Due to a temporary reassignment this morning, I spent my usual blogging time moving all of my computer equipment from one cube to another.

• Sam Gentile writes about the ALT.NET moniker. My favorite of his principles is number 4 where he discusses the importance of tools versus principles and knowledge. I really agree that knowledge and principles are more important because the best tools in the world can’t help us if we don’t know how and when to use them.
• I find Mark Cuban’s ideas (here and here) about how advertising on the Internet is different than traditional media advertising. He points out that the ability of a provider to deliver higher simultaneous views is more important and valuable than delivering views for a longer period of time. I think he right on here, even if I believe his football league is going to fail. (via Blog Maverick)
• Worse Than Failure has been running an unusual contest to get the most interesting, buggy, and unusual way of writing a calculator application. They have 12 finalists for readers to review. I find that the descriptions of how the programs work (or don’t) to be hilarious.
• As I have been working on service-oriented management and monitoring I have given a lot of thought to the best way to present the data. Doesn’t it make the most sense to primarily display information from the business process point of view? I would be interested in your feedback.

Since there appears to be at least a handful of RESTifarians among my readership, I’m just going to throw this half-formed thought / almost question out there. Maybe it’s a FAQ, in which case I’d appreciate a pointer in the right direction.

My observations about REST are:

1. REST is a an “architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems“.
2. REST “has been used to guide the design and development” of HTTP and URI.
3. Therefore REST as an architectural style is independent of HTTP and URI.
4. Yet, I get the feeling that the REST community would consider a solution that uses the REST architectural style but not HTTP and/or URI as “not RESTful”.

Am I wrong in observation #4 above? If you’re addressing resources by resource identifiers [aka URIs] but transferring those resource representations over a durable duplex protocol [aka not HTTP], are you still RESTing?

(Note, such a RESTful durable duplex protocol doesn’t exist to my knowledge, though I would be very happy to be wrong about that. SSB does durable duplex, but it doesn’t support URI style resource addressing. Granted, if I was going to build a durable duplex RESTful protocol, I would build on SSB – much the same way that HTTP builds on TCP. Though I am a huge fan of SSB, I’m specifically not suggesting that SSB is RESTful.)

My session yesterday went very well, especially considering I did no prep whatsoever. Drew a fairly good sized audience – people were sitting on the floor and standing in the back, though honestly the TLC “theaters” only hold about 50 chairs. Most of them stayed the for whole session – at least until I started to run over (only 15 minutes, not too bad).

After my session, I ended up talking to a customer from a large home loan firm for about two hours. Turns out we had a friend in common, a guy I used to work with a long time ago @ ModaCad named Brian. This is actually the second time I’ve run into someone at a major Microsoft conference who has a single degree of Brian, which is a little freaky.

For dinner, I went out with some MS field architects and some customers. We ended up having such a big group, we split up into two tables and somehow my table had four MS employees and only one customer. But that customer was from a very large retail firm and we had lots to talk about. Ate way too much, though I didn’t combine that with drinking too much. And, as a bonus, I didn’t tell the customer than any of their ideas were “stupid”, as my friend Christoph pointed out I had done the last time I was out to dinner with one of his customers. (That customer wanted to run Java on their mainframe. I stand by my assessment.)

I was planning to head up to my room, but ran into Jon Flanders in the lobby. Hadn’t seen Jon since the class I took with him last fall, so I ended up hanging out with him for several hours, chatting up the folks we knew who walked by, including Rocky, Bob and Brian. I realized I’ve been heads down with no speaking or travel for about a year, so it’s been a while since I had seen many of these folks. For example, I hadn’t seen Brian in about three years when we were both presenting at TechEd New Zealand. The downside of hanging out in the lobby is that I didn’t get any code written last night, which I was sort of planning to do when I headed back to the hotel. But chatting with these folks – esp. Jon this time – helps be figure out what I want to write anyway, so I guess it’s worth it! 😄

I ended up sleeping in this morning (still jet lagged) and skipping the morning session. No second keynote this year, which I didn’t realize until I looked at the conf guide this morning. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Once again I get the chance to fill in for Harry while he is gone. I will attempt to keep up with the high standard he has set.

• Be careful with trampolines. I have a four year old that was bouncing on a trampoline this weekend. He twisted his knee slightly on landing, and decided that the fastest way to get comfort was to jump off the edge. His knee gave out and he fractured his tibia. I don’t think this was how he planned to start his summer. At least he is pretty calm about the whole thing.
• It looks like there is a good product out there named CliSecure to obfuscate .net code. From what I was able to read it looks like a pretty decent product, even hiding the code while its in memory. (via Larkware)
• TechEd started this morning. While I am sure Harry will be giving some on-site reports there is a link to the virtual site here.
• There is a great video showing Gregor Hohpe talking about SOA, and the many unrealistic claims in the industry. If you have read any of Hohpe’s work it is clear that he has a great understanding of the topic. (via Nick Malik)
• The NBA Finals will begin this week with the Spurs playing the Cavaliers and King LeBron. I wonder if this will help rescue the NBA from what seems to be a real apathy on the part of the average fan. Other than the series between Dallas and Golden State earlier in the play-offs it really seems there haven’t been any compelling stories. The NBA really needs a shot in the arm to become relevant again.

Being at TechEd without thousands of things to worry about is somewhat strange. But I could get used to coming and going as I please, not tracking down speakers, ordering whiteboards and the rest of the responsibility that comes with track ownership.

My first session is right after lunch – 1:15 @ Green TLC Theater 4 if you’re on site. Our Technical Learning Center (aka “the cabana”) is fairly sparsely attended, at least for the moment. MSIT has never had this significant a presence at TechEd before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the attendees aren’t quite sure what to make of it. I went over to the Architecture and SOA & Web Services area and ran into quite a few people I knew. I expect I’ll spend more time down there than in my cabana.

I skipped the keynote this morning, apparently they did a Back to the Future parody. Had I known, I might have gotten up. But my flight got in at midnight last night, I didn’t get to the hotel until 1am and an 8:30 keynote on the east coast feels like a 5:30 keynote to my still jet-lagged system. Since I skipped it, I’m not sure what was announced, but the opening press release salvo mentions the first CTP of SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 (aka the Visual Studio version formally known as “Orcas”) and the Open XML SDK among other things. I’ve been hacking some Open XML lately, so I’ll have to check that last thing out. Apparently, there was some also discussion of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, but in the press release it came across as Infrastructure Optimization. Not sure if those are one in the same or not.

BTW, for those not attending TechEd, you can check out Virtual TechEd and the TechEd Virtual Pressroom. Not the same as being here – no conversations, no swag and no roller coasters. But at least you can keep up on what’s being announced, presented and spoken about.

I’m off to lunch. Missing the keynotes == missing breakfast. My session is in about an hour, so I’ll probably post again afterwards. I’m hoping for more conversation and less presentation, so the only prep I’ve done is to iron my speaker shirt.