• Beta 1 of VS “Orcas” and .NET Framework 3.5 has shipped. Get it here. Besides LINQ, I’m most looking forward to experimenting with some of the new WF/WCF integration work. However, I don’t think this beta includes DBPro functionality. Not surprising, given that DBPro only shipped a few months ago, but disappointing since I’ve moved all my database dev work over to that model.
• Korby Parnell introduces Claimspace, part of the Microsoft.Community family. While the other family members are retreads – blogs, forums and tagging – but this seems like something fundamentally new – or at least new to me – and therefore interesting. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman updates the new version of Notepad2 to re-enable Ruby support originally built by Wesner Moise. Ruby is nice, but where’s the PowerShell love?
• After his performance in front the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Gonzales is grossly incompetent, lying or both. What does it say about President Bush that he was “pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony“? It says Bush values loyalty over competence, is hiding something or both. Given that his approval ratings can’t get much worse, I guess standing by Gonzales even in the midst of bi-partisan calls for his resignation isn’t going to affect Bush much politically. On the other hand, confirming a new AG with a Democratic congress and low 30% approval rating might be devastating, depending on the bodies buried over there.

Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of rain. In my living room. It’s fixed now.

• Andre Vrignaud writes about MS Research’s new High Capacity Color Barcodes technology. As he points out, there’s some fascinating gaming potential for these barcodes because they have such high capacity (something like 2kb per square inch) and can be read without special equipment (a camera phone should work).
• According to a Pew Research Center report, Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers are significantly better informed than Fox News viewers. On the other hand, they’re only slightly more informed than O’Reilly Factor viewers or Rush Limbaugh listeners so it seems like a wash.
• Speaking of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, you can now download them from Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace. But at $2 160 points an episode, it’s cheaper to set my DVR.
• I recently re-discovered Remus Rusanu’s SSB blog. He went dark for a few months there, but he’s recently posted a new version of his Service Listing Manager utility, presented SSB at DevConnections and showed how to implement a managed stored proc to receive SQL DDL event notifications. Event notifications is one of those features I didn’t even realize was in SQL.
• Dottie Shaw, one of the program managers on my project, has started blogging. That leaves two team mates and one project member still not blogging.
• Yesterday, I stumbled into some other teams morale event. They were bogarting the cafeteria, so it wasn’t like I was crashing it or anything. Normally, I wouldn’t hang around some other teams party, but they had a projector, an Xbox 360 and two copies of Guitar Hero so I had to hang out and watch them play head-to-head for a while. That looks like a fun game.
• Chris Anderson writes at length about the primary enemy of Long Tail economics: “the absurdly complicated and expensive process of rights clearance”. His case in point is the coming DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati, which has replaced the dozens of songs used as background music with “Muzak-style songs that could be licensed in perpetuity for a small flat fee” that apparently “sucked ass”.

• My brother is a VaTech alumni, so the shock of the deadly shootings there yesterday hits very close to home. My heavy heart is with the grieving Hokie nation today.
• Jeff Atwood has a couple of greatposts on Language vs. Platform. Earlier in my MSFT career, I spent a significant amount of time explaining .NET, often to companies that had made a significant investment in Java. Picking the Java platform is fine (it’s almost the best platform around!), but it seemed many people I spoke to didn’t understand the fact that “[w]hen you choose a language, like it or not, you’ve chosen a platform“.
• Ian Thomas riffs on my When is a Service Not a Service post. I like Ian’s thinking about SaaS as an analogy for SOA adoption – if for no other reason that SaaS is easier to “get”. But trying to realize SOA via SaaS inside the enterprise is a mistake in my opinion (and I think Ian would agree with that). SaaS is a business model, and I don’t think you want to turn your enterprise into an internal service marketplace. Instead, this ties back with Nick Malik’s points about central planning. Regardless if I’m right or wrong, I subscribed to Ian’s blog (and not just because he linked to me – check out his Elements of the Future Business Ecosystem)
• TLA Watch: Oracle coins Application Integration Architecture (aka AIA). Joe McKendrick calls it “Big SOA”. Isn’t this the market segment that BizTalk has been in for seven years?

