• In a surprise to exactly nobody, the Caps let coach Glen Hanlon go yesterday. I gotta say I feel for the guy. I mean, he had to go, but still. The Caps promoted the coach of their minor league team Bruce Boudreau. Makes sense – the farm team is where you develop players, why not coaches too? The team responded by beating the Flyers in overtime, though they did blow a 3 goal lead along the way.
• It won’t get them back in the national title hunt, but thrashing ASU may earn USC a ticket to a BCS bowl, or the Rose Bowl if the Ducks can’t win without Dennis Dixon.
• I finally finished Dead Rising today. A sequel has been rumored and hinted at, but not confirmed even though the ending left the door wide open. I really enjoyed it, so here’s hoping. I’m going to hold off on starting anything new until I get back from Canada, but it’ll probably be R6:Vegas. Don’t really have time between now and Christmas to finish Blue Dragon and it’s 3 DVDs.
• In more “Screw Turkey Day, we’re shipping anyway” news, p&p shipped a new version of the Web Service Software Factory. This one’s called the “Modeling Edition”. I saw some of this stuff back in August, and I like what those p&p folks are doing. It’s worth a look, just to see how they’ve integrated DSL and GAT.
• My old team shipped a new version of their S+S demo app LitwareHR. There’s also some tools for testing multi-tenant databases.
• Quick reminder: I’m @ DevTeach Vancouver next week, so blogging will be light. I’ve got a series of thoughts on F# ready to post, but we’ll see when I get network access to post them. Given that I took a month off from blogging a short while back, I didn’t bother asking Dale to cover for me.

After a week offline, I think I’ve finally gotten DevHawk back online. I’m having a few issues from my personal laptop, so if you’re having issues seeing the site, please let me know.

I took the downtime to make a few changes to the site. I fixed up a few things with the theme – I run 120 DPI on both my machines and the theme looked wrong in a few places. Now, except for the main text, I specify font sizes in pixels instead of points so it looks right whatever DPI you run in. Also, I finally got around to updating the stylesheet so the tag list and calendar renders correctly plus I added “older posts” and “newer posts” links at the bottom of the page.

I also took the opportunity to get rid of my Projects, Articles and Presentations sections. I didn’t trash the content, I moved it all to my SkyDrive. But now I’ve eliminated a bunch of pages from my site that I just never took the time to keep up to date.

Back to regular blogging “soon”.

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue”
Steve McCroskey, Airplane!

• So it’s been a while since my last post. Just over a month, not including The F5 High, which wasn’t “original IP”. Frankly, I just stopped reading pretty much cold turkey. I wanted and needed to go heads down on day job stuff for a while. Since I haven’t been reading, Morning Coffee is going to be a little cold while I ramp back up.
• The new NHL season is upon us, and the Caps are looking good so far. Obviously, they have the new uniforms, but they’re also out to a 2-0 start for the first time in five years. And in those two games, they’ve only allowed one goal and are 100% on the PK. It’s nice to see them start strong, but obviously there’s a long way to go. Here’s hoping the can stay strong all season.
• Speaking of staying strong, the wheels that were rattling last week came off the Trojan bandwagon completely this week. I’m not sure it’s as big an upset as Appalachian State beating Michigan but it’s close. What happened to the team that scored 5 TD’s in a row on Nebraska?
• Big news last week is that MSFT is going to release the source code to much of the .NET Framework. Scott Guthrie has the details. Frankly, between Rotor & Reflector, it wasn’t like you couldn’t see the source code anyway, so this seems like a no-brainer. But integrating it directly into the VS Debugging experience, that’s frakking brilliant.
• I haven’t had a chance to install the new XML Schema Designer (Aug 07 CTP)  but I was really impressed with this video. The XML Team blog has more details. However, I’m not sure what the ship vehicle is. The CTP install on top of VS08 beta 2, but in the video they keep saying “a future version” of VS, implying that it’s not going to be in VS08.
• Dare is spending some time investigating SSB. I think it’s interesting that some of the REST crowd are starting to see the need for durable messaging. Dare argues that the features and usage models are more important than wire protocol. As long as it’s standardized, I don’t care that much about the protocol. Several of the REST folks mentioned AMQP. While I’ve got nothing against AMQP technically (frankly, I haven’t read the spec), but what does it say about durable messaging vendors (including MSFT) that a financial institution felt the need to drive an interoperable durable messaging specification?

