• Big news on the WGA strike front: the AMPTP reached a deal with the Directors Guild last weeks. Initial reaction from United Hollywood is mixed, but I’m hopeful this will at least get the AMPTP / WGA talks started again.
• Speaking of new media, Xbox 360 Fanboy has a rundown of 45 short films from Sundance that are getting released on Xbox Live Marketplace. That’s pretty a-typical content for XBLM. Typically, new content on XBLM has been from “Hollywood Heavyweights“. I’m pretty excited to see them branch out content wise.
• Speaking of Xbox 360, seems they had a good year. Congrats!
• Still speaking of Xbox 360, everyone gets a free copy of Undertow this week.
• Scott Guthrie announces the availability of the .NET Framework Source Code. Shawn Burke has instructions for how to use it with VS08. So far, they’ve made the core base class libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF, ADO.NET and XML available. LINQ, WCF and WF are expected to become available “in the weeks and months ahead”.
• Ted Neward wonders if Java is “Done” like the Patriots, or “Done” like the Dolphins? If you want my opinion (I’m guessing yes, since you’re reading my blog), definitely done like the Dolphins. OpenJDK was a desperation move to make Java “cool” again, but it won’t work. People who want an open source stack are using LAMP and language wonks who saw Java as mainstream SmallTalk have moved on to Ruby. The question will be if Sun buying MySQL will make Sun cool or MySQL uncool by association. I’m guessing the latter.
• Speaking of Ted, he’s got a great post about the relevance of game programming to the mainstream or enterprise developer.
• Speaking of game development, David Weller points to all the new XNA GS 2.0 content up on Creators Club Online.
• There’s a new version (1.9.3.14) of F# out, but no announcement from Don regarding what’s new. I reviewed the release notes, seems like this is primarily a bug-fix release with only very minor feature additions.
• Speaking of F#, Don points to Greg Neverov’s implementation of Software Transactional Memory in F#. This immediately reminded me of Tim Sweeney’s Next Mainstream Programming Language talk. Tim suggested said language would need to support a combination of side-effect free functional code and software transactional memory. F# is looking to be closer to that language all the time.
• Still speaking of F#, Don Syme’s Expert F# book is out. I read the draft version – it rocks – but I’m still going to get my own real copy. You should too.
• With their win Saturday, the Caps are back to .500 for the first time since late October. Since Thanksgiving, the Caps are 15-7-4. Only four teams in the league have a better record over that time span. We play one of them tonight – the Penguins – and it’s on Versus, so I’ll even get to see it. In HD no less.

Steve Benen points out:

You may have noticed, on bumpers or t-shirts, the “1.20.09” slogan. It denotes, of course, Inauguration Day for Bush’s successor.

I just thought I’d mention that after seven painful years, the Bush presidency will end exactly one year from today. It’s obviously something to look forward to.

It’s an awkward period in Democratic politics right now — a contentious presidential primary, a frustrated Democratic Congress — but looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, and knowing it’s probably not a train, might serve as a morale booster.

From the morale perspective, it’s worth noting the voter turnout in the primaries so far. Yesterdays’ Democratic Nevada primary is the third in a row to set turnout records. On the Republican side, Benen points out that McCain won South Carolina yesterday with a 135,000 votes but eight years ago, he got nearly 100,000 more votes in a losing effort. By my calculation, Republican South Carolina turnout was 30% less than it was in 2000.

Voter turnout in early primaries doesn’t make this election a sure thing by any means, but it sure is an encouraging sign.

