• Google announces Gears, a browser plugin for taking your web application offline. Developer docs are also available. TechMeme has lots more, but obviously this is yet another significant bow shot in the upcoming unified client platform war. By my count, there are four horses in this race: Microsoft with .NET and Silverlight, Adobe with Flash and Apollo, Google with AJAX and Gears and Sun with Java and JavaFX. Did I miss anyone? (via Dare Obasanjo and Scott Hanselman)
• Alex James writes that REST is about intent and shows a pseudo-code sample posting multiple changes to a single endpoint as a way of demonstrating your intent that they be applied atomically. Andres Aguiar left a comment saying that Astoria does something similar. Personally, I like that model for transactions better than the transaction factory approach Jon Udell describes. But either way, you’ve moved beyond simple CRUD style services and into the world of protocol. Surfacing intent via protocol aligns with what Tim described as making the protocol explicit
• Windows Live posted new beta versions of Writer, Mail and Messenger. I’ve been on an internal build of the new Writer for a while and I’ve really been impressed. There’s also a new Provider Customization API, so I can’t wait to see what the DasBlog folks do with that.
• Scott Guthrie’s LINQ series continues, this time covering how to build the LINQ to SQL data model. Looks like they used the DSL toolkit to build the LINQ to SQL data model designer, cool!
• Martin Fowler digs intoracc, a yacc-esque compiler compiler for Ruby. Looks interesting as a internal DSL example (better than the now-canonical rake example). But why is the sexy new language on the block using old school CFG’s instead of new hotness PEG’s?
• Speaking of Martin, he writes about the opportunity Ruby presents to Microsoft, building on Scott Hanselman’s concerns that Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks. Sam Gentile also weighs in, suggesting that Microsoft is at the crossroads. Frankly, I don’t work in evangelism anymore so I’m going pass these links along without comment except to say that Scott, Martin and Sam are all folks I have much much respect for.

• Microsoft announces Surface Computing. When can you buy one for your house? Probably not anytime soon. TechMeme has lots more.
• The one piece of swag I want more than anything else at TechEd is an Evil Mastermind shirt.
• Nick Allen notes that WSDL 2.0 has reached “proposed recommendation” stage. I guess having a “recommended” version of WSDL is an improvement over the “note” version. But other than having a RESTful HTTP binding in addition to the SOAP binding – and being longer – what’s new?
• Speaking of description languages, Don Box writes about the Web Application Description Language which looks very REST-y in that it supports specifying both the URI as well as the payload format. Like Don, I agree with Erik Johnson who commented that “people attracted to REST (in whatever form) are rebelling against interface-based programming more than WS-* itself”. I have a longer post on this coming, but suffice to say I’m really souring on interface-based programming.
• Nick Malik writes that WCF is immature because of it’s “lack of a routable, intermediable, declared message durability option”. Yeah, that’s a huge problem in my book too. It also relates to the last bullet – since durable messaging is inherently async, it doesn’t fit well into the interface-based programming model.

There appear to be several posts from several blogs that have spawned from my discussion about REST with David. I’ll catch up on them and respond here in the next day or so. In the meantime…

• Saw PotC: At World’s End over the weekend, due to a fluke last minute babysitter availability. It’s gotten mediocre reviews, but I liked it. Not as much as the first two, but certainly better than Spiderman 3. June looks fairly bleak @ the box office. We’ll probably take the kids to see Surf’s Up And Ratatouille. (Remember back when there was only one kids movie per summer?) Evan Almighty might be funny and I remember reading 1408, but I think they’re both rentals. The only thing I’m otherwise remotely interested in is Sunshine.
• Speaking of storytelling, Lost and Heroes wrapped their seasons last week. While early on, it looked like Heroes was going to be the new Lost, Lost’s season finally was awesome. If you don’t watch Lost, you’re really missing out on the best show on TV right now. You have eight months to catch up before season four. Heroes may not be lost, but they’re keeping the interest up with their online comic book plus while Lost scales back to 16 episodes for each of three more seasons, Heroes is bulking up, adding six “Heroes: Origins” and bringing the total to 30 for next season.
• Larry O’Brien fantasizes about his dream PDC. Aren’t there lots of conferences about learning how to “create great applications” on and for the Microsoft/Windows Platform? What about TechEd? (which is where I’ll be next week)
• Sam Gentle continues to dig into WF, examining the various ways you can extend the WF runtime by replacing the persistence, loader and scheduler services. He’s also taking my advice to scrap ExternalDataService and work directly with the WorkflowQueuingService.
• Steve Jones compares SOA to trains and I don’t get it. I mean, his advice on the value of batch processes makes sense, but his train/car analogy seems a bit strained, esp. when he calls the railway system “event based”. Can’t a car be “event based” too? There’s just a much smaller number of people who care about a given car’s events…
• Ted Neward debated OR/M with Ayende on .NET Rocks. Based on Ted’s post, the show must have been a doozy. Sounds like Ted took some controversial positions, including advocating OO databases. Of course, “shies away from controversy” isn’t how I would describe Ted.

• Dottie Shaw – PM on Rome – has a post on Durable Messaging and why she cares. Needless to say, I care about durable messaging too, for all the same reasons…
• PDC07 has been “rescheduled“. Feel free to theorize amongst yourselves the reasons why.
• Friend and ex-boss John deVadoss speaks on Software+Services @ the Enterprise Architect Summit. He finds time to present, but his blog remains quiet…
• JD Meier announces a p&p twofer: beta 1 of both their TFS Guide and their Perf Testing Guide. The TFS guide looks like a packaged doc version of their VSTS Guidance Project wiki.
• Facebook announces their Facebook Platform and Microsoft is supporting it with PopFly and Silverlight. TechMeme has much more.
• Pandora on the Go delivers their service to Sprint cell phones for $3 a month. Raging deal, but where’s the support for Windows Mobile phones? (via Knowing.NET)

• Dare reached a similar conclusion about Silverlight and Apollo that I did. But newly minted Adobe RIA evangelist Ryan Stewart writes that calling Silverlight vs. Apollo the next platform competition is overblown. However, he then reiterates my point that MSFT is moving in on Adobe’s traditional stronghold (aka the web) while Adobe is moving in on MSFT’s traditional stronghold (aka the desktop). The upshot is that both companies are trying to deliver a unified “client” platform that spans desktop, devices and browser. That sounds like “platform competition” to me.
• Apparently I’m missing the this years compiler dev lab. 😦 John Lam is there, with slides from his talk on the DLR. Miguel de Icaza is there, with fairly extensive notes. Hopefully they will post talks like they did last year.
• Speaking of languages, Scott Hanselman explains why he thinks Ruby is “the tits”. Personally, on the scale between “I can’t see where Ruby is such hot shit” and “Ruby is the tits”, I’m somewhere near the middle, leaning towards tits. I love the expressiveness of Ruby’s syntax, but I miss the static typing. Call me over the hill, but I like the compiler catching mistakes at compile time. I realize it’s not for everyone, but I like what I like.
• This talk about Ruby’s expressiveness reminds me of something Larry O’Brien said in the wake of the IronRuby announcement: “I am surprised by the IronRuby announcement. I really thought we were going to see some form of Ruby#:Ruby::C#:Java. Although I’m happy, I was actually hoping to see a new language.” The expressiveness of Ruby that Scott describes (which is to say, not all of Ruby’s expressiveness) would be completely achievable in a statically typed language. Personally, I’d like to see that language…
• My birthday is past, but I want a Lego Ice Cube Tray. (via Geekdad)