Morning Coffee 128

After using Outlook 2007 as my RSS reader for a few months, I’ve gone back to RSS Bandit. I run two work machines (desktop + laptop) and I finally got tired duplicated blog entries because each copy of Outlook downloads the same post. Also, for some reason Outlook downloads the same Technorati posts over and over again.
ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 was released. The latest CTP of the EF Tools is also available. And as per the press release, EF has gained support from “Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, Firebird Foundation Inc., IBM Corp., MySQL AB, Npgsql , OpenLink Software Inc., Phoenix Software International, Sybase Inc. and VistaDB Software Inc”. I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but I guess you’ll be able to LINQ to Entities on a wide variety of DB platforms. Interesting Oracle isn’t on that list. Not really surprising, but interesting.
Here’s a new ASP.NET MVC article from Scott Guthrie, this one on views and how you pass data to one from a controller. Using generics to get strongly-typed ViewData is pretty sweet. But where’s the MVC CTP that was supposed to be here this week?
In news about web app tool previews that did ship this week, Live Labs announces Volta. Haven’t installed or played with it yet, but I did read the fundamentals page. It primarily looks like a tool to compile MSIL -> JavaScript, so you can write your code in C# but execute it in the browser. Sam and Jesus are excited, Arnon not so much. Arnon’s argument that being able to postponing architectural decisions is to good to be true is fairly compelling, and not just because he quotes me to support his argument. But I’ll download it and provide further comment after I experiment with it myself.
Simple Sharing Extensions is now FeedSync. Not sure what else is new about it, other than it’s been blessed with “1.0″ status. The Live FeedSync Dev Center has an introduction, a tutorial and the spec. (via LiveSide)
Dare likes tuples. Me too. I also like symbols.

Morning Coffee 127

I’m back at the office today after almost two weeks away. So “catch-up” is the official hyphenated word of the day.
Big news last week was an update on Silverlight. The next version (the one with the embedded cross-platform CLR in it) was rebranded Silverlight 2.0 and will include higher-level UI framework features and richer networking support. Look for a go-live beta Q1 next year.
According to Scott Guthrie, there should be a CTP of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions this week, including the new ASP.NET MVC framework that many folks await with baited breath. Scott posted the second in new series on this framework, this time covering URL Routing.
After a long blog silence, Pat Helland posted four presentations that he delivered @ TechEd Barcelona. They’re pretty much required reading as far as I am concerned. Here’s hoping the TechEd Barcelona folks recorded at least the audio of these sessions.
There’s a new drop of F#, v1.9.3.7. Don Syme calls it “a release candidate for F# 1.9.3″. Full release notes are over on his blog.
Speaking of F#, Douglas Stockwell explains how to roll-your-own F# Express by combining the F# download above & the VS08 shell.
Still speaking of F#, Robert Pickering has written an article on Active Patterns as well as a series on concurrency in F#. So far he’s covered Async Workflows (twice), Erlang style messages and message queuing.
Speaking of concurrency, Soma announced the CTP of ParallelFX last week. This includes Parallel LINQ (aka PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (aka TPL). Also check out their whitepaper, team blog and dev center.
I’m a big fan of the Architecture Journal. Now you can get all that great content in a great WPF-based app. Simon Guest has the details.

Afternoon Coffee 126

In a surprise to exactly nobody, the Caps let coach Glen Hanlon go yesterday. I gotta say I feel for the guy. I mean, he had to go, but still. The Caps promoted the coach of their minor league team Bruce Boudreau. Makes sense – the farm team is where you develop players, why not coaches too? The team responded by beating the Flyers in overtime, though they did blow a 3 goal lead along the way.
It won’t get them back in the national title hunt, but thrashing ASU may earn USC a ticket to a BCS bowl, or the Rose Bowl if the Ducks can’t win without Dennis Dixon.
I finally finished Dead Rising today. A sequel has been rumored and hinted at, but not confirmed even though the ending left the door wide open. I really enjoyed it, so here’s hoping. I’m going to hold off on starting anything new until I get back from Canada, but it’ll probably be R6:Vegas. Don’t really have time between now and Christmas to finish Blue Dragon and it’s 3 DVDs.
In more “Screw Turkey Day, we’re shipping anyway” news, p&p shipped a new version of the Web Service Software Factory. This one’s called the “Modeling Edition”. I saw some of this stuff back in August, and I like what those p&p folks are doing. It’s worth a look, just to see how they’ve integrated DSL and GAT.
My old team shipped a new version of their S+S demo app LitwareHR. There’s also some tools for testing multi-tenant databases.
Quick reminder: I’m @ DevTeach Vancouver next week, so blogging will be light. I’ve got a series of thoughts on F# ready to post, but we’ll see when I get network access to post them. Given that I took a month off from blogging a short while back, I didn’t bother asking Dale to cover for me.