• I took my son to the Pacific Science Center this past weekend to see the Grossology exibit. His favorite was the barfing machine, but we also got to play Urine: The Videogame, stand inside a giant nose, work the burping machine, climb the scab wall and slide down the throat into the stomach and come out thru the colon. We also checked out the dinosaur exibit (Patrick’s favorite part: petrified dino poop), Kids Works and the Peter and the Wolf laser show. It was awesome.
• This week’s Big News^TM is the rebranding of WPF/E as Silverlight. Tim Sneath has the rundown, including the news that more news about Silverlight is coming at MIX. Personally, I think Silverlight is a great name. I was worried it was going to be another W*F name. (I’m waiting for the day that MSFT marketing tries to rebrand Win32 as the Windows Technical Foundation).
• Gianpaolo Carraro writes about what happens when a SaaS company bites the dust - i.e. “what happens to my data?” I expect that this is one of the aspects of SaaS that you have to weigh, though I doubt most companies will explicitly think about what happens if their SaaS provider goes belly up. As the SaaS market expands and more companies will go belly up (I agree w/ GP 100% that this isn’t SaaS specific, rather a natural force of any market) how much will that drag on SaaS adoption? I’m thinking it’ll be a fairly significant drag, but the SaaS market will eventually rebound.
• Nick Malik picks up the decentralization meme is started last Friday and compares enterprise architecture to city zoning boards. In general, I agree with Nick’s “not in a vacuum and not with a heavy hand” comment, but even more with his point that “we haven’t figured all it out yet.” Most EA efforts I’ve seen have been heavy handed and fairly divorced from reality (aka in a vacuum). More on this topic in the future.
• Kirk Evans closes the loop on city planning with a reference to Pat Helland’s Metropolis work. Pat’s work has been a huge influence on me. I often repeat Pat’s point about cities being “interconnected yet independent”. Services need to be interconnected yet independent also.
• Roger Wolter has a new Master Data Management whitepaper out, this one MDM hubs. I was literally talking about MDM on a conf call this morning, so Roger’s timing is impeccable.
• I haven’t read RADAR Architecture yet, but the fact that DAR in the acronym stands for “Dumb-Ass Recipient” made me laugh. (via Sam Gentile)
• MIT Media Lab has cointed the latest 2.0-ism: Human 2.0. I love Nick Carr’s take on it: “We’re definitely overdue for an upgrade – it seems like we’ve been stuck in Version 1.x for a few hundred thousand years, and that was after a beta that went on for freaking ever. Still, I think I’ll probably hold off until 2.01 or 2.02. I don’t want to be on the bleeding edge for this one.”

• My friend Christoph Schittko (who used to blog here, but hasn’t written anything in almost two years) recently wrote on an internal email thread that he “wonder[s] how many more attempts for “enterprise wide” thingies we need for people to figure out that there’s too much complexity involved to coordinate anything enterprise wide.” I couldn’t agree more, though I think it’s more than just complexity at work here. There are significant forces driving decentralization in society in general and IT in particular, and anything enterprise wide is by definition centralized.
• I’m way behind on this, but Ray Ozzie did an fascinating interview with Knowledge@Wharton. I was especially interested in his separation of “big-I” and “small-i” innovation. Sounds like disruptive and sustaining innovation from The Innovator’s Dilemma to me.
• According to Mary Jo Foley, my ex-teammate Mike Walker is “da man” on Office Business Applications, or OBA’s.
• I think I have an old PocketPC hanging around in a drawer somewhere. Apparently, I can use it as a caller ID server instead of gathering dust. That’s sorta freaky. (via Backstage @ MED)
• Quote of the Day: “If you have a live show on a TV network, Its not good to have a brain fart during a slow news week.” – Mark Cuban. Personally, I don’t care one way or the other about Don Imus, but Mark’s points about the conservatism of media corporations are spot on.