• With this post, I will have posted 31 times in January. I doubt I will average a post a day for the rest of the year, but I’ve averaged less than half a post for a day for the past two years.
• LINQ to whatever is the new hotness. The ADO.NET team blogged about LINQ to DataSet last week. Of course, there’s also LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, LINQ to Entities and LINQ to XSD. Am I missing any other LINQ’s? (Would that be the missing LINQ? har har har)
• Joe McKendrick writes on “rogue” systems in the enterprise. In typical pundit fashion, he doesn’t bother to take a stand on the subject, going so far in this case of having a reader poll rather than offering up his own opinion (wouldn’t want to be wrong, would we?). However, I thought it was interesting that the three poll answers were “No rogue services”, “Sometimes rogue services are OK” and “Why fight it?”. Where’s “Yes, let’s directly empower the users” in that list?
• I finally got around to installing PowerShell on both my laptop and workstation. I love the concept, but so far I just haven’t had the time to dig into it or found a good problem to solve with it.
• Windows Live now has it’s own SDK. According to the Windows Live Dev News, the new and updated areas of the unified SDK include Search, Alerts and adCenter. (via DotNetKicks)
• Speaking of DotNetKicks, is it just me or are a lot of the links submitted by their original authors? Steven Cohn on Service Layer Transparency, Keyvan Nayyeri on How to Write Validators for Custom WF Activities, Mads Kristensen on Universal Data Type Checker just to name three of the top four articles currently on the DNK home page. Seems fishy to blow your own horn like that, but since SNK shares advertising revenue with story submitters, it sorta makes sense.

Most of the technical blogs I read are individual blogs (like this one). Yet, most of the political blogs I read are multi-user. Typically, there is a primary poster – such as Josh Marshal from Talking Points Memo. But TPM has at least four other bloggers on their home page (Paul Kiel, David Kurtz, Greg Sargent, Justin Rood). I wonder why these two blogging communities are so different?

I moved over to FeedBurner a while back. DasBlog has great support for FeedBurner – all you do set your FeedBurner feed name in the DasBlog config and it handles the rest, including permanently redirecting your readers to the new feed.

However, I haven’t been able to make FeedFlares work today. FeedFlares “build interactivity into each post” with little links like “Digg this”, “Email this” or “Add to del.icio.us”. Since FeedBurner is serving the XML feed, it’s no big deal for them to add those links into the RSS feed. But to get those same flares to work on the web site, you have to embed a little script at the end of each item. Scott shows how to do this with DasBlog, except that it didn’t work for me. I’ve tried off and on, but for some reason, the FeedBurner script file I was including was always empty.

Then I noticed the other day that my post WorkflowQueueNames had the flare’s on them. Hmm, why would that post work and none of the rest of mine work? Turns out that it works because there’s no spaces in the title. Unlike most of the rest of the DasBlog community, I’m using ‘+’ for spaces in my permalinks, instead of removing them. So I get http://devhawk.net/FeedFlare+Finally+Fixed.aspx as the permalink url instead of http://devhawk.net/FeedFlareFinallyFixed.aspx. In fact, that feature is in DasBlog because I pushed for it (a fact Scott reminded me of while I was troubleshooting this last night). And it was breaking the FeedFlares.

The solution is to URL encode the ‘+’, which is %2B, in the FeedFlare script link. I created a custom macro, since I already had a few custom macro’s powering this site anyway, and now I get the FeedFlares on all my blog entries. I’ll also go update the DasBlog source, but creating a custom macro was both easier and less risky than patching the tree and upgrading everything.

Last week, after I posting my WF learnings, I got a call from Paul Andrew, Technical Product Manager for WF. Seems calling the built-in persistence service and the built-in web service support “toys” created some extra work for Paul. He blogged a response and I wanted to follow up on a few things here.

1. The “toy” SQL Persistence Service – My understanding about how the built-in persistence service works was incorrect. As per Paul’s blog, “The WF runtime doesn’t load all idle instances on startup, that would be crazy.” Of course, we’re talking about the SQL Persistence Service, not the WF runtime, but it’s still crazy. It’s so crazy that when I thought that’s what the SQL Persistence Service did, I called it a toy! So I’m flat out wrong on this one. Sorry about that Paul (and the rest of the WF team).

2. The “toy” Web Service Integration – Apparently, I was also mistaken about the use of ASP.NET sessions. But I was right about WF’s use of ASMX, the use of the tempuri.org namespace, and that web service support is limited to WS-I basic profile request/response style services. So while “toy” is a bit harsh, the web service integration is still pretty light weight. Where’s the WCF integration? I understand the need to support ASMX, but no WCF means no support for duplex conversations, either as service provider or consumer, and no support for reliable sessions. That makes WF’s web service integration a non-starter in my project. Of course, the good news is that you can build your own WF activities, so I can toss the built-in web  service activites and still get to keep the rest of WF.

3. Is WF itself a “toy”? Paul has a list of reasons why WF isn’t a toy, including some silly ones (it wasn’t in Toy Story). In case there’s any confusion about my opinon of WF, let me be clear: I think WF rocks, full stop. My negative comments about WF were isolated to the two areas listed above and not intended to apply to WF as a whole. The other seven points were all about cool things that I didn’t realize WF does.

I’m not just trying to kiss up to Paul here – WF is one of two foundation technologies that my project absolutely depends on. (Any guesses on the other?) With the class out of the way and a better understaning as to what’s possible with WF, I will be diving much deeper on WF in the future. Watch this space for more WF related posts.

Udi emailed me over the weekend to let me know that he had issues leaving a comment on one of my posts. If you’ve had any issues commenting here on DevHawk, please drop me a line and let me know.

Thanks!