• In writers strike news, the WGA has made side deals with Worldwide Pants (aka Dave Letterman’s company), United Artists (aka Tom Cruise’s company) and The Weinstein Company (previously known as Miramax). The WGA strategy of divide and conquer seems to me making slow progress. Update: The Weinstein Company was founded by Miramax’s founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein after they left Miramax. But Miramax is still around. Thanks to GrantC for the correction.
• They’re still two games under .500, but the Caps completed a season sweep of the Eastern Conference leading Ottawa Senators last night. They’re only 3 games out of the top spot in the (admittedly very weak) Southeast division
• Big tech news today isn’t coming from MSFT-land. Sun is buying MySQL and Oracle is (finally) buying BEA. Both deals seem like pretty significant culture clashes, though Sun/MySQL seems like the better fit of the two.
• There’s a new draft of Service Modeling Language 1.1 available. If you’ll recall, this used to be called the System Definition Model, part of the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Hadn’t heard anything from those folks in a while, good to see they’re making progress.
• Stephan Tolksdorf dropped me a line to tell me he was able to “vastly simplify” FParsec, and as a result it now runs on the current version of F#. Awesome!
• Speaking of F#, Scott Hanselman has a new F# podcast, this time interviewing Dustin Campbell. Check out all of Dustin’s F# posts.
• I didn’t know about the “Copy as Path” feature in Vista. Why is it hidden?
• I was a big fan of the WDS deskbar shortcut feature – a feature that is missing in Vista. Enter Start++ by Brandon Paddock, which adds shortcuts to Vista’s search box. It also supports “iPhone apps” and scripting. But JScript? Where’s the PowerShell love, Brandon?
• EA released the source code to the original SimCity under the GPL. Bil Simser is digging into the code and it looks like he’s going to port it to XNA. (via Ozymandias)
• Wes Haggard has published the source code to CodeHTMLer on CodePlex. He took two updates from me: the F# language definition as well as the ability to choose the font when not using PRE tags.

Big news yesterday for Washington Capitals fans. Alex “the Great” Ovechkin (aka Superman) signed the biggest contract in NHL history – $124 million over 13 years. According to Eric McErlain, that’s an average of over $300k per hour of ice time and $5k per shift. Nice work if you can get it.

Actually, all kidding aside, this is a great move for the Caps.

The financial bar was set last summer when Sid “the Kid” Crosby signed a 5-year $43.5 million contract extension – about $8.7 million a season. Since then, Caps fans have had to suffer thru rumor after rumor that our man Alex wasn’t going to be playing in DC much longer. However, the suggestion that Ovechkin would be leaving never made any sense to me. He was slated to become a restricted free agent this summer – meaning the Caps would have the opportunity to match any offer. Furthermore, the max any player can get under the new CBA is 20% of the salary cap – currently about $50 million. So it was pretty obvious Ovechkin was going to stay a Cap and get paid somewhere between $8.7 and $10 a season.

More impressive than the dollars is the length of the contract. Not only is it the wealthiest in the league, it’s the second longest (Islanders goalie signed a $67.5 million 15 year contract before the start of last season). This contract means Ovechkin is slated to spend at least 16 years in a Caps uniform. In this era of free agency, more often than not you end up “rooting for the laundry” since the players come and go so quickly. It’s nice to know the #8 Caps jersey I got for Christmas will be relevant until the 2020′s.

Also, signing Ovechkin for that long makes massive financial sense, even if some “experts” can’t (won’t) see the value. The salary cap increased from $39 million for the 2005-06 season to $50 million this season. Can the league sustain 13% revenue growth for the foreseeable future? If so, the salary cap will be in the $100 million range by the time Crosby’s deal expires. Even if revenues only grow at half that rate, we’re still looking at a salary cap in the low $70 millions by 2013. So Crosby will be looking to make at least $14 million and maybe as much as $20 million per season when he resigns. Viewed that way, getting Ovechkin for “only” $9.5 mil a season makes good financial sense.

Of course, the last time the Caps committed this kind of money to a superstar, it didn’t work out so well. But unlike Jagr, who got his new contract before skating shift one for the Caps, we know what #8 can do while wearing the Eagle. Owner Ted Leonsis isn’t paying for potential on blind faith, he knows what Ovechkin can do and how much he means to this team. Based on the past two and 1/2 seasons, I think Leonsis is getting his money’s worth.

