One of the big announcements at Tech·Ed was the Visual Studio Team System, a set of lifecycle management tools for architects, developers, project managers and testers. Check out this episode of MSDN TV introducing the Team System that was shot at Tech·Ed.

My wife and I saw the latest Harry Potter movie over the weekend. It’s my favorite so far. I’m not sure if it was the new director, or just the fact that this book was longer than the first two, but I thought this movie spent far less time on stuff from the book that wasn’t relevant to the story. I took a film class back in high school, and the teacher explained that every scene in a movie has to do one of three things.

1. Advance the plot
2. Advance the character
3. Get a laugh

I amended rule #3 to be “Get a reaction” since there are often scenes in a horror or thriller movie that are there just to scare you. The first two Harry Potter movies seemed to spend a significant amount of screen time on getting the reaction: “I remember that from the book”. For example, in the last movie, when Harry and Ron drink a potion to transform into Malfoy’s two henchmen (henchboys?) , Hermione accidentally transforms herself into a cat. The only reason that scene is in the movie is because it’s in the book. Not having Hermione doesn’t affect Harry and Ron’s mission (i.e. it didn’t advance the plot) nor was there any fallout or change to Hermione in later scenes (i.e. it didn’t advance the character). It doesn’t even get a laugh. Given the Harry Potter movies are around 2 1/2 hours long each, there’s no excuse for extraneous scenes like this.

Kill Bill Vol 2, Troy, Shrek 2 and Harry Potter so far with Spider-Man 2 and King Arthur on the horizon. Sure we’ve had Van Helsing and The Day After Tomorrow, but so far the summer movie season is looking good.

A while ago, Chris spouted on the then-trend of all of his friends coming to work for MSFT. He himself joined up six month after writing that entry. Now, there seem to be a bunch of new consulting companies sprouting up. ThinkTecture, PluralSight (thanks for the shirt Keith!), Barracuda.NET and Wangdera just to name a few. Most of these seem to feature DevelopMentor alumni. Will we see newly-minted MSFT alumni join this trend? I know one – my friend Jeff left MSFT to start his own consulting firm Secure Justice Solutions, focusing on integrated justice information systems. One isn’t a trend, but it’s interesting to watch as the economy slowly improves.

Note, unlike Chris, who observed a trend only to become a part of it a few short months later, we won’t be seeing any “DevHawk Consulting” nonsense around here. I’m having *way* too much fun doing what I’m doing w/ Architecture Strategy. Besides, I get to torment work with Pat.

Update: In the comments, Avery pointed out that Rob Howard has left MSFT to create a company called »telligent systems.

I’m guessing someone blogged it last week (I gave up on catching up on blogs since I was almost three weeks behind), but there’s now a free home edition of xmlspy. Many of the cool features, including the schema editor, are available. However, the web services support, primarily the WSDL editor, remain only a part of the enterprise edition.

I keep wondering if someone in the community will build a WSDL editor with VSIP, esp. one that supports WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. I know CapeClear has their WSDL editor, but I find the explorer style view much less usable than the xmlspy-style graphical view.

I updated my theme to reflect the brand-spanking-new Tech·Ed 2005 logo, which looks suspiciously like the now-obsolete Tech·Ed 2004 logo with different text. Luckily, there are palm trees in Orlando and San Diego.

Kidding aside, I will be at Tech·Ed next year, again deeply involved in the Architecture Track.