So I’m back from vacation and ready to head into work tomorrow. I’m almost over jet lag, but Patrick still thinks his bedtime is his afternoon nap. I slept thru the Tri Nations match yesterday morning, where the New Zealand All Blacks, my new-favorite rugby team, got beat bad by the South Africa Springboks. After losing to the Australia Wallabies while we were in Sydney, the All Blacks are out of the running for the Tri-Nations Cup. Winner of next weeks’ match between South Africa and Australia takes it. (note – apparently, severalreaderspointedout that I got my cups mixed up. Bledisloe Cup is between New Zealand and Australia only, and since NZ and Aus drew in their home and home series, NZ keeps that cup.)

I didn’t blog any of my vacation as it was happening, but I want to revisit two items that I think will be interesting to my blog readers – the Buildings of Sydney and the Sydney Opera House.

I went to Australia (and New Zealand) to present Metropolis. Delivering this talk (as well as the follow-up talk on Buildings and Applications) has changed the way I look at buildings and cities. I’ve lived in three different cities – Washington DC, Los Angeles and Seattle. DC is filled with old buildings, but there are no skyscrapers. No building in DC is allowed to be taller than the Washington Monument. Seattle is relatively young, and there was a big fire in 1889 that destroyed a great deal of the city. Los Angeles is…well…I’ve blogged my opinion of Los Angeles before. LA is like a movie set – it only looks good on TV. Drive around LA and you’ll find miles and miles of mini malls, but no history.

Sydney is very different. Many of the older buildings are under “heritage protection” meaning that their facade’s are protected and can’t be changed. This leads to a fascinating mix of older buildings side by side with modern skyscrapers. Paddy’s Markets, which has been there since at least 1834, is housed in a building originally built in 1909 (according to the building’s facade). However, if you check out the picture, you’ll notice that the building’s second floor is notably more modern than the first floor. That’s Sydney to a “T”, new sitting right next to, or on top of, the old. I imagine that some of the older eastern seaboard cities of America have the same combination of historical and current, but none that I’ve spent a significant amount of time in.

Of course, you can’t go to Sydney and not visit the world famous Sydney Opera House. You can read the history online, so I wont bore you with those details. But here’s something you probably don’t know about the opera house – it’s a pretty dinky opera house as opera houses go. My mother works for the Washington National Opera and I grew up hanging around the Kennedy Center so I’ve been around opera all my life. (Betcha didn’t know that about me, did ya?) The Opera Theatre of the Sydney Opera House only holds 1547 people, only about two-thirds of the Kennedy Center Opera House. It also has limited fly, wing and back stage space – the unique sail roof structure severely limits off stage space. (This isn’t an issue in the Concert Hall, which is housed under the larger sail roof and has less need for off stage space.) I found it very interesting that, as opera houses go, the Sydney Opera House looks great from the outside, but isn’t that well thought out on the inside. This comes back to Metropolis metaphor as well – what’s on the outside (in this case, the roof) severely limits what you can build on the inside (i.e. the theatre). In the case of the Sydney Opera House, it’s no problem as people come from all over the world to see shows there, even if the house creates unique logistical challenges for the company putting on the show. For enterprise apps, you probably won’t be so lucky, so design your roof with great care.

I’m back at work tomorrow, so watch this space.

I finally updated my Architecture Strategy and Evangelist Blogs OPML file. For single updates, DasBlog’s web interface is fine, but for doing a slew of updates it blows. I guess that’s why my blogrolls are so out of date. What I really want is an InfoPath form so I can do all the updates locally and then upload the new file at once. InfoPath’s integration with SharePoint rocks, I wonder what it would take to get that kind of integration on an arbitrary web site? Or, alternatively, how to run your blog on SharePoint? I screwed around with SharePoint as a “personal content management system” a while back, but the difficulty in customizing it (as well as a lack of time on my part) doomed that.

Is it obvious that I’ve been rounding up bloggers on my extended team of architects and architect evangelists? Here’s another: Raj Wall blogged the first of what appears to be several posts about Patterns of Successful Software Projects. I like this as it really starts to expand the idea of what is a pattern. If you look at EASOT, you’ll notice a “Development Architecture Viewpoint” that has the following description:

The development architecture viewpoint is concerned with implementing the other architectures. Applications must be built and maintained in a systematic, efficient manner. The development architecture is composed of elements related to this effort, such as design and development tools, repositories, build master utilities, test suites, tracking tools, and other tools.

In my TheServerSide.net Tech Talk, I pointed out that Test Driven Development is a pattern. I know there are a lot more development architecture patterns. Raj’s post starts to define the terms in this area of the pattern space. Can’t wait to see what Raj has to say about project context – the more I work with patterns, the more important I realize context is.

A couple new MSFT architect bloggers to note. Maarten, author of the recent Dealing with Concurrency article, details his issues with CRUD. David “Lottery” White has restarted his blog and writes about the practical architect. Bill O'Brein blogs about presenting on patterns at TechEd Europe. Both Simon and Kevin have both been experimenting custom MQ transport providers for WSE2 - Simon using MQ Series and Kevin using MSMQ. Tim Ewald is back in blog on the PluralSight site, blogging about the differences between XSD and OO inheritance. And my old teammate Marley explains the game of Spoons. Not sure what that has to do with architecture, but it appears my old team had a very good time in Atlanta.

I’m behind on blogging. Not just writing, I’m behind on reading blogs as well. I hit 1000 unread posts today, and scrapped them all. I can offer up excuses like I was on the road most of July so far, my son hasn’t been feeling well, the start of the fiscal year is always busy (all true – I had to get up and soothe Patrick back to sleep after he woke up coughing as I wrote this post) but there’s no real point in making excuses. I started an outlook task list of “Shit to Blog” back at TechEd, and so far I’ve only removed two items from the list. Part of the reason for that is that I’ve been reading Software Factories which isn’t generally available, so I’m holding off on blogging my thoughts until the book ships. Next week, I’m off for New Zealand and Australia for TechEd, which is going to be awesome but probably mean still less blogging.