Recently, I learned that a friend of mine from high school took his own life. I hadn’t spoke to him in nearly a decade, but it was still a shock and very saddening.

There’s a memorial for him this weekend in Northern Virginia, but there’s no way I can make time to go back east for it. There will be a large number of old friends there, many of whom I haven’t seen or spoken to much since high school. It further adds to my sadness that it took the death of a friend for me to both realize the need and have the opportunity to reconnect with so many old friends.

About fourteen months ago, David Trowbridge of patterns & practices introduced me to a guy working in their testing group named Larry Brader. David is one of the primary authors of p&p’s Enterprise Solution Patterns and Integration Patterns books. I wanted to talk to David about building a pattern repository and he handed me off to Larry. Little did I know that Larry is an information theorist and was one of the key authors of Testing Software Patterns. Frankly, when Larry gets rolling on info theory, I only understood a fraction of what he’s saying. But the parts I do understand about how patterns relate to each other blows my mind.

Then p&p hired this guy…what’s his name?…Oh yeah, Ward Cunningham. I hear he knows a bit about pattern repositories. 😄

Anyway, around this time last year I was having regular meetings with Larry and Ward to talk about this repository stuff. Then stuff got crazy on my end – primarily being the acting marketing director for my team as well as the ARC track owner for last years TechEd. The regular meetings became more irregular and then stopped altogether. That is to say, my involvement stopped – Ward, Larry et.al. kept forging ahead. I heard about how things were going from time to time, but that was the extent of my involvement.

Last summer, Larry, Ward and David (plus others I’ve never met) published an article called Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space. (They also did a webcast on the topic.) In it, they laid out a way of thinking about how patterns relate to each other and they introduced the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table (EASOT for short). That was just the first step. PatternShare is next one.

PatternShare is a community site that brings together the patterns from popular authors – Fowler, Evans, Hohpe & Wolfe, GoF, POSA and p&p - into a single repository. Furthermore, it provides a dynamically generated EASOT showing all the patterns in the repository and how they relate to each other. Finally, it provides a way to add new patterns to the repository so that they show up in the EASOT.

Major congrats to Ward, Larry, David and the rest of the p&p folks for pulling this off. I can’t wait to see where the site goes from here.

I recently had to repave my main machine. Among other things I installed MSN Premium which I use to manage my hotmail and DevHawk emails. However, this time I installed the Outlook Connector for MSN, which enables you to use Outlook 2002 or later to manage your hotmail account. Calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, everything. Very very cool. Now, there’s no need to install the MSN Premium client at all…or is there?

The coolest feature of the Outlook Connector is that it delivers all of my personal hotmail to a totally different top level folder inside Outlook. Does anyone know how to do that for POP3 mailboxes? I tried using Outlook to manage my DevHawk email, but then all that mail gets mingled together with my work email. I want the exact same experience for my DevHawk email inside Outlook as I get for my hotmail. However, it appears that while you can have multiple PSTs, you have to designate one as the new mail delivery location default for all accounts. I.e. it doesn’t appear that you can configure this on a per-account basis. I’m guessing the Outlook Connector is overriding this for my hotmail.

Anyone have any ideas on how to deliver email from two different accounts to two different locations? (Other than the obvious “use rules” – I had issues with that approach.)

Tanya, my cohort on the Architecture Strategy Marketing team, has finally – after much promising and subsequent delays – starter her blog. So far, just she’s just written a hello world post where she explains why she named her blog “Wabi-Sabi”.

Of course, long time readers are probably wondering: “Did he just say ‘Marketing team’?”

Yes. Yes I did.

About two weeks ago, I was re-orged to be reporting to Norman. While you might expect me to be displeased about this, I’m really ok with it. First off, I was acting as the marketing director for about six months, so the fact that we now have three people doing marketing instead of just me is a huge bonus. Secondly, while I was acting as the marketing director (badly I might add) I was in total firefighting mode – no opportunity to do advance planning whatsoever. Now, I have the opportunity to focus on doing a great job on a few things well (like the TechEd Architecture track) rather than doing just enough to keep a ton of things from completely falling apart. It’s taken a while to shift gears, but now I spend more time doing and less time running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

Finally, my move to the marketing team is inherently temporary. Yeah, it’s fun while it lasts and I’m learning a ton, but don’t think this is a long term career change. Before it even happened, Adam (head of Architecture Strategy) explained that he expects me to be over on the architecture side of the house “soon”. Norman and I have already started planning that transition.

So get your “marketing slime” digs in while you can! (Apparently, we marketing slime prefer the term “marketing flacks”.)

One of the reasons blogging has been a little light around here recently is because I was prepping for the TechEd Session Triage. Basically, all the track owners figure out what sessions they want on their own then come together for an entire afternoon to present their sessions to each other. Turns out there is often overlap with other sessions in other tracks that need to be worked out, suggesting changes to titles and abstracts and other wise cutting up. For example. I’m sitting next to Becky who owns the Connected Systems Infrastructure track. We had several sessions in both the CSI and ARC tracks that have caused changes and cuts. We actually got the ARC, CSI and DEV tracks got together earlier this week for a “pre-iage” which means today went pretty smooth for the ARC track. Not that it felt like things were going to go smooth running around this morning. Typically, the last 24 hours before triage are a flurry of emails with last minute suggestions. This year – no exception. But now, at least it’s done.