Friday’s Morning Coffee didn’t happen because I fraked up the DNS settings when I moved devhawk.net to a new registrar. Today’s morning coffee was drastically delayed on account of car troubles. Tuesday, I have an 8am meeting so tomorrow’s not looking good either.

• The big news for Xbox 360 is details on the Spring Update. Big news is WLMessenger integration + a QWERTY thumb pad that snaps right into the controller. (via Gamerscoreblog and Major Nelson)
• Speaking of Xbox, I completed the Old Spice Experience Challenge today on my lunch break (couldn’t go to the office due to the car troubles). My reward is an upgrade to level 2, a gamerpic I’ll never use and a free copy of Contra. (Estimated total value: $5)
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on new language features in C#3/VB9. This time it’s lambda expressions. This is the “killer” feature in the new language version IMHO, since you can use lambda expressions either as code or data. Furthermore, it’s up to the class/method handling the lambda expression to decide if it should be treated as code or data. That decision is made and design time, but the upside is that as a developer, I write my queries exactly the same way regardless if they are to be executed directly (aka code) or analyzed (aka data). Scott also metions a few new LINQ to * projects: LINQ to Amazon, LINQ to NHibernate and LINQ to LDAP.
• Speaking of LINQ to *, here’s LINQ to 3D Objects in a C# ray tracer. I think it’s safe to say that LINQ to *whatever* is the new hotness. (via DotNetKicks)
• The new version of F# is out. Looks like the big new feature is Active Patterns which is described in this draft paper. If I only had more time to investigate this. (via Don Syme)
• For the third time in the past six months, my laptop power supply has died. I’ve never had a problem like this before, much less three times. It’s not even the same laptop as I recently moved over to a Tecra M4 Tablet. I just don’t get it.
• P&P has shipped the 3.0 release of Enterprise Library. Tom Hollander has the details. Personally, I am most interested in the new Policy Injection Block.
• Having worked with self-signed certificates and understanding what a PITA they are, it’s nice to see that IIS 7 has explicit support for them.
• I saw a reference to “The Halo Effect” on one of the political blogs I read. Needless to say, as an Xbox gamer, my first reaction was that this had something related to Master Chief. It doesn’t.
• Joe McKendrick compares SOA governance to national governance. Given our polarized political climate, this analogy may hurt more than it helps. Also, the next enterprise architectural board that has equal “branch” footing with IT and executive management will be the first.

• I figured out something to build with PowerShell. Not ready to spill all the beans yet, but I’ve started by building a provider for SQL Server. SQL already has the SQL Management Objects (SMO) library, so I can really focus on how PowerShell works rather than getting too bogged down in the logic of the provider. I’m sure someone else is working on something similar, but my primary goal with building this provider is to understand PowerShell. The codebase itself is a distant second in priority.
• On the subject of missing LINQ’s, Alex James wants LINQ to Web. A good potential use for the Windows Live Search API.
• I posted three recent blog posts to DotNetKicks yesterday, but I’ve only collected one additional kick so far (for my Compiling Workflows post). Looking at what does gather kicks, I think I would need to write a more dev focused article if I wanted to make the DNK home page.
• Don Smith left a comment on my WSSF post where he talked about the developer and the architect perspective. He seemed surprised that I took the developer perspective. To quote David White: “Architect Must Implement”. The customization opportunity in guidance automation is huge, but the value is to the developer first. And while it’s a good start, it doesn’t go very far at automating the development experience. At heart, I guess I’m a developer even though my business card sez Architect (with a capital “A” these days no less).
• I moved my laptop over to Vista yesterday. My workstation is still on XP, but that’s because I haven’t had time to completely rebuild my dev environment. No Aero support with the
• I elbowed my way into the TS Gateway pilot at Microsoft and I’m loving it. TS Gateway is a new feature of Longhorn Server that “enables authorized remote users to connect to terminal servers and remote desktops on the corporate network from any Internet-connected device running Remote Desktop Connection 6.0.” So I can quickly and easily remote into my desktop from anywhere without establishing a VPC session. The only annoyance is my USB smart card reader, which is fine in a pinch but a pain to constantly have dangling off my laptop. However, my boss approved a PCMCIA smart card reader so soon that won’t be an issue.

• 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.

I never really missed Web Application Project support in VS05 until I realized what I could do with it. I’ve been experimenting with LINQ and wanted to be able to use it in a web application I’m prototyping. Under the file system model, there’s no easy way to change the compiler used for dynamic compilation of web pages. With WAP, it’s no problem.

If you’ve got both WAP and LINQ installed, you can enable LINQ support in your web apps by doing the folllowing.

1. Open your WebApp.csproj file in notepad.
2. Add references to System.Query, System.Data.DLinq and System.Xml.XLinq.
3. Change the Target Import element to import $(ProgramFiles)LINQ PreviewMiscLinq.targets instead of $(MSBuildBinPath)Microsoft.CSharp.targets

That’s it! Seems simple, but it let me bind a GridView to the following function:

public static IEnumerable GetTitles()
{
  var con = new SqlConnection(Properties.Settings.Default.PubsConString);
  var db = new Pubs(con);
  var q = from t in db.Titles select t;

  return q;
}

It would be even cooler if I could simply write that query in the conext of the ObjectDataSource, but of course ObjectDataSource doesn’t know about LINQ. I imagine a LinqDataSource would be a logical next step.