• p&p have published new versions of both the Web Service and Web Client Software Factories. Beyond support for VS08, I’m not sure what’s new but that’s worth the price of download (admittedly close to zero) right there. I assume these need the most recent release of the Guidance Automation Toolkit as well.
• W3C has published a new working draft of the Service Modeling Language. I’m really interested to see where this technology goes.
• Yesterday, Microsoft announced the Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint, part of a larger Software + Services Blueprints initiative that I wasn’t aware of. According to Michael Lehman (who’s blog I’ve been been remiss to read of late), S+S Blueprints has a bunch of other interesting projects including Video.Show and Outlook+Services.
• Martian Maly demonstrates how you can use DLR trees to build a statically typed add function. Literally, my very first thought after Martin presented DLR Trees @ Lang.NET was “I wonder if you could use that for static languages too?” I guess the answer is yes.
• It’s been six months, and Scott Hanselman still isn’t evil. Perhaps he could start turn his ASP.NET wiki into an evil ASP.NET wiki? Actually, I’m only linking to his post because I liked the way he described blogging as “I’m writing a book that will never end”.

• I was slammed Friday, so I didn’t get a chance to post the results of last Thursday night’s hockey game. I’m sure you’ve all been eager to hear. We lost, bad, 8-2. Personally, I was -3 and had no points, but I played much better than last week. We had three full lines of forwards, which was a big help, but I have started to find my ice-legs so to speak.
• Charlie Calvert has the now-definitive list of LINQ to Everything. Of all of them, I found LINQ over C# fascinating, especially given my recent efforts in parsing.
• Chris Tavares blogs about a distributed source control system called Bazaar. Unlike most version control systems, Bazaar is distributed which means you can use it without a server. According to Chris, you can share branches as easily as mailing a file. I wonder if you could make Bazaar work over a P2P network.
• While looking up the MSDN link for the previous coffee item, I noticed an entire new section in the MSDN Library for Open Protocol Specifications. Not much to add, just wanted to highlight their existence.
• Admitted non-designer Scott Guthrie shows off using the new version Expression Blend to build a Silverlight 2.0 app. Personally, I was most interested in seeing some of the new of built-in controls.

Nick Malik took me to task for my suggestion that Enterprise Architecture provides no value.

You implied that I could not answer the question, “How does EA demonstrate value.” That is not true. I can readily answer the question, from my viewpoint, but I chose instead to *ask* the question to see if my answer matches the various answers that I may hear back. I got a lot of valuable input, both on the blog and on the forum on Shared Insights where I asked the same question.

You are the ONLY person to reply and say that EA provides no value.

Perhaps you should read about the role and value of Enterprise Architecture from established sources before you bash the entire profession.

EA is real, my friend. It is as real as city planning. The only major city in the US without city planning is Houston. I have visited a few times, and I can honestly say that without city planning, they are a mess.

Nick also provided a link to an article in Architecture and Governance magazine. I was going to read it, however their web site is down as I write this. I feel comfortable interpreting that as a sign that I’m right… 😄

Actually, Nick’s got a point. It was wholly unfair of me to say that EA provides no value. However, I do believe the return on investment of enterprise architecture is fairly low, perhaps even negative. In other words, I shouldn’t have argued that EA doesn’t deliver any value, but instead that I don’t think it delivers enough value, given what we spend on it.

Architecture ROI is hard enough to calculate on a project by project basis. I would argue that measuring it at the EA level is probably impossible, but I think that’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse because EA can’t justify their existence in terms the business can understand. It’s a blessing because if EA is running as deep in the red as I suspect they might be, the company would cut EA entirely in a heartbeat.

Since Nick started my asking a question about value, let me turn it around and ask some questions of my own:

1. How much do you think your organization spends on EA per year?
2. What do you think your organization’s EA ROI is?
3. What can you do to improve your organization’s EA ROI?