Julie, Patrick and I had dinner with my cousin David Schaffer tonight. David is a research fellow for Phillips and is an expert on genetic algorithms. He was one of the founding members of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation and an editor for Evolutionary Computation Journal. He was in town for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference 2004 (i.e. GECCO – cute). It was funny that we are both software experts (though he is much more expert than I), but had to explain to the other what we did. I explained SOA to him and he explained genetic algorithms to me. We didn’t into too much depth over dinner – it was much more fun to watch Patrick try and feed himself noodles and talk about family stuff. However, I think I want to learn more about this – I’m thinking there will be applicability of genetic and evolutionary computation to SOA. Maybe I can get David to write for my JOURNAL.

David is also into genealogy, and he gave me a copy of the family tree he’s been building up over the years. It’s all 20 year old console apps and text files, but he wants to bring it to the web in order to better enable collaboration among family members. Of course, David’s never built a web app before. Sounds like a job for Visual Web Developer 2005 Express! (BTW, what’s the abbreviation for that? VWD?)

By now, everyone has seen the big news – VS2005 Beta 1, Express versions and the new VS2005 Dev Center. I’m provisioning a new VPC to install it on. I’d love to move to VS2005 for all my dev work, but I’m writing a few apps that need to be working in a production environment long before we get to Beta 2, so I’m going to leave those on VS.NET 2003…at least for now. However, there are a few longer-term things that I’m working on that I’ve been wait to start coding on for VS2005 that can now get started.

On the architecture side, we launched a new SOA resource page. As part of the launch, we are featuring an updated version of Pat’s Metropolis presentation and a new SOA whitepaper. The version of Metropolis that has been a part of the Architecture Strategy Series was one of the first times Pat had presented it. Like many presentations, Pat refined his delivery with each new time he delivered the talk. The new version provides a new section that describes SOA as well as a section drilling down on the guidance that the Metropolis model provides. Even if you’ve seen the previous version, you should check out the new version.

We also published a new whitepaper on Service Orientation and Its Role in Your Connected Systems Strategy. It takes a Crawl/Walk/Run approach to describing the approach and technology for service orientation today, next year with SQL 2005 & VS 2005, and further out with Longhorn and Indigo. It also covers such areas as Service-Oriented Analysis, Designing for Change and Extensibility, Service Management and Pattern of Service-Oriented Solutions.

You can discuss the new whitepaper, the new version of the Metropolis presentation or any other aspect of our SOA content on TheServerSide.NET.

I just picked up a 40GB Nomad Zen Xtra. I know everyone is all ga-ga for the iPod, but I have all my media in WMA I found the Nomad for almost half the price of a 40GB iPod. I also picked up Notmad Explorer which is much cooler than the built in software. I especially like the Xtreamer capability which allows you to play music stored on the Nomad thru your computer speakers. So far, I’ve only filled up 1/3 of the storage – I guess I need to rip more of my CD collection!

In my almost six years of working at MSFT, I’ve had one great manager after another. I just found out one of them had a baby two months ago. Madelyn Marie Heard was born on April 30th. Congrats to her mom Jennifer, who was my manager two jobs ago when I was on MSFT’s National Technology Team.

Streaming producer presenations from TechEd US have been posted. However, the streaming presenation site has the same lack-of-url-addressability issue that TechEd Breakout session list had. Is it so hard to just post a simple HTML file with a list of all the sessions in a track? <sigh>

Anyway, here are links to the top 5 sessions from this year’s architecture track. For those who could not make it to TechEd (or were there, but missed these sessions) enjoy!

1. Realizing SOA by John deVadoss & Ron Jacobs
2. Data in SOA by Harry Pierson (i.e. yours truly)
3. Patterns in the Enterprise by Gregor Hohpe
4. Improving Application Perf & Scale by Chris Kinsman
5. Building Apps with P&P App Blocks by Wojtek Kozaczynski

Update: The streaming site has been taken down, so none of the links work anymore. Sorry about that. We will be updating the Architecture Strategy Series at some point in the future with at least the Realizing SOA and Data in SOA talks.