Simon just emailed a bunch of internal architects about the new Architecture Forums on Microsoft.com. So far there’s a general architecture forum as well as one for modeling and tools, with more to come I would guess.

What other forums do you think we need?

I just discovered Ted Neward’s blog has moved. In catching up, I found this great post on the new features of C# 3.0. Even though I had read thru the C# 3.0 spec, Ted’s explanation was much easier to read.

FYI, speaking of Ted, I’ll be speaking at his No Fluff Just Stuff .NET software symposium. Still working w/ Ted on the abstracts, but basically I’m basically talking about patterns, GAT and DSLs.

It’s hard to believe it October already. The last three weeks have been jam packed, starting with PDC 05, then a variety of meetings culminating with the company meeting the following week, then the 2005 MVP Global Summit last week. This was the first MVP Summit to include Architect MVPs so it was pretty stressful. Of course, there were things we could have done better, but all-in-all I was happy with the event. A year ago, we had just awarded our first 14 Architect MVPs. Now we’re 100 strong between our solution and infrastructure Architect MVPs and we had better than half of them in Redmond for the summit. I swear, it will take us the rest of the fiscal year to implement even half of their suggestions.

I’m sure each of the various groups that have MVPs think that their MVPs are the best, so I guess I’m no different in that regard. Our Architect MVPs are an amazing group and I am already looking forward to the next opportunity to get a bunch of them in a room together again.

When I was at PDC, I saw the Phidgets folks in the Coding4Fun booth. Is it just me, or is this stuff dying to get merged with MSR’s Invisible Computing project? Haven’t heard of Invisible Computing? Here’s the description:

This site has the source code and documentation for Microsoft Invisible Computing. It is a research prototype for making small devices part of the seamless computing world. This site contains the source code and is available free of charge for research and educational use under the Microsoft Shared Source License.

Microsoft Invisible Computing consists of compact middleware for constructing embedded web services applications and a small component based Real-Time Operating System with TCP/IP networking to make middleware run straight on the metal on several embedded processors.

The goal is to make it easy to build custom smart devices and consumer electronics, especially battery operated; and to support research in invisible computing, operating systems, networking, ubiquitous computing, sensor nets, distributed systems, object-oriented design, and wireless communication.

FYI, I discovered the Invisible Computing project by searching the web for TinyCLR. TinyCLR is what powers the MSN Direct watch. From what I can tell (i.e. this is based on publicly discovered info) is that Invisible Computing is a shared source version of TinyCLR that works with a variety of hardware platforms. Sort of like a Rotor for embedded devices.

Check out a presentation and the code.

So I had a little time to play on a recently reimaged partition so I decided to install Max to play with. Very cool stuff. Sort of PhotoStory-esque. For someone with little kids and tons of pictures, it’s a great tool. However, I see two immediate issues that need to be rectified.

• No Save or Export Capability. I’ve got Max running on a clean image, but I know I’ll want to reimage it again soon when there’s a later drop of WinFX or VS or LINQ that I want to play with. However, Max doesn’t have any way to save a picture list to the hard drive. Everything (and I mean everything) is stored in an XML file in the C:Documents and Settings<userName>Local SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftMicrosoft Codename Max directory. Spelunking the code with Reflector, I see a locally defined namespace called System.Storage. I’m guessing this is a stub WinFS library with the intention of migrating to the real deal at some point in the future. But since it’s just a stub, there’s no simple way to get stuff in and out of that file. I tried cutting and pasting of the XML, but Max told me the store was corrupted and I had to rebuild my photo list. Please add some way to save photo lists outside of Max!
• No Downlevel experience. I showed my wife the photo list I built and her first response was “can you send me that?” Sadly, no I can’t. I realize that Max is supposed to be an example of the new-fangled WinFX stuff, but my wife, her best friend, my mother, my mother-in-law, etc. are NOT going to install the Sept. CTP of WinFX in order to run Max. Most of the cool Avalon stuff is in the authoring experience. Couldn’t you export a photo list to DHTML or something?