.NET Rocks has had a slew of architecture related guests recently. Rocky, Tim and now Clemens. Carl and Rory, keep up the good work!

All it takes is one bad trip to remind me why I took a job that only requires a handful of trips a year. Pat mentioned that this is the week of our big annual internal training event in Atlanta. We had a two day pre-training event for all our field architects. (which explains the lack of posts around here.) We need to keep them in the know about the content and programs we are working on back at corporate, plus these are great bunch of people so it’s always nice to hang out with them. Too bad the travel has been such a nightmare.

My flights into and out of Atlanta were each several hours late. Getting an elevator in the hotel took forever – once over 15 minutes! The 70-story Westin was booked to capacity, and I guess everyone wanted an elevator at 8am in the morning. But given that “booked to capacity” is a desirable state for any hotel, why didn’t they design for that eventuality? I mean, it’s not exactly an edge case scenario. Then, I left the pre-training early to visit a customer in Minneapolis. The customer meeting went great, but we had a miscommunication on the meeting time and I missed my flight home. So now I’m hanging around the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport hoping to get home flying standby.

It was pointed out to me that I’m not supposed to be visiting customers anymore, and after this trip I’m inclined to agree. However, you can’t solve real world problems if you don’t get out and experience real world customers and their real world problems from time to time. Usually, I meet with customers who come for executive briefings on campus. This meeting in Minneapolis grew out of one of those on-campus briefings. And since I was on the road anyway, I didn’t think it would be a big. Next time, I think I’ll opt to attend via Live Meeting.

I love my Olympus digital camera, but it does have one annoying issue. Occasionally, it “forgets” the current time and date. This leaves me with a bunch of images with a corrupt “Date Picture Taken” field (here’s an example). Luckily, Omar’s PhotoLibrary let me hack up a little program to update the date fields in the EXIF header. I couldn’t use JPEG Hammer out-of-the-box becuase it doesn’t handle the corrupt date fields. No matter. My app is a total hack, but since I only need to use it once-in-a-great-while, it’s no big deal.

For TechEd, we got a big banner to hang in the lunch room to advertise Architecture Center. When we got it back, we hung it in the atrium of building 18 – our new home. Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? In the pic, from left to right, are my boss Adam Denning, yours truly (in desperate need of a haircut) and John deVadoss. Massive thanks to Richard and Megan who got the banner hung in the first place.

We just published a white paper about the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table. Basically, this is a table for categorizing architectural artifacts such as patterns. It owes a great deal to Zachman, but really builds out the concepts of roles and viewpoints. In addition to the white paper, you can get a PDF of the table itself.

What’s ultra-cool about this table is that it’s what the p&p group uses internally. The white paper maps every pattern MSFT has published into the table. You can also see the EASOT viewpoints in action in the Project Notebook section of Integration Patterns. When I saw a print of the table hanging on the wall in p&p’s building, I knew I wanted to see it published online. Love it or hate it, it’s real.

What do you think? Obviously, we’re planning on building on EASOT going forward. Is this useful? Valuable?