• I find Jim Kobielus’ “SOA as 50 square miles of fungus” analogy funny and strangely compelling. The “keep in the dark and feed it shit” jokes practically write themselves. (via Joe McKendrick)
• Politics 2.0 Rising: The number of Americans who got “most of their information” about the 2006 midterm elections was double the number from the 2002 elections.
• Do you use external/flash drives? Do you have issues when you try to “Safely Remove Hardware” with said drive? I do, all the time. Apparently, unlocker is the answer. (via Paul Andrew)
• How come there’s no information about LogToTraceListeners in the WF documentation? As far as I can tell, it’s not in the Windows SDK docs at all and the only reference to it on MSDN is this year-old article and this year-old blog post. I only discovered because someone on the internal WF discussion alias asked about it. I’ve added In my SSB/WF work, I subclassed the built-in SQL persistence service in order to add tracing support. If you’re developing a WF host, you need to turn this on. I find it mind-boggling this isn’t included anywhere in the official WF docs.
• Nice to see Soma bragging about Software Factories. As he writes, our current solution – consisting of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and the DSL Tools - are really just a first step. I’m just starting to experiment with the Web Service Software Factory (WSSF). Aaron Skonnard introduces both the ASMX and WCF version in his two most recent Service Station articles.
• Michael.NET makes Programming Promises and Ted Neward swears the Oath of the Conscientious Programmer. Why stop there? How about the Architect’s Affidavit to actually implement the shit we draw on the white board? The Technologist’s Testimony of understanding and belief in all things geeky and gadget? Come on, isn’t this just called “doing your job”? Do we really need to make promises and swear oaths to take it seriously and do it to the best of our abilities?

• I’m sure glad Heroes is back. And so far, I’m liking this season of 24 better than the last couple. I especially like how they’re introducing Jack’s family to the storyline – very cool.
• Bill Gates will be onThe Daily Show with Jon Stewart next Monday. I rarely miss an episode (though I typically watch it a day or two later via my DVR) so I’m looking forward to this.
• Roger Sessions latest ObjectWatch newsletter is available. Roger does his usual brand of relating architectural concepts to everyday situations (this time, planning his daughter’s wedding). This one was funnier than most – especially since I have a 1 year old daughter – though I’m still waiting for one of these that doesn’t contain the words “doppio machiato”. If you’re reading this Roger, don’t worry, I am enjoying every moment.
• Apparently, I am the keeper of obscure development knowledge on my team. My teammate Buzz was getting an error in shdocvw.dll when trying to open an XSD with the BizTalk editor. He’s on an interim build of BTS06 R2, so bugs are to be expected, but he wasn’t sure what shdocvw was, so he asked me. In case you’re curious, shdocvw is the WebBrowser control.
• Did I mention that I left my laptop power cord at the office again on Tuesday? That’s three times in four the last five trips to my office (not counting weekends, sick days and training). My boss actually got a spare from his boss that I can leave at the house 24/7.

Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of barfing. For all the gory details (you have been warned), check out my wife’s blog.

• Only 12 responses to the State of the Union were posted as I write this. Dunno why, but I was expecting more. Maybe this whole Web 2.0 thing is overblown a bit! 😄
• Speaking of the State of the Union, is it just me, or did anyone else find it odd that the Scooter Libby trial started the same day?
• AtlasASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is done. Lots more on this from Scott Guthrie’s blog. While I’m not personally that interested in ASP.NET AJAX itself, two things strike me as interesting in this release. First, we’re shipping all the code for this. The client side JavaScript library, the Control Toolkit, even the server-side components. Second, it’s nice to see the Developer Division shipping something this significant without waiting for the next release of Visual Studio. Here’s hoping that both of these two trends continue.
• Rich McCollister pointed me to the XmlProviderLibrary. Bad on me for not looking harder.
• Windows Live Writer is pretty cool, but it is missing one feature that I needed twice Tuesday. While embedding images in a post is cake, there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed non-image files. You know, like the ColorConsoleTraceListener Project or the Live Search for Chartity Search Providers. I’m guessing the infrastructure to post images and files would be identical, but there’s no UI interface for it. I checked out the WLW SDK online and found the ISmartContent.Files.Add method, so I’m guessing it’s doable. But there’s no such animal on the Live Gallery. I wonder why nobody else has built this yet? Is this really that unique a request?

• Forgot to say this yesterday, but I’m happy the Colts are in the Super Bowl. Well, I guess I’m more happy that New England isn’t in it. They’ve won it enough lately. I wish the Saints has made it, but at least this way I have no question who to root for on Super Bowl Sunday.
• My Gamerscore cracked 1000 over the weekend. I got 60 points in Dead Rising and 100 points in NHL 07k0%01%02). I have played ten games + three arcade games for a maximum possible Gamerscore of 10,600 and a Gamerscore “conversion rate” of 10.28%. I wonder how good that is? All the leader boards I’ve seen rate purely on Gamerscore.
• Speaking of games, Obsidian (of Neverwind Nights fame) is working on an Aliens RPG! Check out this post by Chris Avellone of Obsidian on Game Design Research (via Game Tycoon).
• Richard Grimes’.NET Instrumentation Workshop rocks. Richard also has extensive workshops on .NET Security and .NET Fusion (aka runtime binding). If they’re as good as the instrumentation workshop, they’re worth a read.
• In my SSB/WF prototypes, I’ve simply been writing to the console. The lo-tech brute force works okay for a console app, but not at all when I move my code into a shared library. So I decided to bite the bullet now and translate the Console.WriteLine calls into TraceSource calls. My prototype isn’t that big (yet), but it went pretty smooth nonetheless. I currently have three TraceSources in my solution – one for the host, one for my SSB activities & workflow service and one for the persistence engine (I just inherited from SqlWorkflowPersistenceService and added the trace calls). I’m sure in time, I’ll wish I had set up my TraceSources differently, but for now it works.
• The one feature I lost moving from Console.WriteLine to TraceSources was color support. Since I am creating voluminous tracing data, I used color coding to indicate which part of the application the trace information was coming from. Of course, the OOB ConsoleTraceListener doesn’t have any mechanism to color code the output. I hacked up a ColorConsoleTraceListener in a couple of minutes that worked great. I say “hacked” because my color choosing code is currently hard coded, rather than being stored the config file. If I get the time to change that, I’ll post the code here.
• While researching ASP.NET’s Membership system, I found this Scott Guthrie post with links to ASP.NET providers for MySql, Oracle and SQLite. I’ve wondered about the lack of a simple file-based ASP.NET role/membership provider and even started hacking together an XML based one. But the availability of a .NET SQLite data provider makes that an interesting option. XML would be human readable, but porting the existing SQL providers to SQLite would probably be easier.
• Politics 2.0 in action: Talking Points Memo is enouraging you (aka Time Magazine’s Person of the Year) to record your own response to tonight’s State of the Union. Basically record your response via camcorder, webcam or cellphone. Then upload it to YouTube and add it to the TPM SOTU group. With President Bush’s approval rating at all time lows, I’m guessing these videos will be venting some of the pent up hostility towards this administration.

• I was checking out the ASP.NET community site, and I noticed a small “Microsoft Communities” toolbar across the top. There’s a little menu that links to other MS community sites like Channel 9 and MSDN Blogs. I’m surprised the NetFx3 community site isn’t included.
• My teammate Dale is blogging about Proper SOA. He lays out 6 Proper SOA principles, and then drills into the first three: meets business needs, requires governance and responds to changing business drivers. I expect to see posts on the remaining principles this week. Maybe Dale should turn this series into an article.
• Speaking of articles about architecture, Architecture Journal 10 is online as a PDF. This issue’s topic is Composite Applications.
• Malbolge is a programming lanugage that is “specifically designed to be difficult to program in.” Here’s Hello World in Malbolge:
  (=<`$9]7<5YXz7wT.3,+O/o'K%$H"'~D|#z@b=`{^Lx8%$Xmrkpohm-kNi;gsedcba`_^][ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA@?>=<;:9876543s+O<olm
  Seriously. Actually, it’s worse than it looks. The effect of any instruction depends on where it is located in memory.  Malbolge is so difficult, it took a month to write a Lisp program to generate that program. However, Lou Scheffer thinks we should think about Malbolge as a cryptosystem. I wonder if it could be used for obfuscation? (via Good Math, Bad Math)
• Nat Torkington blogs about teaching kids to program. He makes the point about “them to think in terms of small steps”. I was lucky to have a computer teacher in elementary school who did something similar. She had us write down instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she then followed them to the letter. For example, if you wrote, “spread peanut butter on the bread” with out first instructing her to take out a slice, she’d happily spread peanut butter on the entire loaf. (via reddit)
• To this day, my wife thinks the peanut butter and jelly lesson negatively affected my ability to communicate with “normal” people. She’ll even say “peanut butter and jelly” when she thinks I’m being particularly obtuse in my communication.