I went to a brownbag today on Atlas, though since it was at 10am there was no one eating lunch or any brownbags to be seen. As cool as the Atlas project is, the coolest thing is that when I asked where their internal web site was, Johnathan said they didn’t have one – just the public http://atlas.asp.net/ site. How about that for transparency! More of that, please!

As part of the new job, I’m involved in the planning a workshop called SPARK, which Dion Hinchcliffe blogged about this morning. (Dion also writes a blog here - bringing the total to three - so I created a combined feed just to keep track of all the places he writes). My new boss Mike also mentioned SPARK this morning. In the hopes of sparking futher interest (pun intended), here’s the overview of SPARK:

SPARK is the first in a series of high-level forums hosted by Microsoft that use a workshop setting to examine “the issues that matter most” in the practice of strategic architecture and produce guidance for the industry as a whole.

Today, new social movements, advances in technology, and forces within business are overlapping to create a landscape glutted with challenges and opportunities. In many cases, these forces have driven the deployment of new technologies and the adoption of new behaviors, adding multiple layers to an already complex set of issues that must be navigated. Architects are searching for a solution that helps manage this complexity.

SOA, Software as a Service, Web 2.0, and Edge are all elements of the solution, but are they the complete picture? Are they a sufficient answer to the issues?  Can they be used together in a productive and efficient fashion? What matters most?

I have been so focused on Web 2.0 stuff that I’ve been reading a bunch of new blogs and disregarding the old ones I used to read. So I didn’t realize until today that the DSL Tools team released a new drop last week. According to Gareth, the highlights include:

• Integration into the Visual Studio SDK. According to the site, they are shooting for an April release for v2 of the VS2005 SDK, so does that mean the DSL Tools will be done in April?
• Single file format and complete visual designer for all aspects of a DSL. I’m guessing this mean we no longer have to edit the designer definition by hand. That’s a good thing. But I liked the seperation of domain model and designer, so I’ll be interested to see how I like what they’ve built.
• Domain-specifiic model serialization. This is huge – previously, the domain model dictated the XML serialization format. Now, if you can customize this, you can provide a clean model syntax and even possibly read in other syntaxes as well
• Port Shapes and a revised modeling API

Update: Apparently, I can’t read. Only the VS SDK integration is done in this build. improvements to the file format and model serialization will be in the next drop.

It’s been a long time since I cared who won the Super Bowl. But I’ve got to give it up for my adopted home team. Go Hawks!

Update: 😦

When I wrote yesterday about the Browser as VM, I made the point that extensibility is difficult as we have four major browsers and multiple OSes to deal with. What Web 2.0 company is going to be willing to bet on a proprietary extension implemented in only one of those combinations? Not many if any I would guess. However, there is one option that works across all those browsers and OSes: Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash Player.

Unlike the browser, where AJAX is a relatively new idea, Flash has been positioning itself as a platform for nearly four years. Instead of AJAX, Macromedia coined the term Rich Internet Application or RIA. RIAs share a lot in common with AJAX in that they are downloaded on demand, execute arbitrary script code and can retrieve data across the network. But the most interesting commonality that Flash has with the browser is that runs across multiple browsers and OSes.

In platform portability, Flash has succeeded where Java failed. I haven’t done enough research to know exactly why yet, but I suspect that it’s because Java tried to be a complete portable environment on day one where Flash focused on specific functionality that weren’t possible any other way – so called “skip intros” – and grew up from there. In other words, Java tried the top-down approach and Flash tried the bottom-up approach. I’m not surprised bottom-up worked and top-down crashed and burned.

While the modern browser has evolved to make it a capable platform, it still lacks some capabilities that Flash has. Most notably support for rich media. Thus, sites like Pandora, Google Video and MTV Overdrive need the capabilities provided by Flash.

While it’s hard to imagine enhancements to the browser due to the difficulties across four browsers and multiple OSes, improvements to Flash are easy to imagine. According to Macromedia, Flash has 98% penetration. Even more impressive is that Flash reaches 80% penetration with new versions of the player within 12 months.

Check out this post from Kevin Lynch for more on Flash for Web 2.0 companies. So far, the only Web 2.0 company I know about (which is to say I’m sure there are more out there) is Goowy. Which ones am I missing?