Friday’s Morning Coffee didn’t happen because I fraked up the DNS settings when I moved devhawk.net to a new registrar. Today’s morning coffee was drastically delayed on account of car troubles. Tuesday, I have an 8am meeting so tomorrow’s not looking good either.

• The big news for Xbox 360 is details on the Spring Update. Big news is WLMessenger integration + a QWERTY thumb pad that snaps right into the controller. (via Gamerscoreblog and Major Nelson)
• Speaking of Xbox, I completed the Old Spice Experience Challenge today on my lunch break (couldn’t go to the office due to the car troubles). My reward is an upgrade to level 2, a gamerpic I’ll never use and a free copy of Contra. (Estimated total value: $5)
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on new language features in C#3/VB9. This time it’s lambda expressions. This is the “killer” feature in the new language version IMHO, since you can use lambda expressions either as code or data. Furthermore, it’s up to the class/method handling the lambda expression to decide if it should be treated as code or data. That decision is made and design time, but the upside is that as a developer, I write my queries exactly the same way regardless if they are to be executed directly (aka code) or analyzed (aka data). Scott also metions a few new LINQ to * projects: LINQ to Amazon, LINQ to NHibernate and LINQ to LDAP.
• Speaking of LINQ to *, here’s LINQ to 3D Objects in a C# ray tracer. I think it’s safe to say that LINQ to *whatever* is the new hotness. (via DotNetKicks)
• The new version of F# is out. Looks like the big new feature is Active Patterns which is described in this draft paper. If I only had more time to investigate this. (via Don Syme)
• For the third time in the past six months, my laptop power supply has died. I’ve never had a problem like this before, much less three times. It’s not even the same laptop as I recently moved over to a Tecra M4 Tablet. I just don’t get it.
• P&P has shipped the 3.0 release of Enterprise Library. Tom Hollander has the details. Personally, I am most interested in the new Policy Injection Block.
• Having worked with self-signed certificates and understanding what a PITA they are, it’s nice to see that IIS 7 has explicit support for them.
• I saw a reference to “The Halo Effect” on one of the political blogs I read. Needless to say, as an Xbox gamer, my first reaction was that this had something related to Master Chief. It doesn’t.
• Joe McKendrick compares SOA governance to national governance. Given our polarized political climate, this analogy may hurt more than it helps. Also, the next enterprise architectural board that has equal “branch” footing with IT and executive management will be the first.

• Nicholas Allen points out that Messaging is not a Transaction. Of course, what he really means is that Messaging with WCF is not a Transaction. Messaging with SSB is in fact a transaction (well, more accurately, it’s transactional but you get the idea). Nick’s right that you may not need anything more than simple retry semantics that you can implement yourself in your application protocol. But SSB has spoiled me. Why should I have to write the retry semantics? Why can’t my messaging stack provide that for me? Or put another way, if I need a “precicely defined failure model”, wouldn’t I be better of choosing a messaging stack that provides that out of the box?
• Steve Hartman explains how to use span Remote Desktop Connection across multiple monitors for use with VPC. I wonder if this will work on my machine, since my multi-monitor setup is an L shape, not a rectangle. I’m offsite today, so I’ll try it tomorrow (via DotNetKicks)
• According to news reports, Microsoft is negotiating to provide DRM free music too. I wonder how well this will work for Microsoft given that both Zune and PlaysForSure provide subscription services. I would assume the $15 all-you-can-listen style subscription services wouldn’t be DRM free. Given that program is one of the (few) selling points they have over Apple, will the availablity of DRM Free music undercut the interest in subscription? (via Dale)

• Scott Hanselman’s post on Mindful Coding reminded me of the practice of rubberducking. The basic idea is that when you’re stuck on a problem, you explain it out loud to an inanimate object – aka the rubber duck. (though when I originally heard about this practice, it was a teddy bear.) Maybe instgead of Coding Mindfully, we should be Coding Out Loud?
• Quick side note to the previous bullet: I have often worked thru a problem by explaining it to my wife who, like Scott’s wife, nods in all the right places, but cares not about such things. But calling your wife a rubber duck is bad for your health, so I’d rather call it Coding Out Loud.
• I’m a couple weeks behind on this, but Microsoft along with BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, and Sun submitted the Service Modeling Language to the W3C. For those not plauing along at home, SML is the new name for the System Definition Model and is a core deliverable of the Dynamic System Initiative. Good to see it’s gotten such broad support for this.
• Jezz Santos and Edward Baker wrote a series of posts entitled “Factories 201“. The entire series is good, but I particularly liked Jezz’ post How Long Will It Take? His rough estimate is that it takes at least five products built with a software factory before you recoup your investment in building the factory itself. Sounds like a fair assumption.

Sam Gentile decided to spawn a new blog because he doesn’t feel his CodeBetter blog is the place to write about “politics, music, family or life in general”. I understand Sam’s feelings 100%. I maintained blogs.msdn.com/devhawk for these exactly these reasons. But since I’m no longer an evangelist (or MVP, natch) and my blog no longer graces the pages of the MSDN Architecture Center, I don’t bother to provide a dev-centric, politically sanitized and work safe version of this blog. As I wrote several years ago that DevHawk is not a technical blog, it’s my personal blog. Like Sam, I don’t get paid to write it and if you don’t want to put up with my politics to get my architecture insights, you’re free to unsubscribe.

Sam, if you’re reading this, I suggest that you have one “master” blog and one “sanitized” blog, rather than two independent ones. I’ve tried having two separate blogs, but one always suffered. My rationale was always that there is only one “me” and I wanted once place that reflects the things I am passionate about. If I felt a specific post needed to be sanitized for whatever reason (too personal, too vulgar, not technical, etc.) I would simply choose to not cross post it to my MSDN blog.

• I survived the weekend no problem. My wife has the details of what she did for the weekend while I played Mr. Mom. The kids were great, we even went to see the Easter Bunny on Sunday. Wish the weather had been better, but we did get to go on a little walk around the neighborhood between hailstorms Sunday after naps.
• Between taking the kids all morning until Jules got home from the airport and going to opening day for a team morale event, I worked about 30 minutes yesterday. In case you’re wondering, that’s way below average. I typically work at least twice that every day. 😄
• After maintaining a post a day average for January and February, I slipped a bit in March. Twenty seven posts in thirty one days. So that puts me five posts behind for the year as of this one.
• Dale let me borrow Madden 07 for the weekend so I could pump my gamerscore (a practice called gamerscore whoring). I still need 255 points by April 22nd to complete the Old Spice Experience Challenge. I’m not proud of it, but it’s not like I have much time to play these days.
• Mads Kristensen has a new .NET blog engine intuitively called BlogEngine.NET. I wonder how it compares to dasBlog, which powers DevHawk. (via DotNetKicks)
• I wrote a last week that unit test support should be in the Express editions of VS. Thanks to Jamie Cansdale, it is. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman saved his C# Tiny OS project from the impending shutdown of GDN and reposted it to his blog. I first met Scott at TechEd Malaysia 2002, so I remember seeing him present this “back in the day”.
• EMI is going to start offering songs sans DRM @ $1.29 a pop. Assuming other labels follow suit, this is gonna be huge. (via Loke Uei)
• Jomo Fisher writes about using LINQ as a string switch compiler that’s about 900% faster than using a hash table. Money quote: “Any time I see a data structure with a capability I’m not using it makes me wonder whether I can trade that capability for something I do need—in this case a speed boost.” LINQ is turning out to be much more interesting than just a (much) better way to query databases. (via DotNetKicks)