I finally made the decision to dump SharpReader. The massive memory utilization (100+ MB) combined with the myriad of alert toast popups finally sealed the deal. Currently, I’m using intraVnews and I’m going to try out the new NewsGator when it’s available.

Reading blogs in Outlook does take some getting used to. Search Folders makes it easier, but then my feeds are sorted alphabetically rather than by the feed category (i.e. the parent folder). Is there a hotkey or shortcut for jumping to the next unread item (even if it’s in a different folder) when using the reading pane? Also, I’m used to deleting emails after I’ve read them but I’m used to letting posts get deleted when they are a couple weeks old. IntraVnews supports this option, but maybe I’m better off treating posts like email and deleting them when I’m done.

Don mentioned he was going to roll his own blog engine so he can use it for experimentation. (I’d link to the entry bu permalinks seem to be broken in his current blog engine). I keep thinking of the same thing about news readers.

Update: thanks to Wesner Moise for pointing out to me in my comments how to turn off the alert toast popups. However, I’m still going to stick it out with an Outlook based solution. Luckily, I’m not like most ‘softies w/ a ton of unread email in my inbox so the built-in search folder works fine.

So it was a year ago today that I started this blog. It’s interesting to see how much has changed in that time. My son was born, I switched jobs, I got an article published in MSDN and even my wife is blogging now. And I’m even blogging this from Phoenix where I started blogging in the first place!

I was in Phoenix for a local architect roundtable event. It went great. I was filling in for a teammate who had a conflict, but I hope to do more of these in the future as it’s a chance to interact directly with the architect community. I presented Metropolis – we’re working on getting more info about that up on architecture center very soon. I also got a chance to do my “performance doesn’t matter” rant discussion that seems to always come up when you start talking about building services. I’ll blog that later, I’ve got a plane to catch.

First Simon, then Ram, now another member of the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team is blogging. David Hill just started, but he’s already posted an article entitled “A Simplified Asynchronous Call Pattern for WinForm Applications“. In the article, David describes “how you can implement a simpler asynchronous call pattern which allows you to consume web services from a WinForm application without having to worry about threads ever again.” Cool!

Another member of the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team, Ramkumar Kothandaraman (we just call him Ram), has started a blog. Like Simon, Ram spends most of his time with customers solving hard architecture issues. Check out his post on architectural agility.

After reading Sam’s slides on Atom, Scoble posted three times about how syndication could evolve. Of course, Scoble has his Longhorn-colored glasses on. Dare pointed out that “The major problems with syndication today have little to do with the syndication format and more to do with it’s associated technologies.” I agree with Dare. IMO, the only thing that the ATOM syndication format has over RSS is a namespace declaration. I care about that because one of the “associated technologies” I care about is SOAP and the lack of an RSS namespace makes it hard to embed an RSS item inside a SOAP message.

I think Scoble should be asking how syndication will evolve in the face of Service Oriented Architecture in general, not Longhorn specifically. Granted, Indigo is going to make Longhorn a great platform for SOA. (If you check out the Longhorn Interoperability and Migration Guide, Chapter 2 is mostly dedicated to describing SOA.) But I think the real change to syndication is going to come from WS-ReliableMessaging. In order to truly evolve syndication, I think we need to break free of the synchronous polling model we have today. Polling only works in scenarios with a central syndication source (like a weblog). However, as the sources of syndicated content get to be more distributed (phones, P2P networks, etc) that polling model breaks down. I need to be able to send messages when things change without regard to network availability. With WS-RM, I can send messages and the infrastructure (i.e. Indigo) can take care of the ugly details of making sure the messages get delivered to their final destination.