Morning Coffee 125

So I wasn’t quite as close to the end of Dead Rising as I thought I was. Those who’ve played the game thru will understand.
After their promising start, the Capitals lost yet again. At the 20 game point, they’re now 6-13-1 for a league-worst 13 points. I think we’re at the point where they need to fire Glen Hanlon. Nothing personal Glen, but it’s not getting done. The only problem is who you would replace him with? Bob Hartley? Uh, no thanks. I think most Caps fans want Dale Hunter, but I think he’s too involved with the London Knights – he’s co-owner, president and head coach. But if we could get Dale, I’m guessing Glen would be gone in a heartbeat.
The XNA team blog announced that XNA Game Studio 2.0′s beta has released. The download is available from Creators Club Online. The big new feature in this release is network support, and they’ve shipped a new starter kit to get you started.
In addition to shipping VS08 & .NET FX 3.5, a new CTP of SQL 2008 shipped yesterday. I couldn’t find a good overview of what’s new, but the SQL Express team has a post on what’s new in just their corner of this release. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
In more “I know it’s Thanksgiving week, but we’re shipping anyway” news, the Ruby.NET folks have shipped v0.9 – the first release since transferring control to the community. Does it run Rails? Not yet, but apparently they’re “close to getting Ruby on Rails to run successfully”. One thing that caught my eye is that it includes VS integration. Nice.

Morning Coffee 124

While my blog was down last week, I finally finished Gears of War. I played thru on hardcore, but had to throttle back to casual to beat the last boss. I’d like to try and finish on hardcore, but I’ve moved on to Dead Rising – another game from last year I never had time to finish. I’m almost done the main play mode, though I understand there are other play modes that get unlocked when you finish it.
I’m forbidden from buying any new games before Christmas, so Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed and The Orange Box will have to wait. My next game will either be Blue Dragon, which a friend let me borrow, or R6:Vegas, yet another (but the last) game from last year I never got time to play.
I’ll skip the “giving thanks” jokes and point out that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 have shipped. Soma has the announcement and both Scott Guthrie and Sam Gentile summarize what’s new. The Express editions are available from the new Express Developer Center. The VS SDK doesn’t appear to be released yet, but I’m sure it will be along in due course.
Speaking of VS SDK, CoDe Magazine did an entire issue on VS Extensibility which you can read online or download as PDF.
Nick Malik took a bunch of heat back in June for what some thought was a redefinition of Mort, one of the Developer Division personas. Now Paul Vick thinks it’s time to retire the Mort persona, primarily because of the negative connotation the name carries. His suggestion for a replacement is Ben (as in Franklin). And did you notice how similar Paul’s description of Mort is to what Nick described? I’d say some folks owe Nick an apology.
I said Friday I was going to take a closer look @ OpenID and OAuth. There’s an intro to OpenID on their wiki and Sam Ruby’s OpenID for non-SuperUsers seems to be the canonical source on implementing OpenID on your own blog. Frankly, reading the OpenID intro reminded me a lot of WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile. Does OpenID have the equivalent of an “active” mode?
Likewise, the Beginner’s Guide to OAuth series of posts by Eran Hammer-Lahav is a good intro to OAuth. The phrase “Jane notices she is now at a Faji page by looking at the browser URL” from the protocol walkthru makes me worry that OAuth is vulnerable to phishing. Having one of the OAuth authors call phishing victims careless and wishing for Karl Rove to “scare people into being more careful and smarter about what they do online” makes me think my fears are well grounded. I’m thinking maybe OAuth and OpenID aren’t quite ready to nail down WS-*’s coffin.
In researching OpenID, I came across this presentation hosted on SlideShare. I had never seen SlideShare before – it’s kinda like YouTube for presentations. Sharing basic presentations is kinda lame – there doesn’t appear to be any animation support, so the slides are basically pictures. However, they also support “slidecasting” where you sync slides to an audio file hosted elsewhere. That I like. I have a bunch of old decks + audio, maybe I’ll stick them up there.

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The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion.