I finally got around to updating my blog rolls from my news reader. I keep three separate ones – my team & architect evangelists bloggers, other MS bloggers and other non-MS bloggers – which is a pain to maintain (which explains why I haven’t updated  them in a long time).

Two new architect bloggers to report. Javed Sikander is an architect on the Architecture Strategy Team focusing on RFID. He links to a pair of articles about Microsoft and RFID plus provides his thoughts on why RFID is a big deal. David Solivan is an architect advisor and an ex-teammate from my old .NET Adoption Team days. So far, David appears to be blogging at conferences. He started in July at MGB and then went dark for a few months. He picked back up at SAF. I hear he’s at a conference this week, so maybe we’ll see some more from him.

That brings the total number of bloggers from my team to 14. That’s over half of the team and I know at least two more coming down the pipe.

Gareth Jones is another blogger from the VS modeling team. He’s got some great posts on using OneNote as a shared whiteboard and the use of color-coding in modeling. Given the fact that a popular use of modelling today is for sketching, it’s interesting to read about how the team is looking at bringing those idioms forward while also making the models precice enough to be used as development artifacts.

BTW, no problem on the image “borrowing” Gareth. 😄

We’ve had some technical difficulties around here. Tom installed ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 1 on this box and it automatically upgraded all the web apps on the machine to the new version. It caused a bunch of issues including breaking the admin interface and requiring a reboot every few hours. I spent some time this afternoon getting all the web apps back on ASP.NET 1.1. I uninstalled all of the beta bits, but it still didn’t work – I needed to use the aspnet_regiis utility to completely uninstall the IIS registration and then reinstall. I get the feeling that I could have left the beta bits hanging installed and just used aspnet_regiis to reset the registration, but better safe than sorry.

Anyway, since I couldn’t log in, I obviously couldn’t blog. I keep an Outlook task folder of “Shit to Blog” that’s gathered a few items, so I’m looking forward to getting those posted.

Some other ‘softies blogging OOPSLA:

• Keith Short talks about the DSL Tutorial and apologizes for our keynote demo.
• Steve Cook talks about the MDA panel and says the keynote demo “wasn’t such a great idea”
• Stuart Kent describes the DSL Toolkit and calls the keynote demo a “commercial break”
• Michael Lehman briefly describes his work building a software factory for the DSL Tutorial and blogs Jack’s GPCE keynote presentation on Software Factories

Finally, Brant Carter took me to task for pointing out that Alan Kay ended his Turing Lecture with a product demo. Brant makes good points and I agree with all him. I think all the ‘softies blogging OOPSLA have acknowledged how poorly this went and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that somehow we were vindicated by Alan’s demoing stuff in his lecture. I plan on giving Squeak a deep look when I get some free time – I have an 18 month old son so Alan’s lecture on teaching computer science resonated with me.