Lunchtime Doughnuts 9

  • I am a few days behind on this, but Joe McKendrick writes an interesting piece on if businesspeople are begging for SOA. It is fascinating because I believe that SOA should come from the business, not because of the delivery mechanism, but because of the results. If services will truly make a business more adaptable and responsive to change shouldn’t all business people desire those results? At the same time they don’t care how that end is achieved, just that it is. That’s where we in the IT industry need to do a better job of working out the details amongst ourselves and show the business how SOA can benefit them. Once we do that we should see more SOA adoptions go smoother and real ROI can be seen.
  • Joel Dehlin has blogged on the myth of youth being the ones that use instant messaging, publish and read blogs, participate in social networks, etc. I agree that the technology has been integrated into every layer of society. If you have ever been at the airport or at a Starbucks you know what I mean. Who is it exactly that has a Crackberry addiction? It seems technology has really become a part of our culture, and that it’s not just one age group that is adopting the changes.
  • Visual Studio 2008 shell was announced at TechEd yesterday. Even Harry who was on-site missed the release, but it certainly looks cool.
  • If you have ever met me you would quickly discover I have quite a background in Unix. That being the case I couldn’t ignore the news that Sun is releasing new blades for the desktop. I had a blade on my desk for several years and it was really a nice system to use. For those that would bash me since I work at Microsoft now I will just say that when you support Solaris boxes, having one on your desk is quite helpful. I don’t take sides in the Holy War. 😄 (via Scoble)

TechEd 2007 Day Three

On Monday, I primarily talked to customers and partners. Yesterday, I spent most of my time talking to other Microsofties that I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a while. For example, Tim Mallalieu was there talking about the Entity Data Model. I worked with Tim a few years back – I did his first interview when he came to Microsoft. We didn’t talk much EDM, but it sure was good to see him.

I finally met Gareth Jones in person. Gareth – along with Steve, Stuart and Alan – have a new book out on the DSL toolkit. Neither stealing nor cajoling worked, I’ll have to go get my own copy or read it on Safari. Gareth and I talked a while about language evolution – how DSLs come to be. One of the subjects we talked about was internal DSLs - I’ll be interested in Gareth’s non-immediate reaction. Gareth also blogged yesterday about a TechEd announcement that I had missed: VS 2008 Shell.

I also spent a long time talking to various members of the DLR team. There seems to be quite a stir brewing about how the Ruby and Microsoft community can / will come together. I will wisely keep my opinions to myself – I’m already in the REST/SOAP fray, no need to join another – though I will say that it’s encouraging to hear the call for “a good, complete [Ruby language] specification” in order to support multiple implementations.