Again, I’m late to the story but I think it’s ultra-cool that MS Research released the source code to Allegiance. At 511 MB, it’s almost thirty times bigger than Rotor + Gyro, which is a significant code release in itself, though honestly, only about 5% of the Allegiance archive is code, the 95% is in the “Artwork” subdirectory. That still leaves about 25MB of compressed code.
I’d love to see a port to MC++, a la Quake II.NET. Is anyone working on it?
I had a few negative things to say about InfoPath a while back. Today, I finally used it to solve a “real” problem and I was extremely pleased with the result.
I’m working on some team stuff and needed to collect a bunch of info on all my teammates and stick it in an XML file. Traditionally, I’d have to send out email asking everyone to send me this info, then manually cut-and-paste the results into an XML file. Instead, I whipped up an InfoPath form (well, truthfully, I whipped up several – but that’s just because I’m not familiar with the tool) and stuck it on a SharePoint site. Now, all my teammates can go fill out the form and I can merge the results together in one big XML file. All in under an hour, including learning curve. InfoPath even supports pictures, so my teammates can even provide a photo of themselves in the form.
I’m not exactly uninstalling VS.NET, but it’s good to know how well InfoPath hits the mark for target scenarios like this one.
Don pointed
out
to Goran that the Indigo definition of “a service is simply a program
that one interacts with via message exchanges.” Goran pointed
out
that that definition “really doesn’t highlight how it’ll help a
customer”. I think part of the reason they are both right is that they
are talking about different things. I would say Don is talking about
Service Oriented Programming where Goran is talking about Service
Oriented Architecture. This gets back to the levels of architecture that
I blogged
about.
Platform tools like Indigo are components used in systems. I’m guessing
the customer’s Goran mentioned are at the system-of-system level for
whom the messaging plumbing is below the abstraction level they care
about.
Of course, SO* buzzwords are thrown about with such frequency these
days it’s hard to keep track of the difference.
Noah Horton, former teammate who has gone on to become PM in the Peer Networking Group, has started a blog. Of course, with the new aggregated feed of MSDN bloggers, you probably already knew that. However, I am compelled to blog this as Noah is a friend, works in the next building over from me and I’ve got a special interest in P2P. I’m looking forward to his promised tips and tricks. Subscribed.
Going thru my referrer logs, I noticed that my SPSynd project is now listed in the SharePoint Products and Technologies Web Component Directory. Thanks for the listing!