Seems like a slow week.

• Jules and I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie this past weekend. It’s easily the weakest of the six HP stories so far. The first two stories were about discovering this magical world, the next two about discovering Harry’s past, and the last two about confronting said past. That leaves OotP as the odd-story-out, mostly bridging from the end of the fourth story to the start of the sixth.
• Speaking of movies, the new movie feature of Mobile Search v2 rocks, though I have two quick suggestions. First, it would be nice to have a time-sorted view of when a given movie is playing. So if it’s playing at 4pm at one theater and 4:30pm at another, you’d see them in a list ordered that way. Second, how about an option to buy tickets directly from the phone?
• If you’re interested in WPF and 3D, Eric Sink has a series for you.
• Old news, but Windows Home Server RTMed on Monday. I’m really looking forward to this product.
• I was looking for some information on how WCF pumps messages in the service host and I found this post from Maheshwar Jayaraman. Between that post and Reflector, I think I’ve got a good handle on how ChannelDispatcher works.
• Larry O’Brein callsoutthree MS Research Projects. Microsoft Research Accelerator is a high-level data-parallel library that targets GPUs. Graph Layout Execution Engine (aka GLEE) is a library for graph layout and viewing. VirtualEarth MapCruncher converts existing maps (PDF and bitmaps) to work with Virtual Earth.
• Ted Neward weighs in on the David Chappell’s Korean War REST vs. WS-* analogy. Skim the history lesson, but make sure you read his points about security and reliability interop. WS-* has addressed these areas, so if you need those capabilities, why wouldn’t you use WS-* to get them rather than re-invent the wheel? As for the history lesson, Ted does say he thinks software development is more analogous to making war than building a house. He expands on that idea and recommends Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War. I want to read the book and mull it over a bit, but I certainly see where Ted’s coming from.

• In doing a little LINQ research, I stumbled upon Wes Dyer’s Yet Another Language Geek blog. Fascinating stuff. Subscribed. Be sure to check out his recent posts about Partial Methods, another new C# 3.0 (and VB9) language feature.
• Werner Vogles has a great post on what a CTO does, including a summary of four different approaches to the job.
• Somasegar lets us know that even though VS08 doesn’t launch until February of next year, MSFT is “still aiming to release Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 by the end of this year”.
• There’s a new version of the Windows Live Mobile Search client. The Virtual Earth / Live Search team blog has the details. New features include Movie Showtimes, More Local Data with Reviews and improved Maps and Directions (including GPS integration). Can’t wait to get this installed. (via Dare Obasanjo)
• XNA Gamefest is coming up next month. It’s sort of like PDC for game developers. It’s where we make our big game dev announcements – last year, we announced XNA GSE there. They recently published their session abstracts, including a whole track on XNA Game Studio Express. As Shawn Hargreaves points out, an “enterprising reader could probably make a good guess” about some of the new stuff getting announced @ Gamefest.

• The big 100. This puts be 1083 posts behind Iron Link Poster Mike Gunderloy. As his .NET skills deteriorate, maybe I can catch up…but I doubt it. I’m only 77 posts behind Sam Gentile, so maybe that’s a bit more feasible.
• The ADO.NET Team blog announces the new Entity Framework CTP. Looks like there’s also a new .NET Framework 3.5 CTP and new Visual Web Developer “Orcas” Express CTP as well. (via Sam Gentile)
• Speaking of “Orcas” VS 2008, it launches with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 next February. (via DNK)
• Scott Guthrie continues is LINQ to SQL series. This time, using LINQ to SQL to update the database.
• My friend Arvidra Semhi recently moved and rebooted his blog. Among his many accomplishments, Arvindra started the Architecture Journal. I’m particularly interested in his recent Service Capsule work. Subscribed.
• Last night was the Microsoft E3 Briefing. Gamerscore blog has the news rundown. Didn’t seem to be any HUGE news. Last year’s E3 was the first Halo 3 showing and X06 featured the Halo Wars announcement. Nothing that earth-shaking this time, though the XBLM keeps on rolling, now featuring Disney movies. (Major Nelson has a list.) I’m thinking that the whole HD-DVD vs. BluRay war is going to be eclipsed by direct download before it’s over, though I’m still waiting for PC support & all-you-can-eat pricing.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: Clay Shirky has a great blog post on modern-day Luddites. As he points out: “A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfort the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys.” How much inefficiency is there in our modern political system? And more importantly, who benefits from that inefficiency? We’ve already seen the dramatic effects blogs can have on political news, media and reporting. What happens when users citizens are no longer satisfied just writing about the political process and want to get their hands dirty in the policy-making process itself?

• Mladen Prajdic has a great post on handling a database in your unit tests. He mentions NDbUnit but seems mostly to favor SQL 2005′s database snapshot feature. He’s got sample code for creating and restoring a snapshot. (via DNK)
• Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 released yesterday. Tandy Trower – GM of the Robotics group – has the details on what’s new.
• Herb Sutter has a new column in Dr. Dobbs on concurrency. First up, “building a consistent mental model for reasoning about concurrency”. Sounds like a must read column. (via LtU)
• Scott Hanselman describes “Sez You Architecture”. I wonder, do architecture ninjas get to wear a Shinobi shozoku?
• From the Not Everyone Agrees With DevHawk Dept.: Libor Soucek disagrees with me and thinks that durable messaging should be avoided. I had a hard time following Libor’s logic but needless to say, I disagree with his disagreement. He writes that one of the reasons to use DM is for “Cooperating on transaction with external system”. While multiple systems may be cooperating on a business transaction, in no way do I believe they are going to cooperate on a database transaction. But since he started talking about the DTC, I suspect we’re talking past each other. Libor, drop me a line and we can discuss further.

• Morning Coffee was canceled on Thursday and Friday on account of a kidney stone. So not fun. Luckily, it was a little one and it was alone, but I will be listening very closely to my doctor’s advice to avoid another.
• Took the kids to see Ratatouille last Tuesday and saw Transformers yesterday with my wife due to fluke babysitter luck. I liked Ratatouille, but I’m not sure it’s the 51st best movie of all time. On the other hand, major props for making a kid movie with a significant lack of toy tie-ins. Ratatouille is a better movie that Cars, but I don’t see my four year old boy trading in is Lightning McQueen toy car for a Remy the Rat. Transformers on the other hand obviously did not forgo the toy tie-ins! Still, it wasn’t bad. Kinda reminded me of The Rock with a bigger budget.
• Micahville listed DevHawk on it’s list of 69 Tech Blogs That Don’t Suck. Thanks!
• David Ing boldly writes that C# is getting fat. Or maybe it’s just big-boned. My take: no question that integrated query is a big feature that covers a lot of surface area. But given the prevalence of databases and other queriable stores, it’s critical to improving programmer productivity. Go read Todd Proebsting’s talk on Disruptive Programming Language Technologies. Two of his candidates for disruptive language technologies were Database Integration and Manipulating XML. LINQ neatly covers both.
• According to John Shewchuck, the new BizTalk Services release is available. However, when I click on the “what’s new” page, it tells me they’re experiencing technical difficulties. (Their error page is Oops.aspx. Funny!)
• Scott Hanselman has Programming Personas 2.0. Who are you? I thought I was and “Order n” Architect (the quote “Where’s the whiteboard” is spot on) but my CS background isn’t as strong as the persona’s.
• Sam Gentile is starting to dig into Concurrency and he has a great list of links that have influenced his design.