“Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue”
Steve McCroskey, Airplane!

• So it’s been a while since my last post. Just over a month, not including The F5 High, which wasn’t “original IP”. Frankly, I just stopped reading pretty much cold turkey. I wanted and needed to go heads down on day job stuff for a while. Since I haven’t been reading, Morning Coffee is going to be a little cold while I ramp back up.
• The new NHL season is upon us, and the Caps are looking good so far. Obviously, they have the new uniforms, but they’re also out to a 2-0 start for the first time in five years. And in those two games, they’ve only allowed one goal and are 100% on the PK. It’s nice to see them start strong, but obviously there’s a long way to go. Here’s hoping the can stay strong all season.
• Speaking of staying strong, the wheels that were rattling last week came off the Trojan bandwagon completely this week. I’m not sure it’s as big an upset as Appalachian State beating Michigan but it’s close. What happened to the team that scored 5 TD’s in a row on Nebraska?
• Big news last week is that MSFT is going to release the source code to much of the .NET Framework. Scott Guthrie has the details. Frankly, between Rotor & Reflector, it wasn’t like you couldn’t see the source code anyway, so this seems like a no-brainer. But integrating it directly into the VS Debugging experience, that’s frakking brilliant.
• I haven’t had a chance to install the new XML Schema Designer (Aug 07 CTP)  but I was really impressed with this video. The XML Team blog has more details. However, I’m not sure what the ship vehicle is. The CTP install on top of VS08 beta 2, but in the video they keep saying “a future version” of VS, implying that it’s not going to be in VS08.
• Dare is spending some time investigating SSB. I think it’s interesting that some of the REST crowd are starting to see the need for durable messaging. Dare argues that the features and usage models are more important than wire protocol. As long as it’s standardized, I don’t care that much about the protocol. Several of the REST folks mentioned AMQP. While I’ve got nothing against AMQP technically (frankly, I haven’t read the spec), but what does it say about durable messaging vendors (including MSFT) that a financial institution felt the need to drive an interoperable durable messaging specification?

Just saw this over on Japers’ Rink and had to share. This video won a three 2007 Golden Matrix award from the Information and Display and Entertainment Association (IDEA): Best Music Video, Best Overall Video Display (hockey) and Best Overall Video Display (overall). More details on Kukla’s Korner. Congrats to the Caps PR team.

Next season is only a little under three months away. Given the moves the Caps have made this off season, next season should be a sight better than last season. Playoffs? Maybe. Contending for playoffs? Probably? Cup Contenders? Check back in a couple more years!

• For the first six months of 2007, I posted 158 times in 181 days. I’m obviously off the pace I set in January of averaging a post a day, but I am averaging just under nine tenth of a post per day. Not bad. At this rate, I’ll post almost as much this year as I did the last two years combined.
• It was a great family weekend. Saturday, three of my friends helped me move an upright piano that we got used for a great price. Luckily, one of said friends is also a physics teacher, otherwise I don’t think we could have gotten that heavy thing in the truck. To say thanks, we BBQed for them Saturday evening. Then yesterday we took the kids to see a Sesame Street Live show. Both days were beautiful, which my wife greatly appreciated.
• The Caps hit the free agent market running yesterday, picking up Tom Poti (four years, $14 million) and Victor Kozlov (two years, $5 million). They weren’t the A-list free agents, but they both seem like solid pickups. According to Japer’s Rink, the Caps were about $6.5 million under the new cap minimum. These two signings just about close that gap, but it doesn’t sound like they’re done. That’s good news for Caps fans.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on LINQ to SQL. While I’ve seen most of this before, the cool thing Scott shows is hovering over the LINQ to SQL result and bringing up the exact SQL statement in a debugger window. That’s pretty cool.
• Nick Malik is now “Mr. SOA” inside MSIT. As you might imagine, I’ll be working with him fairly closely. Actually, he’s late to a meeting with me as I type this.
• John Shewchuk announces a new version of BizTalk Services coming soon. The big new feature is access control for services exposed via the BizTalk Services. If you can’t wait, you can try out the new stuff in their pre-production environment right now, before it’s live. Is this a beta of a beta?
• Soma announces the MSDN Small Business Developer Center. I took a quick look thru the site. Strangely enough, it doesn’t cover Dynamics – Microsoft’s business software primarily targeting small and medium size businesses.
• Ted Neward called object/relational mapping the “Vietnam of Computer Science“. David Chappell gives us our next war / technology analogy, declaring that the REST vs. WS-* war is over, ending in a truce like the Korean war rather than “crushing victory for one side”.
• Like Jeff Atwood, I didn’t realize About Face has been updated, twice. I am a huge fan of the first edition, but Jeff calls About Face 3 “the best edition of this classic yet”. I just ordered a copy for myself.
• David McGhee transcribed a fantastic session with Dr. Don Ferguson at the Australian Architecture Forum on SOA/ESB integration in the real world. Go read the whole thing. Udi Dahan pulls out the quote “there is no such thing as a centralized ESB.” Amen to that. My other favorite quotes from this discussion is “The temptation is often to get everything in a repository, but often you cannot rely on people to put everything in the registry” and “there is sometimes the “Highlander” philosophy of there can be only one service”. If you’re design depends on centralization and/or significant change in human behavior, it’s doomed from the start. Frankly, it’s amazing how often that happens.
• In response to my What is the Rails Question post, Hartmut Wilms wonders why “the .NET community (for the most part) ignores Open Source Projects”. I wonder the same thing, though I don’t think you can lump the whole .NET community together on this. While some parts of the community ignore anything they can’t download from MSDN, other parts strongly embrace open source projects.

• By most accounts, the Capitals had a good draft this weekend. They started the day with ten picks across the seven rounds. The ended the day with ten prospects as well as three extra picks next year, including two second rounders. According to the GM George McPhee (aka GMGM), next year’s is “supposed to be a terrific draft” which is probably true but what you always say when you trade down for future picks. On the other hand, if the guys you want are available further down, why not stock up on the future picks?
• John Lam reports on Steve Yegge’s Rails port to JavaScript that he saw at Foo Camp. Google (aka Steve’s employer) wasn’t interested in adopting Ruby or Rails since they already use C++, Java, JavaScript and Python. So Steve ported Rails to JavaScript. Wow. However, it does beg the question which is more valuable, Ruby or Rails? If you could have just one or the other, which would you choose?
• Speaking of dynamic languages, Powershell Community Extensions v1.1 is out. I want to check out the new Elevate function. Currently, I’m using the Script Elevation PowerToys, but I would rather have a pure PS solution. (via Powershell Team Blog)
• I always know it’s a slow day when I decide to check TechMeme while writing my Morning Coffee post. Usually, I get plenty to write about from just my news reading. However, right now, even TechMeme seems mostly uninteresting. Only thing remotely interesting to me is Samsung’s new 64GB solid state drive.

• The Washington Capitals
  
  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.