Morning Coffee 154

  • Did you see yesterday’s Dilbert cartoon? Classic.
  • MIX isn’t the only Microsoft conference this week. It’s also time for the annual MS Research TechFest conference. It actually started yesterday, with a keynote from Rick Rashid and Craig Mundy (available on demand). I’ll be heading up there later today and will blog everything I saw that is public, like I did last year. In the meantime, you can check out some cool MS Research projects on the TechFest video page.
  • Speaking of MS Research, they’ve published the Singularity source code (for academic and non-commercial purposes) on CodePlex. Singularity is research OS “focused on the construction of dependable systems”. I’ve wanted to play with this, but I’ve never had the time. Frankly, that hasn’t changed, but now that it’s available to the community, I’m hoping I can live vicariously thru other people hacking around with it.
  • Some announcements coming out of MIX won’t be a surprise to anyone:
  • Here some primarily “new” news from MIX:.
    • I’m not sure which team owns it, but I’d say the biggest previously-unannounced news was SQL Server Data Services (aka SSDS), a “highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services.” In other words, SQL in the sky. There’s a free beta sometime this month you can sign up for. Very cool, though no word on what it’s going to cost. If you’re interested in this, I’d keep an I on the Data Platform Insider blog.
    • John Lam announces the Dynamic Silverlight extension that lets you run DLR languages on Silverlight. Given that they talked about this last year, I’m not sure it’s really “news”, but John provides lots of gory details so it made the cute. But are they really using “DSL” as the acronym for this? Guys, that acronym’s already taken.
    • Mary Jo Foley has a scoop on Silverlight for Nokia Symbian mobile phones.
    • There’s a new beta of Expression Studio 2 as well as a separate Expression Blend 2.5 preview for Silverlight 2. Soma has the details. This isn’t really a surprise, but I hadn’t seen any news on new versions of all the Expression Studio products.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on March 5, 2008. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged DLR, Dynamic Languages, Humor, Microsoft, Open Source, Silverlight and SQL Server.

Morning Coffee 95

  • New version of dasBlog is out, the final version on ASP.NET 1.1 (unless this release “kills a kitten” as per Scott Hanselman). I don’t have the time (make the time?) to run daily builds, but I do try and upgrade to new major releases in a timely fashion. I’m also moving hosters, so expect a little downtime around here at some point in the near future.
  • Matt Winkler is doing a series on alternate WF execution patterns. His first is the N of M pattern. While I can nitpick some things in WF – especially the limitations of transaction flow – WF’s support for variability and extensibility of execution patterns is fraking brilliant. (via Sam Gentile)
  • Joe McKendrick is all excited about a SOA built without web services! We’ve been “doing SOA” since the EDI days without web services, so I’m not sure this level of excitement – with an exclamation point and everything – is warranted. But it is good to see people realize web services != SOA. Instead of web services, CERN is using JMS to move messages around. I don’t know much about JMS, but I do know it supports async and durable messaging, two things I think are critical for enterprise services.
  • I saw on LtU that there’s a new paper on Singularity out. For those who don’t know, Singularity is a MS Research platform designed for reliability instead of performance. But there’s more than just a new paper. According to the project home page, “Singularity Version 1.0 is complete. We’ve shipped the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) to a small number of universities for their research efforts.” I wonder if I can get my hands on that RDK?
  • Jeff Atwood is starting to show ads on Coding Horror, but he’s donating “a significant percentage” of the ad revenue back into the programming community. He’s starting with $5,000 and Microsoft is matching for a total of $10,000 to be donated to open source .NET projects. Go tell Jeff which projects you think he should donate to. Castle seems to be an early favorite.
  • On Monday, Nick Malik posted what he called the Simple Lifecycle Agility Maturity Model (aka SLAMM) as a way of measuring your “agile factor”. Surprisingly, the community response has been zilch. After Nick’s comments on Agile last week, I figured someone would have something to say about it, even if only to slam it. (Slam SLAMM, ha ha.) Maybe nobody opened the spreadsheet and saw Mort has an agile factor rating of 71%? Personally, SLAMM seems like a rather coarse tool for measuring how agile you are, but coarse tools are better than no tools at all.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on June 27, 2007. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged Agile, Blogging, dasBlog, Open Source, SOA and WF.

Morning Coffee 93

  • The Washington Capitals
    newcapsjersey
    unveil their new jersey tonight, though they have a picture on their web site. I’ve got mixed feelings, though I’m trying to reserve judgement until I see it “in action”. I like that they’re back to the traditional Caps colors. But the Caps have jersey change fatigue. They only had the screaming eagle jersey for twelve years, and they swapped out the blue jersey for the black one (that started life as a third jersey) somewhere along the line.
  • Lawrence Lessig hangs up his IP spurs to go after the deep corruption of the political process. He points out that after a decade focusing on IP, he’s learned all he is going to about these issues so he decided (among other reasons) that it was time to start fresh learning about something new. I keep telling my kids that “always keep learning” is one of the secrets to life. This move by Lessig is the embodiment of that principle. Good for him. (via John Lam)
  • My old team keep chugging along. They’ve recently added “special coverage” sections on Agile Development and Enterprise Architecture.
  • Miguel de Icaza details the three week “hackathon” (his words, not mine) they went thru to get a working version of Silverlight on Mono – aka Moonlight – in time for ReMix 07 in Paris. It’s an impressive engineering achievement, to say the least. Also, it’s nice to see the folks from Microsoft France invite Miguel to come be a part of their keynote. (via Larry O’Brien)
  • Rob Bazinet points outVisualSVN in response to my question about SVN clients other than Tortoise. Like AnkhSVN, VisualSVN snaps into Visual Studio. However, where AnkhSVN is a native SVN implementation, VisualSVN depends on Tortoise. Scott Bellware wrote “VisualSVN takes a novel approach to bringing SVN into the Visual Studio IDE… it brings Tortoise into the IDE!”. So it still sounds like Tortoise is the SVN client everyone cares about.
  • Scott Berkun details a variety of immature development and management methodologies, including Development By Denial (DBD), Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) and my personal favorite Asshole Driven development (ADD). Scott Hanselman suggests looking around and making sure you’re not said asshole. I tend to be somewhat…how should I say it?…strong willed about the direction projects I work on should take. My current project is about driving a paradigm shift to service orientation, and I don’t think you can’t drive that kind of change without being somewhat strong willed. It’s a thin line between strong willed and asshole and hopefully I come down on the right side of that line more often than not.
This entry was posted by DevHawk on June 22, 2007. It was posted in Development and Morning Coffee. It was tagged Open Source and Washington Capitals.

Categories

Tags

Series

Disclaimer

The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion.