• I finished Mass Effect last night. I definitely need to play thru that one again, though I’ll probably wait until the new Bring Down the Sky DLC ships next month.
• Caps won again last night, improving to 20-10-4 since changing coaches at Thanksgiving. They’re now at 57 points, taking the lead in the SE division with a full game on Carolina, Atlanta and Florida. Still a ways to go – 27 games left in the regular season – and things are far from “sewn up” but we’re a damn sight better off than we were in November.
• Speaking of a horserace, looks like Clinton and Obama are in one after Super Tuesday. Their estimated delegate counts are basically tied. On the other side of the aisle, McCain opened up what is probably insurmountable lead – even though he has the right-wing media stars and Christian leaders against him. Money quote of the day:

“The real story of the night, when you look at their rallies and their turn-out numbers, is that the Dems have two strong candidates either of whom could lead a united party to victory. Forget the gaseous platitudes: in Dem terms, their choice on Super Duper Tuesday was deciding which candidate was Super Duper and which was merely Super. Over on the GOP side, it was a choice between Weak & Divisive or Weaker & Unacceptable. Doesn’t bode well for November.”\

• Mark Steyn, National Review 
  (via Carpetbagger Report, lest you think I regularly read National Review)

• Charlie Calvert is starting a new series on the future of C#. First up: Dynamic Lookup. Probably most interesting is the news that the DLR “will be the infrastructure on which the C# team implements dynamic lookup”. Does this mean C# will target the DLR? Sure sounds like it. I think it’s a good addition, but I’m not a fan of the proposed syntax. (via Bitter Coder)
• Brian McNamara saw me present @ LangNET and sent me a link to his blog. He’s building up a monadic parser combinator library in C# 3.0. This is basically the same concept that FParsec implements, though C#’s syntax is much less attractive than F#’s for this kind of code. However, Brian does a very good job explaining why monadic parser combinators are useful and making the idea accessible to the C# programmer (i.e. you don’t have to learn F# or Haskell to understand what he’s talking about). He also points to Luke Hoban’s C# 3.0 monadic parser implementation.

• After spending most of the last four days away from my desk, I was planning on a quiet day to catch up on a variety of things. Then I heard the oh-so-minor news that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for almost $45 billion. Hasn’t been much reaction on the dev, architecture, politics and hockey-oriented blogs I read, but you can get a ton of reactions on TechMeme.
• Lost is back. Finally. I stayed up late last night reading Lostpedia, catching up on Lost Missing Pieces and the Find 815 ARG.
• Alex The Great had four goals and an assist in last night’s victory. Coughing up three goal lead and letting the Canadiens tie the game in the last 30 seconds isn’t encouraging, but a win is a win. The Caps are currently one game behind the SE leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eight seed Rangers. Alex was named first star for January.
• Ted Neward has a nice summary of Lang.NET by day: one, two and three. I wonder if my talk qualifies for the exception to Ted’s rule that “A blog is not a part of your presentation, and your presentation is not part of your blog”. I had 15 minutes to discuss something I’ve written about over ten posts  (so far).
• John Lam points to the latest DLR hosting spec. I’m much more interested in the DLR code generator, but at least the hosting interface is documented.
• Scott Hanselman has a nice post on fluent interfaces. Note to self, find out if Beautiful Soup works with IronPython.
• I wonder if the VS Source Code Outliner PowerToy works with F#? (via Sam Gentile)
• Chris Tavares has an extensive post Deconstructing ObjectBuilder? I’ve poked around inside OB before, but I’m really looking forward to Unity (also via Sam Gentile)
• NVIDIA finally updated the drivers for the video card in my Tecra M4. That only took a year.

I was hoping to blog my thoughts on Lang.NET as the event went along. Obviously, that didn’t happen, though I was pretty good about dumping links into my del.icio.us feed. The talks were all recorded, and should be up on the website in a week or two. Rather than provide a detailed summary of everything that happened, here are my highlights:

• The coolest thing about conferences like this is what John Rose called “N3″ aka “Nerd-to-Nerd Networking”. It was great to meet in person, drink with and geek out with folks who’s blogs I read like Tomas Petricek, Wesner Moise and Larry O’Brien. Plus, I got to meet a bunch of other cool folks like Gilad Bracha, Stefan Wenig and Wez Furlong. That’s worth the price of admission (which was admittedly nothing) right there.
• Coolest MSFT talk: Martin Maly “Targeting DLR”. I was wholly unaware that the DLR includes an entire compiler back end. Martin summarized the idea of DLR trees on his blog, but the short version is “you parse the language, DLR generates the code”. That’s pretty cool, and should dramatically lower the bar for language development. Of course, I want to write my parser in F#, so I’m going to port the DLR ToyScript sample to F#.
• Runner-up, Coolest MSFT talk: Erik Meijer “Democratizing the Cloud with Volta”. Erik is a great speaker and he really set the tone of his session with the comment “Division by zero is the goal, not an error”. He was referring to an idea from The Change Function that user’s measure of success is a function of perceived crisis divided by perceived pain of adoption. Erik wants to drive that adoption pain to zero. It’s a laudable goal, but I remain unconvinced on Volta.
• Coolest Non-MSFT talk: Gilad Bracha “Newspeak”. Newspeak is a new language from one of the co-authors of Java. It’s heavily smalltalk influenced, and runs on Squeak. He showed developing PEGs in Newspeak, and they were very compact and easy to read, easier even than F#. He calls them Executable grammar, and you can read his research paper or review his slides on the topic. Unfortunately, Newspeak isn’t generally available at this time.
• Runner-up, Coolest Non-MSFT talk: Miguel de Icaza “Moonlight and Mono”. The talk was kinda all-over-the-place, but It’s great to see how far Mono has come. Second Life just started beta testing a Mono-based script runner for their LSL language (apparently, Mono breaks many LSL scripts because it runs them so fast). He also showed off Unity, a 3D game development tool, also running on Mono.
• Resolver One is a product that bridges the gap between spreadsheets and applications, entirely written in IronPython (around 30,000 lines of app code and 110,000 lines of test code, all in IPy). Creating a spread-sheet based app development environment is one of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect, at least to me. If you do any kind of complicated spreadsheet based analysis, you should check out their product.
• If you’re a PowerShell user, you should check out PowerShell+. It’s a free console environment designed for PowerShell and a damn sight better than CMD.exe. If you’re not a PowerShell user, what the heck is wrong with you?
• Other projects to take a deeper look at: C# Mixins and Cobra Language.
• I thought my talk went pretty well. It’s was a 15 minute version of my Practical Parsing in F# series. Several folks were surprised I’ve been coding F# for less than a year.

• I only posted one Morning Coffee post last week. It wasn’t a lack of content, it was a lack of drive on my part. I had 20-30 items flagged in my news reader, but for some reason I couldn’t work up the interest in posting them. So some of these are a bit old.
• I’m at the Language.NET Symposium this week, so look for lots of language blogging. I’ve already chatted with Tomáš Petříček and John Lam. If someone kicks Ted Neward’s ass because he hates Perl, I’ll try and liveblog it.
• Speaking of Ted Neward, he discusses the question “Can Dynamic Languages Scale?” without devolving into a flame-fest. I agree 100% with his point about the difference between performance scaling and complexity scaling. Personally, I tend to err on the side of better complexity scaling, since buying hardware is easier than hiring developers.
• Nick Malik responds to me calling his shared global integration vision flawed. He points to NGOSS/eTOM as an example of a shared iterative model that works. I know squat about that shared model, so I’ll refrain from commenting until I do a little homework on the telco industry.
• Speaking of shared interop models, Microsoft is joining DataPortability.org. Dare Obasanjo and Marc Canter are skeptical that so far this effort is all hype and no substance. Reminds me a bit of AttentionTrust.org. But if DataPortability.org can get off the ground, maybe there’s hope for Nick’s vision (or vis-versa).
• Don Syme lists what’s new in the latest F# release. As I said, this release is pretty light on features. Hopefully, I’ll get some details
• Tomas Restrepo shows how to change your home folder in PowerShell. I need to do this.

• Big news on the WGA strike front: the AMPTP reached a deal with the Directors Guild last weeks. Initial reaction from United Hollywood is mixed, but I’m hopeful this will at least get the AMPTP / WGA talks started again.
• Speaking of new media, Xbox 360 Fanboy has a rundown of 45 short films from Sundance that are getting released on Xbox Live Marketplace. That’s pretty a-typical content for XBLM. Typically, new content on XBLM has been from “Hollywood Heavyweights“. I’m pretty excited to see them branch out content wise.
• Speaking of Xbox 360, seems they had a good year. Congrats!
• Still speaking of Xbox 360, everyone gets a free copy of Undertow this week.
• Scott Guthrie announces the availability of the .NET Framework Source Code. Shawn Burke has instructions for how to use it with VS08. So far, they’ve made the core base class libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF, ADO.NET and XML available. LINQ, WCF and WF are expected to become available “in the weeks and months ahead”.
• Ted Neward wonders if Java is “Done” like the Patriots, or “Done” like the Dolphins? If you want my opinion (I’m guessing yes, since you’re reading my blog), definitely done like the Dolphins. OpenJDK was a desperation move to make Java “cool” again, but it won’t work. People who want an open source stack are using LAMP and language wonks who saw Java as mainstream SmallTalk have moved on to Ruby. The question will be if Sun buying MySQL will make Sun cool or MySQL uncool by association. I’m guessing the latter.
• Speaking of Ted, he’s got a great post about the relevance of game programming to the mainstream or enterprise developer.
• Speaking of game development, David Weller points to all the new XNA GS 2.0 content up on Creators Club Online.
• There’s a new version (1.9.3.14) of F# out, but no announcement from Don regarding what’s new. I reviewed the release notes, seems like this is primarily a bug-fix release with only very minor feature additions.
• Speaking of F#, Don points to Greg Neverov’s implementation of Software Transactional Memory in F#. This immediately reminded me of Tim Sweeney’s Next Mainstream Programming Language talk. Tim suggested said language would need to support a combination of side-effect free functional code and software transactional memory. F# is looking to be closer to that language all the time.
• Still speaking of F#, Don Syme’s Expert F# book is out. I read the draft version – it rocks – but I’m still going to get my own real copy. You should too.
• With their win Saturday, the Caps are back to .500 for the first time since late October. Since Thanksgiving, the Caps are 15-7-4. Only four teams in the league have a better record over that time span. We play one of them tonight – the Penguins – and it’s on Versus, so I’ll even get to see it. In HD no less.