TechEd is almost upon us – just over one week to go. We had our last track owner meeting yesterday. I’m chasing down speakers for slides (I actually have some already!) and figuring out what seems like a million final details for our track cabana. In addition to the great sessions, we’ve got some cool stuff happening at TechEd this year. Some I can’t quite talk about yet (watch this space) but I did want to remind all TechEd attendees about the Architect Road Rally happening Sunday night, after the precons. Space is limited and subject to first come, first served registration, so register right away!

Since this blog is now being syndicated on Architecture Center, I thought I should repost links to a recent pair of entries I wrote entitled “Is the Middle-Tier Endangered?” and “The Endangered Middle-Tier, Part 2“. The basic premise of the posts is that as computer hardware gets faster and service-orientation aims to carve our course-grained applications into finer-grained services, the value of running the business logic on a separate tier diminishes greatly. Add an improved programming model to the database (such as the CLR’s addition to SQL 2005) and I feel that, eventually, it will make more sense to run the services in-process with the database instead of on a separate tier. We’re not there yet – in addition to continued hardware improvements, we need a major improvement to the overall management infrastructure – but I think it will happen. The question is, do you think it will happen?

From the one-less-thing-for-me-to-do department, Chris Dix has created a managed wrapped of the WinXP P2P SDK. He also has several sample apps, including a Scoble-inspired MagicFolder. According to his site, Chris plans to extend his library to support web services (WSE custom channels?) which should be very cool.

It’s funny, I used to get really sad when I discovered someone else had built something that I had started building. Especially if, as in this case, theirs was better. Now, I’m just relieved that I can reuse the library without having to build all the surrounding infrastructure. I’m glad I never released my managed P2P wrapper, it would be one more thing for me to kill. Like my HtmlReader stuff. I still get people looking for it even though I killed it a while ago. (Hasn’t everyone figured out they should use SGML Reader instead?)

The more I understand about Windows Media Services 9, the more I like it. I especially like the fact that can create your own data source plug-in as part of a custom broadcasting solution. However, one quick gotcha – you can only use custom plug-ins with WS03 Enterprise Edition. Didn’t realize until I had built and configured my virtual media server and compiled the sample data source plug-in. Annoying, but not the end of the world.

Not only in my blog back in action, but my gracious host Tom has started a blog of his own. Since he hosts DevHawk for me, I added him to both my blog roll and to my navigation links.

Tom’s first post (and the theme of his blog in general) is about the role of consultants and programmers in the future. He draws a nice parallel comparing how those roles are changing to how the chaufer role changed during the 20th century.