Short one today as I’m prepping for a presentation I’m delivering later this morning.

• The US Patent & Trademark is going to pilot posting patent applications online. Microsoft is one of the pilot companies. Given how broken the patent process is these days (note, my opinion – not my employers) nice to see at least small steps to solving the problem. (via Political Animal)
• Joe McKendrick coins the term “intrapreneurial” talking about SOA and SaaS. I like it.
• Xbox Live reaches six million members four months earlier than expected. Congrats!

I was going to wait until tomorrow’s Morning Coffee to post about TechFest 2007, but I just realized that Rick Rashid’s keynote will be webcast publicly tomorrow at 9:30 am Pacific time. I don’t ever get my Morning Coffee post out that early, so I figured I’d give my readers the heads up now.

From the TechFest website:

Microsoft Research TechFest provides a strategic forum for Microsoft researchers to connect with the broader group of Microsoft employees and product managers. Hundreds of researchers from Microsoft’s worldwide labs in China, England, India and the US gather for the annual event at the company’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. They come together to exchange ideas with colleagues, show off their latest innovations, and shine a light into the future of computing. In many cases, the partnerships formed at TechFest between researchers and product teams allow innovations to begin making their way into game-changing products for Microsoft customers.

I’ve been to every TechFest so far, even the first one when I lived in L.A. (got special permission my my manager to come up for it) and the one where I was on paternity leave after Patrick was born (got special permission from my wife to be leave her alone with a three week old). This one is no different. In fact, I think my whole team is going up on Wednesday.

Last week was been slow, but with GDC and TechFest I’m thinking this week will be much more lively.

• As predicted, the XNA guys had a bunch of news to announce at GDC. They launched the XNA Creators Club Online with samples, forums and a new starter kit. Also they announced some cool partnerships for Creators Club Premium members (aka the folks who paid $99 a year to be able to run code on their Xbox 360) including access to the highly anticipated Torque X Engine.
• From Don Syme, we here that the new 1.9 version of F# is almost ready. When I shifted from learning F# to learning PowerShell, it wasn’t because of a sudden lack of interest in F#, so I’m glad to see them still chugging along. And by the time they release 2.0 later this year, I hope to have learned enough PowerShell that I can spend some time focusing on learning F#.
• Apparently Jenny Lam at Microsoft reviewed more than 10,000 images to pick the new Vista Wallpapers. Not sure if I would love or hate that job. But some that didn’t make the cut are available online. (via DotNetKicks)
• Tomas Restrepo reviews a number of lightweight, syntax-highlighting text editors. Personally, I like Notepad2, but as Tomas mentions there’s no way to save your settings. Also, there’s no way to add new syntax highlighting without recompiling it. For example, Wesner Moise compiled a version that added Ruby syntax. I really want a version that that supports PowerShell. Maybe it’s time to give Notepad++ a closer look
• Dale has some new SOAhlocis Anonymous shirts available.
• Jeff Atwood discovers that the French acronym for object oriented programming is POO.

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?