These morning meetings are really cramping the “morning” style of these posts. But better late than never, I guess.

• Politics 2.0 Watch: Democrats pwn Republicans online. (via Balloon Juice)
• Roger Wolter writes about integrating SSB with WF, something I’ve experimented with myself. I didn’t find the integration quite as natural as Roger did – transactions are a real PITA, and Roger apparently he hasn’t looked into that yet - but I agree 100% with the idea that “most SSB programs end up looking a lot like a workflow.” Looking forward to seeing your code, Roger.
• Pat explains his Newton vs. Einstein view of distributed systems and then rants about Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance. In particular, he discusses the evolution of what consistency (and to less extent availability) means in the face of loose coupling. Do yourself a favor and give up on distributed transactions now. Also, Pat points to another paper from CIDR dealing with isolation in services. Haven’t read it yet, but I’ve added it to “the pile”.
• David Chappell writes about Service Component Architecture vs. Service Oriented Architecture. Since I don’t “do” evangelism anymore, I don’t spend much time watching what our competitors are doing. According to the SCA website, SCA is supposedly a “a model for building applications and systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture.” But according to David, SCA 1.0 focuses on “portability, not interoperability, and so they don’t fully define the interactions between components necessary to create composites that cross vendor boundaries.” I realize that we don’t industry agreement on all the details of what SOA means, but I think we all agree that it’s cross platform and cross vendor. Or maybe we can’t even agree on that much.

• Saw Shrek the Third over the weekend with the kids. It’s gotten mixed reviews, but I liked it even though it wasn’t as good as the first two. Is it just me, or has sequel-itis reached an all time high? This month alone we’ve had Spiderman 3, 28 Weeks Later, Shrek the Third and the new Pirates movie opens this week.
• Hot on the heels of his post on anonymous types, Scott Guthrie starts to explain LINQ to SQL, which is where all these C#3/VB9 features have been headed. Lots of digital ink have been spilled on this topic since we announced LINQ @ PDC 05, so I’ll just point out that I think this is the first OR/M solution that really works well across the board.
• David Ing sucks the fun out of PopFly by suggesting it might be a “nice data aggregation / reformatting service for technically-challenged managers [and] their business data”. Sounds like the next step of enterprise mashups.
• Speaking of PopFly, Larry O’Brein thinks PopFly is helping restore ” the bridge between power users and programmers”. From the PopFly FAQ: “We’re going back to our roots in 1975 when Microsoft originally launched BASIC for the Altair 8080. Tools like BASIC and Visual Basic 1.0 democratized development by enabling users to easily build applications on DOS and Windows. We believe we can make Popfly a great tool for building and sharing applications on the Web.”
• Scott Hanselman wonders if Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks. In a related vein, I wonder if MS should be learning more aggressively from the community. MS has been the source of many developer innovations, but certainly not all. For ideas pioneered elsewhere, we tend to eventually get it, but I think we could be better about it.
• Apparently, I’m just a little younger than video games. Pong was born May of 1967, only three years to the month before me. (via Ozymandias)

• Soma announces PopFly, the “fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications” from the Non-Professional tools team. The PopFly team blog has some videos. Sounds vaguely like Yahoo! Pipes, but cooler. While most of the focus is on their browser-based mashup creator, they also have VS support for the non-non-professionals among us.
• Eric Nelson suggests that the new Dynamics CRM systems is actually a LOB application platform in it’s own right. More details in Ben Riga’s MIX session. (via Gianpaolo)
• Sam Gentile is worried that C# is becoming to complex, especially when you also consider how fast the platform is moving underneath. When you get your head out of the debugger for a second and look at the Big Picture, it certainly seems overwhelming. Is it just a question of getting used to it? The first time I fired up the VS.net 2002 alpha and looked at all the classes in the BCL, I had the same overwhelmed feeling, but eventually I got over it. Or have things just gotten too big and move to fast now? If so, it’s time for some new layers of abstraction…
• Udi Dahan writes about building testable services. Testability has to be a core consideration when building anything, but especially a reusable framework. I’ve had similar thoughts about language design. How do you unit test a DSL?
• Roberto Medrano of SOA Software thinks “maybe 20 percent of IT folks understand SOA and half of the rest think they do”. Personally, I think most IT folks don’t agree on what SOA is or should be. Furthermore, we don’t even have a common lexicon to discuss it, so we end up talking past each other and arguing about topics we agree on. I think Roberto is really saying is “most people are wrong because they don’t agree with what I think SOA is”. (via Jack van Hoof)
• Jeffrey Snover talks about the virtuous cycle of .NET language support. His point is that time spent learning .NET pays off as you transition between system programming (C#, VB.NET), shell programming (PowerShell) and script programming (IronPython, DLR). I’m not sure I would break them down that way, but his point spot on.
• Clemens Vasters experiments with the new BizTalk Services with a sample called TweetieBot. I agree 100% with his point about the assumption of centralization will be challenged by the federation of personal services.

