Morning Coffee 32

As 24 sputters, Lost hits it’s stride. Last nights episode rocked.
My old team keeps churning out great stuff. This time, it’s the new Composite Applications site.
In a follow up to a post from a couple of weeks ago, Joe McKendrick declares that “Rogue IT is Cool“. In the spirit of rogueness, maybe we get the Rogue Ale guys to whip up some IT themed beers? Service Oriented Stout? Architecture Ale? Programmer’s Porter? (you get the idea)
Scott Hanselman provides a detailed look at static analysis in general and NDepend in particular. I hereby coin the acronym YAGTSR, which stands for “Yet Another Great Tool Scott Recommends”.
Jeff Atwood thinks we should code smaller. He lists some positive aspects of small code (less bugs, less chance of failure, etc) and links to Bob Koss talking about the negative aspects of big code (harder to understand, harder to reuse, higher likelihood of duplication, etc). OK, I’m down, but where’s the how? I’ve got fairly radical ideas on this subject: regularly throw out your old code and start over. In movie making, there’s this idea that you have to “kill your babies“. Not literally of course, they’re talking about having the willingness to scrap your pet idea, favorite line, coolest shot, etc. for the sake of the bigger picture. I think the same goes for making software.

Morning Coffee 31

Architect MVP business news keeps on coming. Today it’s Corillian – the company Scott Hansleman works for – getting acquired by CheckFree.
Los Angeles is looking to provide city-wide low-cost (maybe free) wireless access. My father has often suggested that Internet access be treated like other utilities like water and power. Sounds like LA is heading down that path. I wonder if they’re looking at WiMAX?
The .NET Micro Framework – which powers the SPOT watch – now has an SDK. For those keeping track, that makes three embedded solution platforms from Microsoft, the Micro FX, Windows CE (which also just shipped a new version) and Windows XP Embedded. (via Larkware)
BEA’s Bruce Graham talks somewhat obtusely on a topic I am particularly passionate about: putting more power in business people’s hands to build their own systems. (via Joe McKendrick)
Register for the Windows Home Server beta. Also check out the forums, team blog and SuperSite Preview. Looks pretty sweet (via Scott Hansleman)
The final version of Live Search for Mobile was released a few days ago. This program rocks. I’m using the Windows Mobile version, but there’s also J2ME version as well. (via Dare Obasanjo)
Any lingering interest I had in Ruby vanished yesterday as got to chapter 8 of Windows Powershell in Action. Chapter 8 is called “ScriptBlocks and Objects” and it is specifically about meta-programming. After reading that chapter, PS seems more flexible in this space than Ruby, which is the current industry darling for metaprogramming. For example, in Ruby you can optionally pass a block of code to any method. In PS, you can define a ScriptBlock like any other parameter. That means you can tell from the method signature that the ScriptBlock is used. Or you can define a function that takes multiple ScriptBlock parameters. Much more thought on this is needed.

Morning Coffee 30

Wes clued me in that the CodeHTMLer WLWriter plugin does support using the convert whitespace option. The Dialog UI is awful, but if you select “Edit Languages” from the dropdown in the plugin UI, you can set the UsePreTag option to false. While it is an ugly UI (sorry, Wes) it does allow you a lot of control over how the languages render. Not only can you change the settings for an existing language, you can add your own custom language if you want.
David Ing has tuned his one man show Taglocity into Terazen Technology Inc. Not sure why Terazen is located in Vancouver, but maybe next time hops the pond for a visit to his new company’s headquarters, he might take a detour a few hours south and ramble on about architecture with a few old friends.
My excitement about the new season of 24 is waning quickly. Last night’s two hours episode had so many “oh, come on!” moments that it overwhelmed my ability to suspend belief.
If you want to dig in the Connected Services Sandbox, start with this description. I just saw this on Larkware this morning, so I haven’t had time to dig personally, but it does appear related to the Connected Services Framework. And apparently there’s a contest starting in a few weeks.

Morning Coffee 29

My friends at Manning sent me a copy of Windows PowerShell in Action. If you’re at all interested in PS, buy this book as soon as it comes out.
My colleague in MSIT Nick Malik wants to know the top 100 patterns every developer must know. I’d start with the ones from Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Jeff Atwood figures out how to wake up his computer from across the room. Money quote: “why get out of your chair and walk 20 feet when you can spend two hours figuring out how to do it without moving at all?”
Tomas Restrepo says that WCF is too configurable. But he doesn’t really mean it because later he says that while it’s “fantastic” that WCF has so many options to tweak, he wished those options were less “in my face”. I’ve reached a similar conclusion, so I’m with you 100% Tomas.
Scott explains how to rotate a video file. I have a whole collection of video clips taken with my wife’s digital camera where I shot portrait by mistake, so this is good to know.

Morning Coffee 28

From the “Ask and ye shall receive” department: A couple weeks ago I wondered how good or bad my Gamerscore conversion rate is. MyGamerCard.net just launched a completion leaderboard where they rank you on your Gamerscore times your completion rate.
Shane Courtrille pointed out that the prize you receive in from the Xbox Rewards program gets better if your Gamerscore is higher. With a meager 1090 points, I’m in level 1. But those with 10,000+ or more can get a copy of Fuzion Frenzy 2 for completing the challenge.
Yesterday, I complained that code in my RSS feed looks awful. It appears to be a problem with dasBlog. In validating the HTML is actually XHTML, it screws up the white space. Of course, usually that’s not a big deal, but inside a <pre> tag, it is. Until I get a chance to submit a patch to dasBlog to fix this, I’m using CodeHTMLer, which has a “convert white space” option that doesn’t use the <pre> tag at all. As a bonus, it even support PowerShell! Note, you have to use the website, not their WLWriter plugin, if you want the convert white space option.
There’s a new beta of Ruby.NET available. Now that I’ve moved on to PowerShell, I’m only slightly interested in Ruby these days. If I can figure out how to create internal DSLs with PS, what would I need Ruby for? (via Larkware)
My old team just shipped a single-instance multi-tenancy SaaS sample called LitwareHR. Details are on Gianpaolo’s blog, code is up on CodePlex.

Series

Disclaimer

The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion.