• Scott Hanselman’s post on Mindful Coding reminded me of the practice of rubberducking. The basic idea is that when you’re stuck on a problem, you explain it out loud to an inanimate object – aka the rubber duck. (though when I originally heard about this practice, it was a teddy bear.) Maybe instgead of Coding Mindfully, we should be Coding Out Loud?
• Quick side note to the previous bullet: I have often worked thru a problem by explaining it to my wife who, like Scott’s wife, nods in all the right places, but cares not about such things. But calling your wife a rubber duck is bad for your health, so I’d rather call it Coding Out Loud.
• I’m a couple weeks behind on this, but Microsoft along with BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, and Sun submitted the Service Modeling Language to the W3C. For those not plauing along at home, SML is the new name for the System Definition Model and is a core deliverable of the Dynamic System Initiative. Good to see it’s gotten such broad support for this.
• Jezz Santos and Edward Baker wrote a series of posts entitled “Factories 201“. The entire series is good, but I particularly liked Jezz’ post How Long Will It Take? His rough estimate is that it takes at least five products built with a software factory before you recoup your investment in building the factory itself. Sounds like a fair assumption.

• I survived the weekend no problem. My wife has the details of what she did for the weekend while I played Mr. Mom. The kids were great, we even went to see the Easter Bunny on Sunday. Wish the weather had been better, but we did get to go on a little walk around the neighborhood between hailstorms Sunday after naps.
• Between taking the kids all morning until Jules got home from the airport and going to opening day for a team morale event, I worked about 30 minutes yesterday. In case you’re wondering, that’s way below average. I typically work at least twice that every day. 😄
• After maintaining a post a day average for January and February, I slipped a bit in March. Twenty seven posts in thirty one days. So that puts me five posts behind for the year as of this one.
• Dale let me borrow Madden 07 for the weekend so I could pump my gamerscore (a practice called gamerscore whoring). I still need 255 points by April 22nd to complete the Old Spice Experience Challenge. I’m not proud of it, but it’s not like I have much time to play these days.
• Mads Kristensen has a new .NET blog engine intuitively called BlogEngine.NET. I wonder how it compares to dasBlog, which powers DevHawk. (via DotNetKicks)
• I wrote a last week that unit test support should be in the Express editions of VS. Thanks to Jamie Cansdale, it is. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman saved his C# Tiny OS project from the impending shutdown of GDN and reposted it to his blog. I first met Scott at TechEd Malaysia 2002, so I remember seeing him present this “back in the day”.
• EMI is going to start offering songs sans DRM @ $1.29 a pop. Assuming other labels follow suit, this is gonna be huge. (via Loke Uei)
• Jomo Fisher writes about using LINQ as a string switch compiler that’s about 900% faster than using a hash table. Money quote: “Any time I see a data structure with a capability I’m not using it makes me wonder whether I can trade that capability for something I do need—in this case a speed boost.” LINQ is turning out to be much more interesting than just a (much) better way to query databases. (via DotNetKicks)

I’ve had a solid morning of meetings. I’m a little sick. My wife leaving town for a few days. Last but not least, things seem afwul quiet out in the blogoshpere. Thus, no Morning Coffee post today or Monday. See you Tuesday.

• Many years ago, I picked .net instead of .com as DevHawk’s TLD. My old pal Chris picked up devhawk.com and redirected it to the site because he got tired of typing “devhawk ctl-enter” into the browser address bar and getting nothing. He must have let it lapse because now devhawk.com points to what looks like a splog in development. Part of me is annoyed, but a bigger part of me just doesn’t give a shit. You – dear reader – have found this site, and that is all I care about.
• A couple of weekends ago, I re-wired my living room to enable surround sound. It meant adding a receiver to the mix, and that pushed us into three remote territory, which is too many. So I picked up a Logitech Harmony Universal Remote, since they have one specifically for the Xbox 360. So far so good, but I’m not sure my wife likes it much yet. However, their remote config application doesn’t run on Vista yet, so I had to bust out the old laptop to get it working.
• I’ve written about Spec# before, but I’ve never experimented with it. MS Research just released a new version that support VS05, so here’s my chance. (via Larkware)
• Speaking of MS Research, the Deepfish project has released a new tech preview. However, Loke Uei is reporting they’ve already maxed out on test accounts. (via Major Nelson)
• Jeff Atwood says there’s no substitute for learning on the battlefield. I always say that the only way to get good at something is to suck at it for a while. Different words, same concept.
• According to Naysawn Naderi, the “majority” of unit test features are being added to the Orcas Pro version. This is obviously good news, though personally I agree with Brad that they should available separately VS. Not sure it needs to be in the framework itself, inclusion in the .NET Framework SDK is probably sufficient. I also think there should be unit test support in the VS express editions as well. (via Knowing.NET)
• I’ve been digging Geekdad, but most of the stuff is for older kids. I mean, I’d love to take my daughter karting, but she’s only two and can’t reach the pedals! However, I’m itching to try out today’s post on image searching with younger kids. The kids love to draw on my new tablet, so I’m thinking of not only searching but snipping these images into OneNote for them to doodle on.

• The black Xbox 360 Elite is official. Details on Gamerscore and Major Nelson.
• Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games writes about XNA and the approval process for making an Xbox Live Arcade game. At the end of his post, he confirms that his team is using a “pre-pre-alpha” version of XNA Game Studio Professional. I wonder how long before that’s widely available?
• Politics 2.0 Advice: When building your MySpace page, don’t use images hosted on other peoples servers. John McCain found out the hard way. (via Balloon Juice)
• Speaking of Politics 2.0, you can check out the Roots Project, described as “a social networking site for people with progressive values, allowing them to form their own groups, sharing information and best practices nationally while acting together locally.” (via firedoglake)