• Huge perk of the new job: new hardware. I had to give up my Dell workstation but I got a Lenovo T61p dual core widescreen laptop, an HP dc7800 dual monitor quad core desktop and a Polycom CX700 IP phone. I’m really digging the Lenovo’s integrated fingerprint reader – no more password login – but I’m most impressed with their integrated driver management software. Sure beats the heck out of hunting for dozens of updated drivers all over the place like most vendors for you to.
• Minor downside to all my new toys: I spent most of my first week on the job installing and configuring said new toys.
• Caps will face the Flyers in the first round of the playoffs which starts Friday. I have a feeling that I’ll be feeling poorly Friday around 3pm and have to head home early. 😄

DyLang Stuff

• Apparently, Michael Foord isn’t getting enough exposure on this blog. 😄 He left a comment to remind me to mention the IronPython URLs link blog he writes along with Mark Rees and Seo Sanghyeon.
• Speaking of Michael, his employer Resolver Systems just launched a new product: Resolver One Quant.
• Still speaking of Michael, he’s quoted in the InternetNews article Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise.
• My teammate Jimmy Schementi posts a preview of his spare time project “Silverlight on Rails”. This RoR plugin lets you declaratively specify if you want your RoR controller code to be accessed remotely via AJAX and run on the server or if you want that code to be downloaded to the client and run in SilverLight. Very cool stuff.

Other Stuff

• Don Syme provides some insight into the F# producization process. There’s going to be an update to the “Research release” later this month and a CTP of the “Product release” later this summer (Brian McNamara has the CTP details). I am looking forward to these releases, though I’ll probably be too busy w/ IPy to experiment much with them.
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki continues his adventures with F# with a look at tuples, records and discriminated unions. Of the three, I find discriminated unions the most interesting since there isn’t anything like it in other languages I’ve used.
• Gregori and Chris both announce the release of Unity 1.0. Congrats guys! But if I don’t have time to hack around with the latest F# release, you can imagine I won’t be getting to Unity any time soon…
• Jeff Atwood recommends you build your application UI first. Furthermore, he does a good job selling the value of paper prototyping as well as introducing the concept of PowerPoint prototyping. Money quote: “You don’t want something too powerful.”
• Via LiveSide I discovered James Hamilton’s blog. Normally, hardware infrastructure isn’t really my bag, but I find his ideas around using ISO standard shipping containers as modular data center building blocks fascinating. For example, check out this post that suggests sticking modular data centers in condos would be cheaper than building data centers! Subscribed.
• Speaking of ISO, you may have heard Open Office XML was ratified as an ISO standard. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy around this, but Miguel de Icaza lists of what he considers major community wins from the standardization process. Anything that “pushed Microsoft into more open directions” is a good thing IMO.

Japers says all there needs to be said: CONQUE(RED)!

With a 3-1 win over the Panthers, coupled with a Hurricanes’ 4-3 loss to the same Panthers the night before, the Washington Capitals are the Southeast Division champions.

These words are music to my ears: Capitals Playoff Tickets On Sale Now!!!

The win was their 7th straight, and they went 14-4 since the trade deadline @ the end of February. They finished the season 43-31-8 after starting the season 6-14-1. That’s a 20 game swing (from 8 games under .500 to 12 games over) in 61 games. That’s frakking amazing. Had the Caps played at that clip all season, they would have ended up with around 109 points, which would have been good enough for first in the east, though still short of Detriot’s 113 points (and they still have a game to play). Ovechkin isn’t the only Cap who should be a shoo-in for a trophy. Coach Bruce Boudreau should be a lock for the Adams.

I just spoke to my parents, who were at the game and have almost no voice left after no doubt screaming their frakking heads off or chanting M-V-P in the stands. I also spoke to my brother, who lives in ‘Canes country these days but was on his way back home from England. Until he talked to my father earlier today, he didn’t even know the ‘Canes had lost last night. He sounded slightly stunned, but that might be a by-product of being on a plane all day.

What an amazing year. Can’t wait to see what they do in the playoffs.

Go Caps Go. Rock the Red.