• Ian Griffiths posts a much longer version of “Even though the runtime supports multiple languages, most programmers are only fluent in one.” (via Larkware)
• I wrote yesterday that Pat Helland’s first post back was light on the tech talk. Luckily (for us) he takes the bus to work so he has plenty of time to write blog entries. Today’s post is his “personal opinion about how computers suck”. Money Quote: “We try too hard as an industry.  Frequently, we build big and expensive datacenters and deploy big and expensive computers. In many cases, comparable behavior can be achieved with a lot of crappy machines which cost less than the big expensive one.”
• Steve Jones wrote that CRUD is CRAP. I agree 100%, but for additional reasons. Not only is it boooooring to write, it also delegates control outside of the service which I think is a mistake. Check out this post from Maarten Mullender who advised to do CRUD only when you can afford it.
• MIT Media Lab has created Scratch “a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web” targeted at kids 8 and up. It’s a dynamic visual programming language that looks like Lego. Between Scratch, Boku and Phrogram I think my kids will have lots of fun learning to program like daddy does. (via GeekDad)
• Halo 3 is coming September 25th! I foresee lots of people calling in sick that day. And the next. And the rest of the week, etc. etc. etc.

• Pat Helland is finally blogging again. His first post back is basically “what I’ve been up to for the past two years”, which is to say no cool tech stuff…yet. David Ing calls Pat’s time @ Amazon “an extended training sabbatical” and that we’re lucky to have him back. Agree 100%. BTW, since Pat didn’t include a link to his recent paper and presentation, I will.
• Speaking of blogging luminaries, James Clark is also blogging. Don Box calls him the “brightest guy in XML-land”. Money Quote: “any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML.”
• Rick Barnes – aka my boss – likes Roger Session’s white paper A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures and comes up with a number of variants of Roger’s Observe/Orient/Plan/Act model. Then he asks the $64,000 question: “Why then, do we insist on spending months analyzing software the business, interviewing subject matter experts and end users, writing hundred or thousand page “requirements” documents, and meeting to agree on dozens or hundreds of features before we write the first line of code?” Rick is one of the reasons I took this job instead of the other awesome opportunities I had when I was switching jobs. I’m sure you see why.
• Speaking of requirements, Eric Sink has a phenomenal post on requirements. Go read it. Can we officially grant “Walking Spec” anti-pattern status without the customary waiting period?
• Scott Guthrie posted on Anonymous Types, the latest in his series on the new language features coming with LINQ. Anon types in and of themselves are a fairly simple construct – you pass the properties and values into the new object init syntax and the compiler munges up a class to match. Simple, but critical for SQL-style data shaping queries. Of course, the limitation is that you can’t pass the anonymous type object around in any type-safe way.
• LINQ to * Watch: LINQ to SharePoint. Details on Bart de Smet’s blog.
• Jeff Atwood writes a long post to ask for background compilation in C#. +1 on that request. But I disagree with his point about “giving up on the idea that .NET is a multiple language runtime”. Even though the runtime supports multiple languages, most programmers are only fluent in one.
• I’m a bit behind on this, but my old team has moved SkyScrapr to MSDN. For the uninitiated, SkyScrapr is a site for aspiring architects to learn about software architects and architecture.
• p&pClarius has shipped a new software factory: the VSIPFactory, a software factory for Visual Studio Extensibility. Pablo Galiano has more.

Update: I mistakenly attributed the VSIPFactory to p&p. It’s from Clarius. Sorry guys.