Gareth Jones is another blogger from the VS modeling team. He’s got some great posts on using OneNote as a shared whiteboard and the use of color-coding in modeling. Given the fact that a popular use of modelling today is for sketching, it’s interesting to read about how the team is looking at bringing those idioms forward while also making the models precice enough to be used as development artifacts.

BTW, no problem on the image “borrowing” Gareth. 😄

Last week, Microsoft announced the new Movies channel for SPOT Watches. I blogged a while ago about wanting movie times on my SmartPhone. On my watch is nearly as good, except that I don’t have said watch. I’ve been thinking about getting a SPOT watch, but I’m curious – why can’t I get MSN Direct content delivered to my device of choice? I’d be happy to pay a service fee – I’ve just gotten used to not wearing a watch.

We’ve had some technical difficulties around here. Tom installed ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 1 on this box and it automatically upgraded all the web apps on the machine to the new version. It caused a bunch of issues including breaking the admin interface and requiring a reboot every few hours. I spent some time this afternoon getting all the web apps back on ASP.NET 1.1. I uninstalled all of the beta bits, but it still didn’t work – I needed to use the aspnet_regiis utility to completely uninstall the IIS registration and then reinstall. I get the feeling that I could have left the beta bits hanging installed and just used aspnet_regiis to reset the registration, but better safe than sorry.

Anyway, since I couldn’t log in, I obviously couldn’t blog. I keep an Outlook task folder of “Shit to Blog” that’s gathered a few items, so I’m looking forward to getting those posted.

We announced it last week, but the DSL Tools home page just went live today. The big thing is the Microsoft Tools for Domain Specific Languages Technology Preview. There’s also a walkthru of the tool, a newsgroup and Jochen’s blog. We also published the third article in the Software Factories overview series.

The DSL Tools is the first in a collection of “workshop” projects that relate to Team System. These projects will be run as transparently as is feasible, so watch that site to be pretty dynamic as we post things like specs and lots of interim builds. Scoble has talked in the past of transparent projects, this I think will be a much more transparent project than we’ve done in the past.

(BTW, if you want to try out the DSL Tools, you need VS2005 Beta 1 as well as the VSIP SDK 2005 Beta 1)

While I’ve started my self-imposed temporary media blackout, I had to make one last post after discussing the election with my parents. Apparently, someone on the news had said that the Democratic party had lost touch with the American people. Frankly, that bullshit – the exit polls tell a very different story.

First off, Bush didn’t win in a landslide – he won the popular vote by just over 3.5 million votes which translates into a safe-but-still-narrow 3.1% victory margin. In comparison, Clinton won the first time with a 5.5% margin and the second time by 8%. Furthermore, according to the national exit poll, Kerry won both the liberal and moderate vote. The election swung to Bush becuase of the high percentage (34%) of conservative voters. I’d love to compare those percentages to actual population ideology distribution, but I have no idea what those actualy distribution numbers are. Interestingly enough, the 1996 exit polls had an almost identical heavily-conservative ideological distribution and Clinton still won easily.

Kerry lost because he’s had no connection with the conservative voters of the south and mid-west. He stengthed the democratic lead among liberals by five points and among moderates by one point over the 2000 exit polls (mostly due to the Nader non-factor this year) and yet still lost because Bush improved both the republican lead among conservatives and the conservative voter turnout by 5 points each.

You can safely say that the Democrats lost touch with conservatives in America this year, and that it cost them the election. But to say that Democrats have lost touch with America as a whole is simply not true. This electorate doesn’t look that much different than the ones that elected Clinton to two terms.