Michael Platt, Field Architect in the UK, has started a blog. I know Mike and so I’m looking forward to reading his thoughts on the topics he lists in his first post. Subscribed.

My teammate Simon has posted details of his managed SDK for Outlook codenamed Niobe. He’s also created a GDN workspace for it. Coolness.

The Middleware Company has launched TheServerSide .NET, a community for enterprise .NET development. Of course, it’s a complement to their existing enterprise Java site simply called TheServerSide. Generally, the reaction on TheServerSide to the new .NET site is positive – only one negative comment as I blog this.

Various teams at Microsoft are contributing content. There’s a smart client case study from a project my by team. Patterns and Practices have a public book review. And there are tech talks from Don Box and Scott Guthrie. Look for more in the future.

Other great content on the site includes an article on unit testing, a tech talk from a Borland engineer and an article on autonomous services.

Major congrats to Floyd Marinescu (GM of Server Side Communities) and Ted Neward (Editor in Chief of TSS.NET). Looks like it’s going to be a great site – though the sign up process seems to have a few bugs in it this morning.

My team owns the architect track for TechEd 2004. We’re hoping to build on the very successful Architecture Symposium from PDC. As part of that effort, I own that community efforts for the architect track. I’m working on the plan now. Obviously, we’ll have “the usual” events: Ask the Experts, Birds of a Feather, Speaker Lounge, Attendee Party, etc. Any other suggestions? Please email me or leave a comment.

Michael Earls is pleading with MS bloggers to focus on released bits instead of all the cool future stuff we previewed @ PDC. He is especially frustrated with my response to Scoble’s post about how syndication will look in the Longhorn timeframe. Mike, I can’t speak for Scoble or any of the other MS bloggers, but I’m sorry that it’s been hard to keep up. You’re a member of my target audience, so it’s good to know where we are missing the mark.

In my post, I said that Scoble shouldn’t focus on how syndication evolves in the Longhorn timeframe, rather how it evolves in the face of Service Oriented Architecture. And as watered down and nebulous as the term SOA is, when I use it I’m not implying that you have to wait for Longhorn. Indigo will be a great platform for services, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do them today. In fact, the advice coming out of my group is to start doing services right away. Check out the first two sessions from the PDC Architecture Symposium (here and here). In 110 slides there are only about three slides that mention Longhorn, Indigo or Yukon. The rest of the slides are focused on “Practical Advice for Building Your Services Now” (PPT deck from first session, slide 5). Stuff that you gotta worry about regardless of the infrastructure you’re building on. Tentative Operations. Avoiding Ambiguity in Messages. Stability of Data and MetaData. Service Masters and Service Agents. Mike, when you get a chance, please check out those sessions from the PDC Architecture Symposium and then let me know if they can help you right now.

It’s too bad the chapter on SOA that’s posted on MSDN is from a book on Longhorn. That implies you can’t do one without the other. Truth is, you can build traditional tightly coupled apps with Longhorn and, more importantly, you can build services without Longhorn.

What’s weird is that I’m actually not dogfooding anything right now. Oh, I have a VPC with the PDC Longhorn bits and another with Yukon and Whidbey installed, but I haven’t spent much time with them recently. I guess I didn’t make it clear in my recent post on SQL Service Broker that I can’t wait for it because I’m not actually using it yet. The only beta software I’m running on my host machine is Firebird and Thunderbird. I have two primary development VPC’s – XP and WS03 – and the only beta stuff running in either is WSE 2. Call me a slacker, but Whidbey/Yukon/Longhorn aren’t far enough along yet for my current projects.