I’m not sure what a “Preliminary Beta” is but QIT has released a one for their Ruby.NET compiler. They expect to achieve “full semantic compatibility” (can you tell this is an acidemic project?) by the end of the year. Thanks to David Ing for the link.

They claim to “pass all 871 tests in the samples/test.rb installation test suite of Ruby 1.8.2.” which seems odd since later they say “We have a plan for how to deal with continuations but we have not yet implemented them.” Doesn’t the Ruby test suite test continuations? I wish they would provide more details on this plan, continuations might not be the most interesting thing in Ruby, but it’s up there and it’s probably the hardest thing to implement on top of the CLR.

BTW, there are two other projects @ QIT that Ruby.NET leverages that look interesting. The Gardens Point Parser Generator is essentially a YACC clone written in C# and making extensive use of generics. Personally, I’m more interested in Parsing Expression Grammars, but there’s no C# implementation as of yet. QIT also has a library for reading and writing program executable files (i.e. EXEs and DLLs).

As a quick aside, I’m getting pretty tired of all the different euphemisms for “alpha”. In the age of perpetual beta, isn’t alpha the new beta? But everyone seems worried about calling their releases alpha as if it means “it might not cause your machine to explode, if you could actually get it to compile”. So we end up with things like “Preliminary Beta” and “Community Tech Preview”. We all KNOW what these terms mean, so lets just call an alpha and alpha, shall we?

Last weekend, I finally got around to picking up an Xbox 360. Things have been a little busy this week so I haven’t had a ton of time to play it. I bought Oblivion and Kameo, but have spent most of my time playing Xbox Live Arcade. Seems sort of stupid to shell out $400 to play Hexic and UNO, but it actually a compelling experience for a number of reasons. First off, they’re games you can play for 10-15 minutes at a time. Playing Oblivion for 15 minutes is pointless, but it’s perfect for a Live Arcade game. With two kids, 15 minutes of play time is much more common than 2 hours. Second, you don’t have to get up to put in a game disc. Sure it’s lazy, but aren’t we all lazy sometimes? Third, I can play them in front of my kids. Fourth, they’re cheap and easy to download on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Marketplace is a thing of genius. My son Patrick’s favorite is the Cars movie trailer in HD. Being able to download demos is awesome, rather than keeping track of the discs that come with OXM. For example, I’ve downloaded every racing game demo there is so Patrick can play them. He hasn’t got the hang of it yet (he is only three) but since it’s a demo it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care that he keeps racing the same car on the same track. (He did see the new Cars game at Blockbuster the other day, but it’s for the original Xbox and not on the back compat list.)

Finally, the ability to play music and look at pictures from a standard XP machine is pretty cool. The User Experience for lots of photos and music isn’t great, but the end result is worth it. My wife quipped “I could watch this all night” as we looked at a slide show of photos we’ve taken over the past three years while listening to some of custom tunes. I don’t have a Media Center as I’ve been waiting for HD cable support. However, I know the MCE experience for navigating thousands of songs and photos is much better than Xbox 360’s, so I might make the switch early. Plus, I would also get support for remote video viewing – something Xbox 360 doesn’t support for reasons that escape me.

All in all, I’m really digging the Xbox 360. Only downside is not enough time to play.

This is even bigger than Scoble leaving, much less me moving to a new role.

Microsoft Announces Plans for July 2008 Transition for Bill Gates

Microsoft Corp. today announced that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.

The company announced that Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume the title of chief software architect and begin working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities, to ensure a smooth transition. Similarly, Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie will immediately take the new title of chief research and strategy officer and will work closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company’s research and incubation efforts; Mundie also will partner with general counsel Brad Smith to guide Microsoft’s intellectual property and technology policy efforts.

Wow.

It’s not the biggest job change news this week (or the day), but after three years on Architecture Strategy and six years total as an evangelist, I’m moving on to a new role. After six years, I decided it was time for me to put my money where my mouth is as well as get my hands dirty building something more substantial than buzz.

