• John Backus, leader of the team that developed the first high-level programming language, died yesterday. It’s been a hard year so far for IT industry luminaries. (via Good Math, Bad Math)
• Yesterday, I followed on Martin Fowler’s post on going transactionless. As I said yesterday, I didn’t agree with the idea of no transactions inside a service, but I agree 100% with no transactions between services. Via Paul Brown, we learn that EBay does allow forbids the use of client-side or distributed transactions, but doesn’t outlaw the use of transactions in general. That makes much more sense to me since transactions between services would have to be are distributed.
• Wired just launched a new blog called GeekDad with the mission statement “Cool toys and fun projects you and your kids do together”. Subscribed (via The Long Tail)
• DevHawk made Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog Directory. It’s in the “Software Development and Design” section. Not sure why I’m listed above Raymond Chen, John Montgomery, Chris Sells and Don Box in that section, but that’s nice company to be included with.

• USC is in the Sweet 16. Not sure when that’s ever happened before.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: The rise of political blogs in main stream media reporting. Check out what the LA Times has to say about Talking Points Memo. 2008 is going to be interesting and ugly.
• Jeffrey Palermo wrote that Scott Guthrie showed him a prototype web MVC framework for ASP.NET. Looking forward to seeing that. I thought it was interesting that Jeff described web MVC as “like Rails and MonoRail”. Didn’t Web MVC initially gain popularity on Java with toolkits like Struts and Spring? (via Larkware News)
• For reasons that can’t be explained, I haven’t read Eric.Weblog() in quite a while. My loss. His post on Boundaries was both thought provoking and hilarious, a hard combo to achieve in practice.
• New versions of Expression Design (Beta 2) and Expression Blend (Release Candidate) are available.
• Martin Fowler writes about being Transactionless. I like to see people thinking this way, because I don’t believe transactions across services is feasible or loosely coupled. However, I still think you should use transactions inside the service. Also, I gotta wonder how much time all that error checking logic you have to write takes if you’re not using transactions. What’s the tradeoff?

Sort of late this morning due to back to back meetings…

• I seem to have stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest with my “kinda surprising that no other mainstream language has done this before” comment. Dennis Hamilton and Mike Parsons both asked about other dynamic languages like Javascript and Python in my comments. To be clear, the ability to add a new method to a specific object instance is fairly common in dynamic languages. Extension methods in C#3/VB9 is a different capability – it only supports adding new methods to a class, not to specific object instances. I’m not sure what dynamic languages other than Ruby supports adding new methods to both object instances and classes, but I’m sure they’re out there.
• Some anonymous commenter asked “why invent another language for PowerShell if there are so many great popular languages already in existance [sic]?” I can’t speak for the PowerShell team, but I think they were better off inventing a new language specificly designed for their scenario than they would have been shoe-horning in existing lanugage. To their credit, it looks like the PS team took great care to make the PS lanugage accessable by leveraging common syntax and idioms from other shell programming environments. I’m not a shell programming expert, but isn’t PS more a variant of shell languages that have come before than a brand new language?
• I want a “Works on My Machine” T-Shirt.

• Yesterday’s morning coffee was canceled on account of going to main campus and hanging out with the Architect MVPs. I spent all morning + dinner with them yesterday. Some of these guys I hadn’t seen in nearly two years, so it was a ton of fun.
• Nicolas Allen (aka Dr. Nick) is looking for SQL Service Broker users. I cornered him at the MVP dinner last night and gave him my thoughts on WCF + SSB. You can head over to his blog and do the same. (I’ll post my answers to his questions later today, hopefully)
• The new Vista x64 driver for my workstation’s video card does support monior rotation, so I’m mostly XP free at this point. I’m dual-booting my workstation at this point, while I finish configuring stuff in the Vista partition. With both my workstation and work laptop tablet, I’m XP free at work. Next, I start getting home machines moved over.
• Tom Hollander reports on a new drop of the Guidance Automation Toolkit. Mostly bug fixes like Vista support, but the full list is here. It’s an ugly upgrade process. You have to uninstall all existing guidance packages. I can’t wait until this technology is “integrate[d] … more deeply into Visual Studio and Team System”.
• I mentioned the Podcast Authoring tool that I saw at TechFest last week. Herearesome pictures of it from engadget (via Loke Uei Tan)
• I’ve been thinking of getting a Wii, and the fact I can hack code for it – managed code for managed snobs no less – is just another good reason to do it. (via DotNetKicks)

• I got my Tecra M4 back sans flaky motherboard. That’s my full time laptop now – it’s nice to have a laptop that supports Vista. I’m still running XP on my desktop out of a combination of lack of video driver + laziness. I run dual monitor with my primary monitor rotated to be portrait instead of landscape. Easier to read websites and documents that way. Unfortunately, while there’s a generic WDDM driver for my video card’s chipset, it doesn’t support the rotate function. But according to the Dell support site, they released a new driver for my card a few weeks ago so maybe it’s time to try the upgrade again.
• I sat down to watch Heroes last night, forgetting that it’s not on again until April. Watched 24 instead, but it has really jumped the shark.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on new Orcas language features, this time covering extension methods. On the one hand, it’s pure syntactic sugar. On the other, how sweet it is. It’s kinda surprising that no other mainstream language has done this before.
• Scott Hansleman is a self-described managed code snob. What do you call the opposite of a managed code snob? An unmanaged code snob or a managed code bigot?