• I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry at Nick Malik’s definition of politecture. I mean, it’s funny so I’m laughing, but it’s so true that it makes me want to cry.
• Don Box comments on retiring the tenets. It’s good to see him say “please God tell me we can do better” than CLR interfaces or WSDL.
• Looks like the P2P APIs are finally getting the managed treatment in .NET FX 3.5. A long time ago, John deVadoss asked me what an enterprise system like CRM might look like if it used a peer-to-peer approach instead of client-server. If I had any free time, I’d prototype one out on this API. (via Mike Taulty)
• Scott Guthrie goes back to his LINQ to SQL series to tackle Stored Procs and UDFs. Being able to use UDFs inline with LINQ queries is very cool. However, it seems to me that LINQ discourages the use of stored procs. As a developer, I’d rather write LINQ queries than stored procs, if I can. The probably puts me at odds with DBAs who’d rather all DB access be via stored procs they control.
• Soma writes about new MSBuild enhancements in VS08: multi-targeting and parallel build.
• I just discovered Vista Battery Saver. Basically, it turns off Aero and Sidebar when you’re on battery. I’m traveling to Chicago next week, so we’ll see if it has much impact on my battery life. (via Plenty of Code and Larkware)

• 3D Printing is going to be huge. According to the NYT, we’ll be looking at around $1,000 for one within four years. For the impatient, check out Fab@Home and build one right now.
• It’s been a while since I experimented with the P2P stack in Windows, but it looks like it’s getting the managed treatment in VS “Orcas”.
• The managed Ruby hits keep on coming. Last week was DLR and IronRuby. This week it’s a new drop of Ruby.NET which includes VS integration.
• Looks like Sun is trying to get back into the Ajax/Flash/Silverlight fray with JavaFX Script. I wrote over a year ago that “In platform portability, Flash has succeeded where Java failed.” I can’t help but believe JavaFX is too little too late. Also, it’s yet another Java technology name that sounds like it’s been blatantly copied from MSFT. JDBC, JSP, JDO … What’s next? JINQ? (via TechMeme)
• Steve Maine has a great series of posts on the new Web Programming Model that’s coming in .NET 3.5 and is currently being previewed as part of the BizTalk Services SDK. But it was his Balancing reach and rich post that I found most illuminating. The first version of WCF feels hopelessly bound to the WS-* view of the world, which makes it difficult to incorporate alternative messaging models into the same programming model. I’ve run into this trying to use SSB with WCF. In the next version, that WCF / WS-* marriage looks like it’s getting a little more open. In my current role, I’m not so interested in the web programming model, but I am very interested in how they are integrating these alternative models.

From the one-less-thing-for-me-to-do department, Chris Dix has created a managed wrapped of the WinXP P2P SDK. He also has several sample apps, including a Scoble-inspired MagicFolder. According to his site, Chris plans to extend his library to support web services (WSE custom channels?) which should be very cool.

It’s funny, I used to get really sad when I discovered someone else had built something that I had started building. Especially if, as in this case, theirs was better. Now, I’m just relieved that I can reuse the library without having to build all the surrounding infrastructure. I’m glad I never released my managed P2P wrapper, it would be one more thing for me to kill. Like my HtmlReader stuff. I still get people looking for it even though I killed it a while ago. (Hasn’t everyone figured out they should use SGML Reader instead?)

Noah Horton, former teammate who has gone on to become PM in the Peer Networking Group, has started a blog. Of course, with the new aggregated feed of MSDN bloggers, you probably already knew that. However, I am compelled to blog this as Noah is a friend, works in the next building over from me and I’ve got a special interest in P2P. I’m looking forward to his promised tips and tricks. Subscribed.

I realized I wasn’t going into the office today @ 6am. My wife’s school called to let us know school was canceled. Given how hard it has been to get my email all day, I’m guessing I’m not the only one. Since I’m not at work or doing email, I figured I’d mess around with my new Longhorn machine.

I noticed browsing through the samples that Longhorn has a managed P2P API. The PDC build only supports PNRP and identities, which means you can’t acually communicate with another machine via P2P (yet), but it’s nice to see that it exists.