Morning Coffee 100

The big 100. This puts be 1083 posts behind Iron Link Poster Mike Gunderloy. As his .NET skills deteriorate, maybe I can catch up…but I doubt it. I’m only 77 posts behind Sam Gentile, so maybe that’s a bit more feasible.
The ADO.NET Team blog announces the new Entity Framework CTP. Looks like there’s also a new .NET Framework 3.5 CTP and new Visual Web Developer “Orcas” Express CTP as well. (via Sam Gentile)
Speaking of ~~“Orcas”~~ VS 2008, it launches with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 next February. (via DNK)
Scott Guthrie continues is LINQ to SQL series. This time, using LINQ to SQL to update the database.
My friend Arvidra Semhi recently moved and rebooted his blog. Among his many accomplishments, Arvindra started the Architecture Journal. I’m particularly interested in his recent Service Capsule work. Subscribed.
Last night was the Microsoft E3 Briefing. Gamerscore blog has the news rundown. Didn’t seem to be any HUGE news. Last year’s E3 was the first Halo 3 showing and X06 featured the Halo Wars announcement. Nothing that earth-shaking this time, though the XBLM keeps on rolling, now featuring Disney movies. (Major Nelson has a list.) I’m thinking that the whole HD-DVD vs. BluRay war is going to be eclipsed by direct download before it’s over, though I’m still waiting for PC support & all-you-can-eat pricing.
Politics 2.0 Watch: Clay Shirky has a great blog post on modern-day Luddites. As he points out: “A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfort the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys.” How much inefficiency is there in our modern political system? And more importantly, who benefits from that inefficiency? We’ve already seen the dramatic effects blogs can have on political news, media and reporting. What happens when ~~users~~ citizens are no longer satisfied just writing about the political process and want to get their hands dirty in the policy-making process itself?

Morning Coffee 92

Brad Wilson blogs about SvnBridge, a tool that lets you use Subversion clients like TortoiseSVN to talk to Team Foundation Server. While I think that’s cool, I wonder is anyone interested in subversion clients other than TortoiseSVN? For example, will people choose AnkhSVN instead of the Team Explorer Client?
Speaking of TortoiseSVN, I wonder if those guys are interested in building a TortoiseTFS project? I did find two other TFS shell extensions projects: Dubbelbock TFS and Turtle, though neither appears as full featured as Tortoise.
Scott Guthrie details VS08′s multi-targeting support. Of course, the three versions of the .NET Framework VS08 can target all use the same underlying runtime, which probably made it easier to build.
Michael Platt refactors Don Box’s original tenets of service orientation so he can include some information about how these services get built.
Scott Hanselman tackles the tricky question of assembly granularity.
PowerShell Analyzer is now available for purchase. Among other things your $59 gets you, besides a 50% savings, is “Feature request priority“. That’s pretty cool. I wonder how many other micro-ISV’s take the approach of “pay me now and you get to help me pick some of the new features.”
Brandon LeBlanc
writes about dual monitor support in Vista. I’m loving the dual monitor support, though I have a somewhat strange setup. I keep my primary monitor rotated in portrait mode, which is great for reading and writing. I typically use my second monitor for blogs and mail. I even wrote a custom multi-mon wallpaper utility so I could easily generate new wallpapers for my non-standard monitor layout, including bitmap rotate support. If there’s interest, I can post it. (via Sam Gentile)
Nick Malik continues to write about Mort, with the usual response from the usual folks. I liked his point that “You cannot fight economics with education”, but otherwise I’m staying out of this discussion.
In the same vein, Martin Fowler writes about Technical Debt. I completely agree with his hypothesis that short changing design may save time in the short term but will cost much more in the long term. However, the problem is that the people who are making the tradeoff – i.e. the people paying for the project NOT the people building the project – either don’t understand the tradeoff or are more than happy to sacrifice the long term cost for the short term gain. How are most projects measured? Being on time and on budget with the planned set of features. Very few projects – and none that I’ve ever seen – are goaled on long term maintainability. Until you can change that, this issue will continue to linger.