• The big 100. This puts be 1083 posts behind Iron Link Poster Mike Gunderloy. As his .NET skills deteriorate, maybe I can catch up…but I doubt it. I’m only 77 posts behind Sam Gentile, so maybe that’s a bit more feasible.
• The ADO.NET Team blog announces the new Entity Framework CTP. Looks like there’s also a new .NET Framework 3.5 CTP and new Visual Web Developer “Orcas” Express CTP as well. (via Sam Gentile)
• Speaking of “Orcas” VS 2008, it launches with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 next February. (via DNK)
• Scott Guthrie continues is LINQ to SQL series. This time, using LINQ to SQL to update the database.
• My friend Arvidra Semhi recently moved and rebooted his blog. Among his many accomplishments, Arvindra started the Architecture Journal. I’m particularly interested in his recent Service Capsule work. Subscribed.
• Last night was the Microsoft E3 Briefing. Gamerscore blog has the news rundown. Didn’t seem to be any HUGE news. Last year’s E3 was the first Halo 3 showing and X06 featured the Halo Wars announcement. Nothing that earth-shaking this time, though the XBLM keeps on rolling, now featuring Disney movies. (Major Nelson has a list.) I’m thinking that the whole HD-DVD vs. BluRay war is going to be eclipsed by direct download before it’s over, though I’m still waiting for PC support & all-you-can-eat pricing.
• Politics 2.0 Watch: Clay Shirky has a great blog post on modern-day Luddites. As he points out: “A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfort the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys.” How much inefficiency is there in our modern political system? And more importantly, who benefits from that inefficiency? We’ve already seen the dramatic effects blogs can have on political news, media and reporting. What happens when users citizens are no longer satisfied just writing about the political process and want to get their hands dirty in the policy-making process itself?

• Morning Coffee was canceled on Thursday and Friday on account of a kidney stone. So not fun. Luckily, it was a little one and it was alone, but I will be listening very closely to my doctor’s advice to avoid another.
• Took the kids to see Ratatouille last Tuesday and saw Transformers yesterday with my wife due to fluke babysitter luck. I liked Ratatouille, but I’m not sure it’s the 51st best movie of all time. On the other hand, major props for making a kid movie with a significant lack of toy tie-ins. Ratatouille is a better movie that Cars, but I don’t see my four year old boy trading in is Lightning McQueen toy car for a Remy the Rat. Transformers on the other hand obviously did not forgo the toy tie-ins! Still, it wasn’t bad. Kinda reminded me of The Rock with a bigger budget.
• Micahville listed DevHawk on it’s list of 69 Tech Blogs That Don’t Suck. Thanks!
• David Ing boldly writes that C# is getting fat. Or maybe it’s just big-boned. My take: no question that integrated query is a big feature that covers a lot of surface area. But given the prevalence of databases and other queriable stores, it’s critical to improving programmer productivity. Go read Todd Proebsting’s talk on Disruptive Programming Language Technologies. Two of his candidates for disruptive language technologies were Database Integration and Manipulating XML. LINQ neatly covers both.
• According to John Shewchuck, the new BizTalk Services release is available. However, when I click on the “what’s new” page, it tells me they’re experiencing technical difficulties. (Their error page is Oops.aspx. Funny!)
• Scott Hanselman has Programming Personas 2.0. Who are you? I thought I was and “Order n” Architect (the quote “Where’s the whiteboard” is spot on) but my CS background isn’t as strong as the persona’s.
• Sam Gentile is starting to dig into Concurrency and he has a great list of links that have influenced his design.