COmega (otherwise known as Cw since most people don’t have an omega key on their keyboard) is on a long list of stuff for me to look at. But instead of actually coding with it, so far I can just read Steve Maine’s blog. He’s got interesting posts on syncronization and streams, the two big features of Cw over C# (come to think of it, we use the “#” symbol as most people don’t have an actual sharp key on their keyboard). I also learned from Steve that Cw comes with basic VS integration – you get project support, syntax highlighting and some Intellisense. Now I just need a few extra hours in the day.

Actually, I don’t think he’s “officially” part of the team ’til next week, but Josh Lee has already started a blog about his new job on the Architecture Strategy team. Josh is “The FinServ Guy”, and is a member of the IFX Forum Board of Directors. Nothing really meaty on his blog yet, just a Hello World post, but I hear great things about him.

Speaking of the Architecture Strategy team, I finally took 5 minutes to term serv into the machine that hosts DevHawk to update the theme. I keep mentioning the Architecture Strategy extended team OPML file, but I wanted to add a blogroll to the site theme. Now, I have a Team Blogroll on the left hand side of my website featuring all of my blogging teammates as well as all the blogging architect evangelists. Enjoy.

Watching the Olympics I’ve seen ads for AT&T’s CallVantage, a VOIP service similar to Vonage and Lingo (any others?). All three have the basics – Unlimited calling to US & Canada, voicemail, call waiting/forwarding, 911 support, caller ID & 3-way calling. However, each has a feature or two that the others don’t. AT&T has Do Not Disturb (no big deal) and Personal Conferencing up to nine people (wow!). Vonage has a soft phone (i.e. an app that acts like a phone so you can call and receive calls while on the road). Lingo is the cheapest ($20 a month + 3 free months) and Western Europe is included in the unlimited free calling area (hello brother-in-law from Germany). I’m leaning towards Lingo as I don’t need personal conferencing (I organize groups of people outside my immediate family with email) and when I travel with my family, I don’t really spend much time online so the soft phone is of limited use. One issue – checking out Broadband Reports VOIP reviews, Lingo sounds like it’s got really awful tech support. But, with three months free, I’m hoping I can try it out and cancel it if it’s a problem.

Update: I called Lingo and they confirmed they have an activation fee as well as a 30 day cancellation policy. So while the first three months are free, you pay $10 S&H and $30 to activate. If you cancel the service in the first 30 days, you can get your $30 back. And there is no service contract, so you can cancel anytime (not sure if the other services require a contract or not).

I’m setting up a new SQL 2005 / VS 2005 VPC. While I’m pretty excited about SQL Express, I want to experiment with some of the features in the full product so I’m installing Express’s big brother. However, there must be some weird issue w/ VPC’s shared folders feature – the setup support files fail to install. If I connect to my host across the virtual network to the loopback adapter then the install works fine. As I said, weird.

On a related note, anyone know a good, simple, free/cheap DHCP server for XP? The one issue w/ using the loopback adapter is that you either hardcode network addresses or use the “Automatic Private Address” (i.e. the 169.254.*.* address). The auto private address works fine, except that it takes a while for the DHCP to time out before assigning the private address. Plus, in XP SP2, there’s an annoying tray icon that pops up to tell you that the loopback adapter failed to get a DHCP address. If I had a DHCP server for the virtual network hanging off the loopback adapter, then I could avoid all that timeout and annoying pop up tray icon stuff.

We keep getting more and more field architects and architecture strategy team members blogging. Remember, I keep a list (I am becoming the Scoble of Microsoft Architecture). Anna Liu is a field architect evangelist who presented at TechEd Australia (but we didn’t get a chance to hang out). Anna’s also been thinking about software development as an engineering discipline.

In addition to Anna, two of my teammates are blogging: Chris Keyser and Dave Welsh. Chris is a solution architect who’s doing some awesome next gen SOA work. He’s been bloggingabout using WSE2 to manage Security Context Tokens. Chris, like John deVadoss (who has relapsed into silence), is very pragmatic so it’s great to run radical ideas past him.

Earlier this year, our team “inherited” a group of awesome vertical architects – I’ve blogged about John Evdemon before who’s from that group. Dave is also from that group. Like many of our vertical architects, Dave is heavily involved in standards bodies – in Dave’s case it’s UN/CEFACT. He’s got an great article on how Standards Development Organizations traditionally work and another on how MSFT (and our specification partners) is improving on that process. He’s shining a light on the dark corners of the standard process, which is a good thing since so many people act like standards are a silver bullet solution. I love Dave’s description of the traditional standards process:

[L]aunch a committee, politically pick a chair, generate lots of hype and expectation on how this spec will solve world hunger, stack the new committee with people who may be able to contribute, host conference calls and arm wrestle the original idea down to some compromise that seems to make sense, then hope someone’s got a number of free weekends over to write up a draft of the new spec.

You want an example of the results of a traditional standards process? How about XSD? I think XSD is the ugliest widely-used spec around.  Don agrees, according to his comments from last years SellsCon:

Nothing illustrates [the cost of standardization] more than XML schema. XML schema is the quintessential example of what happens with a design by standards body specification. Rather than taking something that worked and something that was done and that there was experience with and effectively dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s you had two from every company off doing wanton innovation and invention without implementation experience. It was a train wreck in the making, especially when you consider the fact that you had people who vehemently disagreed about what they were building. Some people thought they were bringing object orientation to XML. Some people thought they were bringing database schema concepts to XML. Some people thought they were just, you know, reliving the SGML dream. So what do we get? We get a Frankenstein’s monster that is dumber than the dumbest person in the committee. No one person on that committee could have produced something this bad. It took an army of people to work hard day and night to build something that is not good. It’s not terrible – can we make it work? Yes. But it’s going to take a lot of work from a lot of plumbers and a lot of tool vendors to make XML schema palatable to the average developer.

A great example of the opposite approach is RELAX NG. It is widely believed at this point in time that RELAX NG is a better schema language for XML than XML schema. Why? Because two guys who were really smart said why don’t we go do this and let’s get it working and let’s build it while we do it and let’s iterate it and see what works and what doesn’t work. And then when we’re done we will take it to the rubber stamp – I’m sorry, Oasis – where they will carefully vet every decision and bless it and give it UN status.

I’m with Don and Tim: I want RelaxNG. More importantly, I want standards that are built like WS-* and RelaxNG.