I’ll be moving over into Microsoft’s IT division as a member of the Integration Center of Excellence Architecture Team. Integration, as you might guess, is a euphemism here for service-orientation. My team is tasked with architecting and delivering the shared service-oriented infrastructure for four of the biggest projects Microsoft IT will be delivering in the next year. Last time I changed jobs, I lamented that “With each job I take at MSFT, coding seems to become less a part of the job description.” Happily, this is NOT the case this time.

About a year ago, Microsoft hired Stuart Scott to run the business apps side of IT as one of our two CIOs (our other CIO Ron Markezich oversees the IT infrastructure). Stuart was kind enough to spend about an hour with me last week explaining his vision for how he sees MSIT evolving under his leadership. Here’s what he said in a recent interview:

PressPass: How do you see Microsoft IT evolving?

Scott: There is a broader role for IT to play at the front end of the development of products and services. Our IT organization knows a lot about the challenges that other IT organizations face because we build and maintain the IT backbone of a massive worldwide enterprise. IT must become future-thought leaders in the development of the product roadmap for our enterprise products.

By using our internal applications and experiences to build better products for our enterprise customers, we have the potential to solve the challenges that other IT organizations face. We’re heavily involved in dogfooding our products once they’ve been developed, but we also see a role closer to the front end of the product development cycle. Business Intelligence is one area where we will be partnering with the product groups and Finance as we build out our internal capability. I want to ensure that any product we develop to meet the needs of Microsoft, also meets the needs of the marketplace.

He was also very frank about the current state of affairs in MSIT relative to the vision. He was quoted in China Information World (no link, sorry) as saying that “The systems Microsoft now uses are already 14 years old and based on previous versions of windows, so from a systems capability perspective, they cannot support the needs of the growing business.”

All in all, I was pretty impressed with what he’s setting out to do and the opportunity not only from a business perspective from from an industry perspective as well. Hence the whole “going to work in his division” thing. Of course, “Thought Leadership” is one of the things Architecture Strategy works on very diligently, so in some ways this isn’t as big a change as it might be. On the other hand, giving advice to people solving hard problems is a lot different than solving those hard problems yourself.

I’ll be starting this new role pretty much immediately, so expect the less-than-usual blogging to continue for the time being. But my external visibility on my blog and presenting at conferences and executive briefings is one of the things they hired me for. So after I get my bearings things should be back to normal. At that point, I’ll hopefully be able to talk in more specific terms about what we’re tackling on my new team. I hope to shake things up quite a bit over there and deliver the play by play here on my blog.

Massive thanks to John deVadoss and the rest of the Architecture Strategy Team. Back when I started, I think Simon Guest was the only other blogger on the team. Now there are only three non-bloggers on the whole team. It’s been a great three years and I’ve been a part of so many great accomplishments:

• Making Microsoft the first (I think!) global sponsor for the International Association of Software Architects
• Delivering the CRM Integration for Outlook Sample Application
• Launching the Solution Architect and Infrastructure Architect MVP programs
• Delivering the first-ever Architecture Track at Tech-Ed 2004
• Taking Arvindra’s amazing JOURNALThe Architecture Journal worldwide
• Launching the Architecture Resource Center and the MSDN Solution Architecture Center websites
• Presenting at PDC, worldwide Tech-Eds, p&p Summits and a host of other events
• Meeting tons of customers in user group meetings, at executive briefings and in architecture design sessions

I always joke that if I ever left Microsoft, I wouldn’t want to go work for another technical company. Now, I get the chance to go affect the business of a Fortune 50 business while not having to leave Microsoft. Pretty sweet.

See you on the other side.

I typically don’t search Technorati for incoming links because a significant number of the links to my blog come from my inclusion on dasBlog’s default blogroll. For example, “Dutch Railways Suck” doesn’t appear to have anything to do with architecture, development or hockey, but they still link to me. However, in checking out Technorati today, I discovered several blogs were linking to me that were out of the ordinary to say the least. Turns out that this picture I took on my trip to Australia two years ago is the number one result when searching both Windows Live Image Search and Google Image Search.

I’m guessing that’s why this picture shows up on the blog of woman trying to reverse the trends of feminism, a guy who despises Sydney, a couple of french blogs that I can’t read and two german blogs – one I can’t read and one that I can.