Lunchtime Coffee 158

  • My friend (and hopefully my next representative) Darcy Burner is leading a group of congressional challengers in publishing A Responsible Plan To End The War In Iraq. I haven’t read the plan itself in detail, but I sure like what I’m hearing about it.
  • Speaking of politics, Obama’s speech today “A More Perfect Union” was fantastic.
  • Bioshock is getting a sequel. ’nuff said.
  • There’s a new version of FolderShare out and I’ve got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I’ve been a regular user of FolderShare for a while so it’s nice to see it get a face lift. On the other hand, it’s been over two years since Microsoft bought FolderShare and we’re only just now getting a new version, which is literally nothing more that a face lift – this version introduces no new functionality at all.
  • I was hoping to geek out vicariously via someone else’s hacking around with Singularity. Luckily, Matthew Podwysocki provides just such an opportunity.
  • Looks like “Prism” is the new CAB. Glenn Block has two extensive posts covering a project overview and their first drop. I think it’s interesting that the Prism team is focused on building a reference implementation, and letting the framework eventually fall out. Reading thru the description, it sounds awesome. However, based on the massive increase of inbox throughput I’m experiencing since I accepted the new job, I can’t imagine I’ll have time to play with it. Maybe Matthew will start playing with Prism too! (via Sam Gentile – btw, thanks for the kind words on the new job Sam!)
  • Speaking of Sam, he points to a series by Bob Beauchemin entitled LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework: Panacea or evil incarnate? With a title like that, who can resist reading the whole series? Err, I can because LINQ 2 SQL & EF performance just fell off my radar entirely. However I gotta agree with Sam’s point that he “can’t think of anyone more qualified than Bob” to tackle these questions.
  • Tomas Restrepo blogs his dev environment PS script as well as a PS fortune script. Personally, I use Chris Tavares’ vsvars wrapper for PS, though I’ll gladly take an “official” PS based dev environment.
  • I wonder if Ted Neward will get jumped for admiring Mort the way Nick Malik did. Given that Ted called himself Mort while Nick compared Mort to agile developers, I’m guess Ted will have to go back to his Vietnam analogy if he wants to create controversy.
  • Speaking of Ted, I agree with his point that conferences are about people. As a python pre-newbie (I figure I’ll reach full newbie status by the time I actually start my new job), I spent most of my PyCon time connecting with people rather than trying to learn technical stuff. Also, I love Ted’s WHISCEY acronym.
  • Speaking of PyCon, my soon-to-be new teammate Srivatsn Narayanan blogs his thoughts on PyCon. I’ll try and get to my PyCon thoughts soon.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on March 18, 2008. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged Games, LINQ, patterns & practices, PowerShell and Research.

Comments:

Thanks for the link to Chris tavares blog, Harry; I had honestly not seen it before. The trick he uses is cool, but not sure it would work for me (as I modify a bunch of other env variables on my profile and blindly replacing them with the output of vcvars32.bat might not work. In any case, my desire for creating a custom script was mostly so that I could keep a single script that worked on all my machines, regardless of the VS version installed, and since it's doing that very nicely, no need to switch for now. On a different topic, Ted does have a good point. I haven't been to "real" conferences in a few years, but certainly the networking opportunities where by far the most productive part of the conferences. I wonder how many people totally miss that. Looking forward to your thoughts on PyCon.... hope it wasn't all as bad as Bruce Eckel was complaining about :)
This comment was posted by Tomas Restrepo on March 18, 2008 at 1:39 PM.

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