I took most of last week between jobs and have spent much of this week getting machines setup, access to builds, etc. Furthermore, RSS Bandit ate my feedlist and I am still soldiering on sans mobile phone so I was pretty much unconnected for about a week and a half.

IPy Stuff

• Laurence Moroney demonstrates how to configure a web site project in VS08 to use Dynamic Silverlight’s development web server Chiron. I looked at turned it into an exported template, but I think the Start Options are stored in the suo file and I’m not sure how to include that in the template. Maybe it could be set w/ a macro or at worst a GAX recipe?
• If you’re a regular reader, you might as well get used to the name “Michael Foord”. He’s a developer @ Resolver Systems, makers of the IPy based Resolver One app/spreadsheet hybrid I’ve written about before. He’s also the author of the upcoming IronPython in Action book and the maintainer of Planet IronPython and the IronPython Cookbook. I’m going to try very hard to only link to Michael at most once per day. Frankly, that’ll be tough.
• Today’s Michael Foord Link: Michael turned his PyCon talk on IPy + SL2 into a series of articles entitled IronPython & Silverlight 2 Tutorial with Demos and Downloads.
• Ken Levy (who now sits just down the hall from me) clued me into the 1.0 release of IronPython Studio, which is a free IDE based on the VS08 Shell for IronPython (based on code from the VS SDK). Big new feature in this release is support for the integrated VS08 Shell, which means it’ll snap into your existing VS08 installation (well, not express) rather than forcing you to install the 300 MB isolated shell.

Other Stuff

• Caps had a BIG win last night when they needed it most. Now they’re tied with Carolina for the SE division lead, but they lose the tiebreaker so unfortunately, they can’t make the playoffs without help. ‘Canes have to head back home last night to play Tampa Bay, they have to win tonight and Friday to clinch. Loss in either gives the Caps control of their own destiny. Caps are only one game back of Ottawa, Boston and Philly, none of whom have played well down the stretch. It does mean I have to root for the frakking Penguins to beat Philly, twice.
• Now that I’m in a job where I’ll be traveling occasionally, I really appreciated Scott Hanselman’s travel tips, though I’m not sure “Don’t look like a schlub” is in the cards for me.
• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Scott Guthrie blogged that the ASP.NET MVC Source Code is available on CodePlex. The project name is “aspnet” not “aspnetmvc” which makes me wonder if they might release the source to more ASP.NET stuff over time.
• Speaking of Scott Guthrie, today he blogged about unit testing in Silverlight. Jeff Wilcox appears to have the definitive post on the subject, including links to the SilverLight testing framework (it’s included in the SL Controls source code release). He also provides a prebuilt “Silverlight Test” project template for easy download. Personally, I really like the in-browser test runner. I wonder how hard it would be to hook that up to DySL so you could write your tests in IPy? (given that IPy doesn’t have attributes, I’m guessing there’d be at least a bit of work involved in making this happen)
• Speaking of Silverlight, apparently the next version of Windows Mobile (i.e. 6.1) will support it. Since I’m in the market for a new phone anyway, I’m thinking of getting one of these. Also, it’s nice to see a marketing site for WM 6.1 using Silverlight instead of Flash like WM 6.0 marketing site does.(via LiveSide)
• Ted Neward turns the news that MSFT is releasing XAML under the OSP into a long and fascinating history lesson that is well worth the read. I’m going to skip commenting on it, beyond advising you dear reader to read this if you haven’t already, except to wonder: how many sides does a “Redmondagon” have?

