• Pat Helland is finally blogging again. His first post back is basically “what I’ve been up to for the past two years”, which is to say no cool tech stuff…yet. David Ing calls Pat’s time @ Amazon “an extended training sabbatical” and that we’re lucky to have him back. Agree 100%. BTW, since Pat didn’t include a link to his recent paper and presentation, I will.
• Speaking of blogging luminaries, James Clark is also blogging. Don Box calls him the “brightest guy in XML-land”. Money Quote: “any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML.”
• Rick Barnes – aka my boss – likes Roger Session’s white paper A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures and comes up with a number of variants of Roger’s Observe/Orient/Plan/Act model. Then he asks the $64,000 question: “Why then, do we insist on spending months analyzing software the business, interviewing subject matter experts and end users, writing hundred or thousand page “requirements” documents, and meeting to agree on dozens or hundreds of features before we write the first line of code?” Rick is one of the reasons I took this job instead of the other awesome opportunities I had when I was switching jobs. I’m sure you see why.
• Speaking of requirements, Eric Sink has a phenomenal post on requirements. Go read it. Can we officially grant “Walking Spec” anti-pattern status without the customary waiting period?
• Scott Guthrie posted on Anonymous Types, the latest in his series on the new language features coming with LINQ. Anon types in and of themselves are a fairly simple construct – you pass the properties and values into the new object init syntax and the compiler munges up a class to match. Simple, but critical for SQL-style data shaping queries. Of course, the limitation is that you can’t pass the anonymous type object around in any type-safe way.
• LINQ to * Watch: LINQ to SharePoint. Details on Bart de Smet’s blog.
• Jeff Atwood writes a long post to ask for background compilation in C#. +1 on that request. But I disagree with his point about “giving up on the idea that .NET is a multiple language runtime”. Even though the runtime supports multiple languages, most programmers are only fluent in one.
• I’m a bit behind on this, but my old team has moved SkyScrapr to MSDN. For the uninitiated, SkyScrapr is a site for aspiring architects to learn about software architects and architecture.
• p&pClarius has shipped a new software factory: the VSIPFactory, a software factory for Visual Studio Extensibility. Pablo Galiano has more.

Update: I mistakenly attributed the VSIPFactory to p&p. It’s from Clarius. Sorry guys.

One of the things that’s different about being in MSIT is that it’s cut my travel dramatically. Basically, the only travel I’ve done since taking this job was Thomas Erl’s SOA Workshop last September. So it came as a bit of a surprise when I got tapped to present at TechEd (at fairly close to the last minute).

The last year I ran the architecture track, all track owners were asked to include either a globalization or MSIT session in our track. Since then, MSIT has expanded it’s role at TechEd dramatically, with 14 breakouts, 20 chalk talks and our own Technical Learning Center.

I’m doing a two chalk talks on my MSIT project, Rome. I mentioned the project back when I switched jobs, but we’ve never talked about the project by name before. We haven’t accomplished quite as much as I’d hoped since then, but we’ve progressed to the point that we can talk publicly about what we’re doing. Now that we’ve begun to open the kimono a bit, you should see more on Rome, Not only from me but also my teammates who blog: Dale, Rick and Dottie.

So if you’re going to TechEd, make sure you stop by the MSIT Technical Learning Center and say hi. Unlike my last two trips to TechEd, I have very limited responsibilities this time – basically just show up on time and talk about what I do all day, twice – so that leaves plenty of time to attend sessions, chat up attendees and ride roller coasters. Hope to see you there.

ROME: Service Oriented Infrastructure for the Enterprise
Like most enterprises, Microsoft IT is adopting a service oriented approach for the development of their internal systems. However, in order to avoid projects building similar service infrastructures on a per application basis, MSIT realizes the need for a common service oriented infrastructure to build these systems upon. Inside MSIT, the Rome project is tasked with designing, building and maintaining the infrastructure for these services. Come chat with Harry Pierson, lead architect of the Rome project, and discuss the challenges of building a large-scale service infrastructure inside a large enterprise like Microsoft.

• MST02-TLC Monday (June 4th) 1:15-2:30pm
• MST14-TLC Thursday (June 7th) 1-2:15pm