Morning Coffee 25

  • I’m surprised we haven’t seen a laptop with a flash memory hard drive yet. Given the significant power, heat and performance advantage of flash memory over hard drives, I would have expected the laptop companies to have high-end laptops with flash memory hard drives by now. I’m probably getting a new laptop in the next six months, but I’d hold out until the end of the year if it meant being able to get one with a flash memory hard drive.
  • I wrote last month that “The next new language I learn will be F#“. I was wrong. It’s PowerShell.
  • I’ve been listening to Scott gush about CodeRush for years now. His post yesterday about the new free version of Refactor! for ASP.NET finally kicked me into action. I installed the CodeRush trial and will be commence bugging my boss to buy it.
  • Looks like big news brewing in the online identity space.
  • Dale is talking about service heartbeats. I’m pretty stoked that Dale is now spending 100% of his work time (when he’s not blogging about sports, politics or video games anyway) with me building service oriented infrastructure for MSIT.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on February 6, 2007. It was posted in Architecture and Morning Coffee. It was tagged SOA.

Morning Coffee 24

  • Congrats to the Colts on winning the ugliest Super Bowl ever. Pouring rain, eight turnovers, missed PAT and field goal and the opening kickoff TD return. Ugly, but fun to watch.
  • Now that we’ve had our first poor-weather Super Bowl, I think it’s time to start rotating through cities that have never gotten it due to expected weather conditions. Obviously, I’d like to see a Super Bowl at Qwest Field. But most of all, I would love to see the Super Bowl played in Green Bay on the “frozen tundra” of Lambeau Field.
  • Was it just me, or did the Super Bowl ads suck this year?
  • There’s a sweet looking pinball game coming to XBLA. I love pinball, so unless it completely stinks I’ll be buying it.
  • I commented on the Windows Live SDK last week, but I missed the Windows Live ID Client SDK alpha release. It looks like you can use this SDK to build desktop applications that use Windows Live ID for authentication. Fairly cool, but does it work with non WL services? (via Dare Obasanjo)
  • I saw this post on the home page of DotNetKicks today. It claims that locating the ASP.NET App_Data directory by calling AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetData(“DataDirectory”) is a “dirty hack”. I left a comment on the original post, but I wonder if the correct information will ever make it’s way back to DNK?
  • Architecture Comix? Yep, on Skyscrapr, an architect community site run by my old team. Sorta funny, but I’m guessing Scott Adams isn’t worried about the competition yet.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on February 5, 2007. It was posted in Morning Coffee and Sports. It was tagged Community and Windows Live.

Morning Coffee 23

  • My Binding Across States post made it to the home page of DotNetKicks, so at last six other people liked it. I wonder if I’ll be able to detect and traffic increase from that.
  • I wrote yesterday that I had ordered a PCMCIA Smart Card reader for my laptop. I ordered it around 11:30pm on Wednesday and it arrived yesterday around 2pm.That’s good service! And so much more convenient than the USB smart card reader.
  • I also mentioned yesterday that I had moved my laptop over to Vista. I’m not sure why, but my battery life has gotten significantly better. Maybe it’s because these days I’m primarily using my laptop to remote into my desktop so I’m not exercising the local system much.
  • I was checking out Windows PowerShell Quick Reference from O’Reilly (on Safari) and discovered this PS offers the numeric constants of gb, mb, and kb to represent gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes. Example: $downloadTime = (1gb + 250mb) / 120kb. That’s pretty cool.
  • Speaking of PS, I stumbled across PowerSMO! from Dan Sullivan. Instead of building native PS support for SQL administration, PowerSMO! makes it easy to access SMO objects in PS. Instead of having to call new-object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.ManagedComputer, you call goGet-SMO\_ManagedComputer. Even more interestingly, PowerSMO! uses metaprograming techniques to generate all the Get_SMO* methods. It iterates over all the SMO types – about 1000 types in total – and generates the associated Get-SMO functions into a temp script file. Once the temp file is created, it can be invoked like any other script. Must noodle on this approach further.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on February 2, 2007. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged PowerShell.

Morning Coffee 22

  • I figured out something to build with PowerShell. Not ready to spill all the beans yet, but I’ve started by building a provider for SQL Server. SQL already has the SQL Management Objects (SMO) library, so I can really focus on how PowerShell works rather than getting too bogged down in the logic of the provider. I’m sure someone else is working on something similar, but my primary goal with building this provider is to understand PowerShell. The codebase itself is a distant second in priority.
  • On the subject of missing LINQ’s, Alex James wants LINQ to Web. A good potential use for the Windows Live Search API.
  • I posted three recent blog posts to DotNetKicks yesterday, but I’ve only collected one additional kick so far (for my Compiling Workflows post). Looking at what does gather kicks, I think I would need to write a more dev focused article if I wanted to make the DNK home page.
  • Don Smith left a comment on my WSSF post where he talked about the developer and the architect perspective. He seemed surprised that I took the developer perspective. To quote David White: “Architect Must Implement”. The customization opportunity in guidance automation is huge, but the value is to the developer first. And while it’s a good start, it doesn’t go very far at automating the development experience. At heart, I guess I’m a developer even though my business card sez Architect (with a capital “A” these days no less).
  • I moved my laptop over to Vista yesterday. My workstation is still on XP, but that’s because I haven’t had time to completely rebuild my dev environment. No Aero support with the
  • I elbowed my way into the TS Gateway pilot at Microsoft and I’m loving it. TS Gateway is a new feature of Longhorn Server that “enables authorized remote users to connect to terminal servers and remote desktops on the corporate network from any Internet-connected device running Remote Desktop Connection 6.0.” So I can quickly and easily remote into my desktop from anywhere without establishing a VPC session. The only annoyance is my USB smart card reader, which is fine in a pinch but a pain to constantly have dangling off my laptop. However, my boss approved a PCMCIA smart card reader so soon that won’t be an issue.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on February 1, 2007. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged LINQ, PowerShell and WCF.

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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.