• Yesterday’s morning coffee was canceled on account of going to main campus and hanging out with the Architect MVPs. I spent all morning + dinner with them yesterday. Some of these guys I hadn’t seen in nearly two years, so it was a ton of fun.
• Nicolas Allen (aka Dr. Nick) is looking for SQL Service Broker users. I cornered him at the MVP dinner last night and gave him my thoughts on WCF + SSB. You can head over to his blog and do the same. (I’ll post my answers to his questions later today, hopefully)
• The new Vista x64 driver for my workstation’s video card does support monior rotation, so I’m mostly XP free at this point. I’m dual-booting my workstation at this point, while I finish configuring stuff in the Vista partition. With both my workstation and work laptop tablet, I’m XP free at work. Next, I start getting home machines moved over.
• Tom Hollander reports on a new drop of the Guidance Automation Toolkit. Mostly bug fixes like Vista support, but the full list is here. It’s an ugly upgrade process. You have to uninstall all existing guidance packages. I can’t wait until this technology is “integrate[d] … more deeply into Visual Studio and Team System”.
• I mentioned the Podcast Authoring tool that I saw at TechFest last week. Herearesome pictures of it from engadget (via Loke Uei Tan)
• I’ve been thinking of getting a Wii, and the fact I can hack code for it – managed code for managed snobs no less – is just another good reason to do it. (via DotNetKicks)

• I got my Tecra M4 back sans flaky motherboard. That’s my full time laptop now – it’s nice to have a laptop that supports Vista. I’m still running XP on my desktop out of a combination of lack of video driver + laziness. I run dual monitor with my primary monitor rotated to be portrait instead of landscape. Easier to read websites and documents that way. Unfortunately, while there’s a generic WDDM driver for my video card’s chipset, it doesn’t support the rotate function. But according to the Dell support site, they released a new driver for my card a few weeks ago so maybe it’s time to try the upgrade again.
• I sat down to watch Heroes last night, forgetting that it’s not on again until April. Watched 24 instead, but it has really jumped the shark.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on new Orcas language features, this time covering extension methods. On the one hand, it’s pure syntactic sugar. On the other, how sweet it is. It’s kinda surprising that no other mainstream language has done this before.
• Scott Hansleman is a self-described managed code snob. What do you call the opposite of a managed code snob? An unmanaged code snob or a managed code bigot?

• This week is the MVP summit. Hopefully, I’ll make it over there and see the Architect MVPs. Otherwise, things seem sort of quiet in the Microsoft wing of the blogoshphere.
• Saw 300 yesterday on a relatively rare day out with just Jules. Really enjoyed it.
• Nick Malik describes what goes into an enterprise platform roadmap.
• Joe McKendrick recaps a vendor SOA suites podcast. With SOA, you can revisit your platform decision on a project by project basis which allows you to avoid the dreaded “vendor lock-in”. But supporting lots of platforms is an operational nightmare, so maybe lock-in isn’t as bad as it sounds.

Ever since I got back from vacation, it’s been all about the Morning Coffee. I’m happy to be getting a daily post out, but I haven’t written anything deep in several weeks now. My one non-MC post in the past two weeks was The Virtuous Cycle of Virtual Platforms which frankly I wrote over a year ago for internal usage and adapted for my blog after reading Dare’s post.

One of the reasons for my lack of “deep” posting recently is post vacation re-engagement. Also, things at work that I can’t blog about (yet) have been taking my attention. But I worry that this daily MC post is causing me to focus on “shallow” blog topics. Since I’m trying to average a post per day, that means at least two non-MC posts every week. Of course, more than two non-MC posts a week would be just fine.

• On the XNA Team Blog, Michael Klucher announces the XNA Game Studio Express Update is coming in April. Among the new features are Vista compatibility, 3D audio, bitmap fonts, game icons and most interesting the sharing of compiled XNA games. Currently, the only way to share something you build with XNA with the community is by sharing the source code, which is less than optimal. For more, check out the XNA GSE Overview presentation by Mitch Walker from GDC.
• Speaking of gaming consoles, Sony’s “big” announcement is a Second Life clone? Kotaku thinks “this is going to be one of those features that people didn’t realize that wanted until they get it.” Personally, I doubt that very much, but what do I know about game consoles? I just play, man.
• Jafar Husain suggests a way to do Ruby symbols in C# 3.0. Sort of. He defines an extension method that returns the name of the property defined in a lambda function. On the plus side, it’s strongly typed. On the minus side, this.GetPropertySymbol(o =\> o.Name) isn’t as easy to type as :Name. (via DotNetKicks)
• While pseudo-symbol support is fairly verbose, Scott Guthrie goes thru some of the new language features for terser syntax: automatic properties, object initializes and collection initializes. While I like object and collection initializes, I’m not really sold on automatic properties. Personally, I like the VS prop snippet approach, where you automate the creation of the property once time when it’s authored rather than leaving the shortcut syntax in the code in perpetuity.

As promised, I spent about half of yesterday at TechFest. Ran into some folks I knew, met some new folks, the usual social networking stew of these sorts of events. Here’s some of the stuff I saw. Much of the stuff I saw wasn’t public, but everything below has either a public MSR page or a brief description on the TechFest demo page.

• SecPAL – easily the most work-applicable demo I saw. SecPAL stands for “Security Policy Assertion Language”. It’s a language for expressing distributed authorization policies. We’re looking at authorization policies in the next phase of my MSIT project, so this was very timely.
• 3D Video - Take a garden variety video shot with a camcorder and add computer generated 3D objects into the scene automatically. I actually saw this last year, but this year they’ve added automatic occlusion. In other words, it automatically calculates when a real-world object passes in front of the computer generated object and renders accordingly. Check out this video. This would be great for creating synthetic characters Jar-Jar Binks style (though hopefully less annoying)
• Boku: Lightweight Programming for Kids – Sort of like LOGO, except beautifully rendered 3D, running on the Xbox 360 and programmed using an Xbox 360 game controller. Patrick’s not quite ready for this – Riley even less so - but I’ll be keeping an eye on this.
• F# – nothing really new here, but I got to meet Don Syme in person.
• Telescopic Pixel - Sort of like an LED screen but using significantly less energy efficient and faster.
• Podcast Authoring using Speech Recognition – Instead of the standard waveform view of recorded audio, this app feeds the spoken words thru the Microsoft speech recognition engine and allows the user to crop the audio simply by selecting words. Not mind blowing technology like some of the other stuff I saw, but certainly an interesting combination of technologies.
• Smart Workflow Foundation - Adding constraint solving capabilities to WF. Must noodle on this.