Has it been a slow week for everyone, or just me my first week back from vacation?

• I got email last night from Pat Helland – he’s re-taking the red pill. He starts in the developer division on Monday. He asked for my help getting is website up to date, so look for that in the near future. In the meantime, revisit some of Pat’s hits: Metropolis, Data on the Inside vs. Data on the Outside, The Nerd, the Suit, and the Fortune Teller and his greatest hit Mr. CIO Guy.
• The new 4.0 version of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK is out. Details on James’ vs.Eco blog.
• Next week is the Game Developers Conference. About a month ago, Dave Weller wrote that he had “been busy” and the XNA team blog has also been fairly silent. I have no inside information on this, but given that last years GDC was the first time we showed managed code running on an Xbox 360, the time is nigh for XNA announcements.

• It snowed again yesterday. Last year we had one snowstorm, the year before that none. We’ve now had I think five this year plus the massive windstorm that knocked out power for days.
• Technorati told me that “social news aggregator” Megite is linking to me. For some reason, this post of mine on Powershell is considered related to “Is PR Too Stupid for Conversational Marketing?” from Amanda Chapel. Seems like Megite has some bugs to work out.
• Paul Andrew announces BPEL support for WF but David Chappel writes “no one should interpret the announcement as an embrace of BPEL-based development by Microsoft”. Personally, I think BPEL is just the latest attempt at “write once, run anywhere” and will meet with the same limited success of previous attempts. The last thing I think MSFT should do is embrace BPEL based development.
• BPEL actually has two flavors, Executable and Abstract. Abstract BPEL is potentially fairly useful. You could use to exchange of the publicly viewable parts of a process with a partner in order to make two processes work together. That’s fairly exciting. I would welcome Abstract BPEL support for WF and/or BTS. But as far as I can tell, most of the BPEL focus has been around Executable BPEL, which as I wrote above is attempting to be a platform independent language for implementing business process. That’s fairly unexciting since we’ve been down this road before many times (UNIX, CORBA, J2EE) and it has never worked out.
• Soma announces the launch of the Beginner Developer Learning Center. It includes Kid’s Corner with the cutely named C# for Sharp Kids and VB for Very Bright Kids e-books. Very cool, I can’t wait to share this with my kids in a few years. Only complaint: where’s the XNA love?