Speaking of Ted, my father ran into him @ the seasons ticket holder’s event they held last night. When he mentioned that he’s “Devhawk’s Dad”, Ted recalled how I “reamed him a new one” as well as meeting me. For the record, I still think trading Bondra was a mistake, though time has demonstrated it was a fairly minor one. More importantly, it was an isolated mistake. Since then, I think Ted and the Caps have done almost everything right, both on and off the ice. If you’re reading this Ted, keep up the good work and I take back that whole “abomination to the sport of hockey” thing.

And don’t look now, but the Caps are 12-6-4 since the changing coaches. Had they been playing at that pace all season, they’d have around 55 points and the second best record in the Eastern Conference right now. Good to know, but not very relevant since they did, in fact, start the season 6-14-1. However, if they can stay on this pace for the second half of their season, they would end with around 93 points – probably enough to get them in the playoffs. (Last year’s eighth seed ended with 92 points.) Furthermore, Carolina currently leads the Southeast Division, but they’re only on pace to reach 86 points. So even with the horrific start, the Caps are still poised to make a playoff run.

In the press release announcing the contract, Alex is quoted saying “I want to bring the Stanley Cup to Washington”. Even if they do make the playoffs, I think the Caps are still a year or two away from honestly being competitive for the Cup – though I’d love to be wrong about that. Either way, it’s nice to know Alex has 13 years to make the Caps’ Stanley Cup dreams a reality.

To quote Mike Vogel, “It feels like morning in Washington.” I may be displaced in the “wrong” Washington, but I feel it just the same.

• Note, I somehow duplicated Morning Coffee 135. So I’ve skipped 136 to make up for it.
• Congrats to Hillary Clinton for her unexpected win in the New Hampshire primary. As I said last week, I think Obama has a better chance of winning in November, but I’ve got nothing against Clinton or her politics.
• Speaking of winning, congrats to LSU on winning the BCS. Are they the best team in college football? Personally, I don’t think so – there are at least three other teams (Georgia, West VA and of course USC) who can make a persuasive argument that they should be #1. But losing to teams like Penn Pitt and Stanford, neither WVA and USC have an argument they should have been in the championship game. But that’s what makes the BCS such BS. If nothing else, at least the “we need a playoff” meme is picking up steam.
• This is sort of cool: Eye-fi is a wireless enabled SD card so you can wirelessly upload pictures from your camera to your PC or favorite photo service. However, I think the price needs to come down a bit. I recently bought a 2GB SD card for my wife’s new camera for $20. A 2GB Eye-fi card is $99. Not sure wireless upload is worth 5x per card.
• With all the focus on LINQ providing type-safe queries, it’s easy to forget that some apps do need to build their queries at run time. Scott Guthrie points at a Dynamic LINQ C# sample (also available for VB) that builds LINQ expression trees from strings. It kinda takes you back to the bad-old-days of embedding SQL strings in your code, but there are scenarios – especially BI scenarios – where you need this capability.
• Soma announces the VC++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta. This is the long-awaited (by who?) MFC update as well as support for the C++ TR1. TR1 provides some FP-esque support like function objects and tuples, so maybe this is worth a look. On the other hand, given that much (all?) of TR1 is lifted from Boost, maybe we should just use that.
• Speaking of cool libraries, check out C5 (aka the Copenhagen Comprehensive Collection Classes for C#). It’s basically a complete redesign of System.Collections.Generic (or SCG as they call it). I’ve read thru their online book and I’m very impressed. Of course, with me focused on F# of late, I’m primarily using immutable collections, so I’m not sure how much use I have for C5 right now.
• There was a free CoDe magazine in my DevTeach bag back in November with a fascinating article on where LINQ goes from here – LINQ 2.0 if you will. One of things the article discusses is tier-splitting, which has seen the light of day in Volta. Will Volta also deliver External Relationships, Reshaping Combinators and Join Patterns or will those come from different projects?
• I had to pave my workstation yesterday. I was running an interim build of Vista x64 SP1 and I couldn’t make Virtual Server work with it. As part of the repave, I discovered I needed to update the firmware of my SCSI controller, but the update had to run under DOS. Freaking DOS? My workstation doesn’t even have a floppy drive to boot DOS from! However, I was able to boot from a USB thumb disk instead. That’s damn useful.