• My Xbox 360 started flashing the dreaded Red Ring of Death on Friday. <sigh> I’m not going to have much time to play in the next week, so it’s not the end of the universe, but I did have to dig an old DVD player out of the garage for interim duty.
• My Caps really stepped in it over the weekend dropping two games they had to have and by most reports (aka according to my dad) that they dominated most of the way. Caps Playoff Math isn’t as dire as say Clinton’s Nomination Math, but they are three games back of the Hurricanes with twelve to play.
• Ted Neward has a pretty good F# overview article in the most recent MSDN Magazine. I say pretty good because I wonder if someone with no functional programming experience will “get it”. As much as I like F# and functional programming, I think some of the basic concepts don’t pass Don Box’s two beer test.
• Speaking of Ted, somehow his feed fell off my radar (bad DevHawk!) and I missed several great posts like Modular Toolchains (note to Ted, check out A Research C# Compiler), Why we need both static and dynamic in the same language (note to self, check out Cobra) and The Fallacies Remain…. (recently, I’m the guy shouting about risks).
• Speaking of MSDN Magazine, have you seen their new site redesign? I can’t find any announcement of it, but man the site looks great.
• If you missed MIX, the sessions are all online already. That was fast.
• John Lam blogs about the availability of the Dynamic Silverlight bits. Apparently, Dynamic Silverlight includes more recent bits than the Silverlight 2 SDK, which does includes binaries and tools for IronPython, IronRuby and Managed JScript (quickstart). So you can get started with dynamic languages on Silverlight using the SL SDK alone, but I expect that the Dynamic Silverlight bits will be updated more regularly than the SDK.

• Yesterday was the NHL trading deadline, and the Capitals were very busy. They obtained Huet from Montreal, Federov from Columbus and Cooke from Vancouver. Given they are fighting just to make the playoffs, going for three soon-to-be unrestricted free agents seems like an odd choice. However, the consensus (among my parents anyway) was that it’s critical to get this very young Caps team some playoff experience. Even if all three walk at season’s end, it’ll be worth if the Caps make a playoff run. Besides it’s not like we gave up much: an extra second round pick in ’09, a 19 year old defensive prospect (who was apparently 14th on the depth chart) and an underachieving winger.
• Speaking of the Caps playoff chances, they are currently one and a half games back of the division leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eighth seed Flyers. Yes, I rank hockey teams using baseball’s standings system. Otherwise, you have to talk about games in hand (i.e. the Caps are five points behind Carolina with two games in hand).
• The writer’s guild ratified the new contract, so Hollywood labor strife is now officially behind us. At least until July when the the actors may go on strike.
• It seems like a slow week for Microsoft geek news, which is odd since WS08, VS08 and SQL08 all launch today. I’m guessing it’s the calm before the Mix storm next week.
• After going dark for six months, Linq to XSD has been re-released to work with the RTM version of VS08. Scott Hanselman demonstrates Linq to XSD by applying it to OFX, an XML Schema he calls “goofy” but apparently helped develop. OFX uses derivation by restriction, which has no direct corollary in C#, but Linq to XSD’s  is able to translate between XML and objects without loosing any of that type fidelity. Nice to know Linq to XSD can tolerate OFX’s level of goofiness, though I’m guessing most people use much more straightforward schemas.
• Speaking of Linq, I discovered LINQPad via a comment on Rob Conery’s blog (which I found via DNK). It’s basically a code snippet IDE for C# 3.0 and VB9, with it also has built in database connection support, so it can fulfil much the same role as SQL Management Studio. I only played with it for a few minutes, but I was really impressed.  This is definitely going in my utilities folder. I wonder if they’re interested in supporting F#?
• Not sure how I missed this, but you can get MSDN Magazine via same Syndicated Client Experience as Architecture Journal. Unlike AJ which is divided into issues, the MSDN magazine client is divided into topics which is harder to square with the physical magazine. On the other hand, since MSDN Mag has been around longer, perhaps topics + search is a better discovery mechanism.
• Soma announces the Visual Studio Gallery, a repository of VS Extensions. It’s kinda cool, but the whole discovery mechanism is clunky. I might like to experiment with some free or even free trial products, but there’s no way to filter on cost so finding them is a hassle. Also, there’s no way for community members to vote, rate or comment on the products in any way.
• Nick Malik can’t answer the question “how does Enterprise Architecture demonstrate value?” I could be snarky and say “it doesn’t”, but that’s only half the answer. It doesn’t, but it should. My opinion, since you asked Nick, is that EA fails to deliver value because it tries to control the uncontrollable. Trying to gain efficiency thru establishing standards and eliminating overlap via reuse are pipe dreams, though literally millions of $$$ have been poured into those sink-holes. There are a few areas where centrally funded infrastructure projects can solve big problems that individual projects can’t effectively tackle on their own. EA should focus their time there, they can actually make a difference. Otherwise, they should stay out of project’s way.