roger’s taken on transactions in a web services architecture. His last newsletter on the topic had a much more detailed but harder to follow example. He points out that there are two related specs in this space – WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity but that he thinks only WS-BA is going to work in the long run. WS-AT requires holding locks open in the DB, which is highly unlikely between services in different trust boundaries communicating with async messaging. Am I really going to lock the records in my database while I wait for a service that I don’t trust to figure out if it is able to commit or abort? I don’t think so. Pat’s wrote a great scenario showing how unrealistic the concept of long-running transactions really are.

However, at the end of the newsletter, Roger takes Indigo to task for implementing WS-AT and not WS-BA and I don’t agree with him. While I think WS-AT shouldn’t be used in web services architectures, Indigo is also responsible for moving existing technologies like COM+ forward. Leaving out WS-AT isn’t really an option in those scenarios. As for not implementing WS-BA, I’ve got to wonder just how valuable is WS-BA? While WS-BA avoids the DB locking issue of WS-AT, it still doesn’t deal with the delegation of control. WS-BA still leaves me beholden to the decision of some outside coordinator. This seems to violate two of Don’stenets of service orientation: “Boundaries are Explicit” and “Services are Autonomous”.