Lunchtime Doughnuts 9

I am a few days behind on this, but Joe McKendrick writes an interesting piece on if businesspeople are begging for SOA. It is fascinating because I believe that SOA should come from the business, not because of the delivery mechanism, but because of the results. If services will truly make a business more adaptable and responsive to change shouldn’t all business people desire those results? At the same time they don’t care how that end is achieved, just that it is. That’s where we in the IT industry need to do a better job of working out the details amongst ourselves and show the business how SOA can benefit them. Once we do that we should see more SOA adoptions go smoother and real ROI can be seen.
Joel Dehlin has blogged on the myth of youth being the ones that use instant messaging, publish and read blogs, participate in social networks, etc. I agree that the technology has been integrated into every layer of society. If you have ever been at the airport or at a Starbucks you know what I mean. Who is it exactly that has a Crackberry addiction? It seems technology has really become a part of our culture, and that it’s not just one age group that is adopting the changes.
Visual Studio 2008 shell was announced at TechEd yesterday. Even Harry who was on-site missed the release, but it certainly looks cool.
If you have ever met me you would quickly discover I have quite a background in Unix. That being the case I couldn’t ignore the news that Sun is releasing new blades for the desktop. I had a blade on my desk for several years and it was really a nice system to use. For those that would bash me since I work at Microsoft now I will just say that when you support Solaris boxes, having one on your desk is quite helpful. I don’t take sides in the Holy War. 😄 (via Scoble)

Morning Coffee 55

Many years ago, I picked .net instead of .com as DevHawk’s TLD. My old pal Chris picked up devhawk.com and redirected it to the site because he got tired of typing “devhawk ctl-enter” into the browser address bar and getting nothing. He must have let it lapse because now devhawk.com points to what looks like a splog in development. Part of me is annoyed, but a bigger part of me just doesn’t give a shit. You – dear reader – have found this site, and that is all I care about.
A couple of weekends ago, I re-wired my living room to enable surround sound. It meant adding a receiver to the mix, and that pushed us into three remote territory, which is too many. So I picked up a Logitech Harmony Universal Remote, since they have one specifically for the Xbox 360. So far so good, but I’m not sure my wife likes it much yet. However, their remote config application doesn’t run on Vista yet, so I had to bust out the old laptop to get it working.
I’ve written about Spec# before, but I’ve never experimented with it. MS Research just released a new version that support VS05, so here’s my chance. (via Larkware)
Speaking of MS Research, the Deepfish project has released a new tech preview. However, Loke Uei is reporting they’ve already maxed out on test accounts. (via Major Nelson)
Jeff Atwood says there’s no substitute for learning on the battlefield. I always say that the only way to get good at something is to suck at it for a while. Different words, same concept.
According to Naysawn Naderi, the “majority” of unit test features are being added to the Orcas Pro version. This is obviously good news, though personally I agree with Brad that they should available separately VS. Not sure it needs to be in the framework itself, inclusion in the .NET Framework SDK is probably sufficient. I also think there should be unit test support in the VS express editions as well. (via Knowing.NET)
I’ve been digging Geekdad, but most of the stuff is for older kids. I mean, I’d love to take my daughter karting, but she’s only two and can’t reach the pedals! However, I’m itching to try out today’s post on image searching with younger kids. The kids love to draw on my new tablet, so I’m thinking of not only searching but snipping these images into OneNote for them to doodle on.

Morning Coffee 53

The Virtual PC 2007 virtual video card seems to max out @ 1600 x 1200 resolution. Given that the two screens on my main dev workstation are 1200×1600 (i.e. portait mode) and 1680×1050, it means I can’t run VPC in full screen on my dev box. I can get close on the widescreen monitor, but I like writing code on the portain monitor better. Luckily, I can use remote desktop instead the built in VPC display window in order to get full screen on either monitor.
Soma announces the aquisition and immediate (i.e. free) availability of Teamplain web client for VSTS as part of Visual Studio’s 10th birthday. We’re also “publishing the Orcas Wave (Orcas + Rosario) roadmap for VSTS.” I’ll be interested to see the reaction to that. Mike’s reaction to the schedule was: “That’s insane”.
THe XNA tools just keep coming. Allegorithmic’s MaPZone texture creation tool is free to XNA developers. Actually, it looks like it’s free for everyone, as a carrot to upgrade to their procedural texture tool ProFX. Still, free tools are still free. (via Michael Klucher)
Can I get 1200U of rackspace, to go? Apparently, yes. (via Half My Brain)
Watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica last night. Wow, is there a better show on TV right now? (yes, one: Lost. But that’s it) When it ended, my wife said “We have to wait until 2008 for a new episode? That sucks”. I couldn’t agree more.

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