• I survived the weekend no problem. My wife has the details of what she did for the weekend while I played Mr. Mom. The kids were great, we even went to see the Easter Bunny on Sunday. Wish the weather had been better, but we did get to go on a little walk around the neighborhood between hailstorms Sunday after naps.
• Between taking the kids all morning until Jules got home from the airport and going to opening day for a team morale event, I worked about 30 minutes yesterday. In case you’re wondering, that’s way below average. I typically work at least twice that every day. 😄
• After maintaining a post a day average for January and February, I slipped a bit in March. Twenty seven posts in thirty one days. So that puts me five posts behind for the year as of this one.
• Dale let me borrow Madden 07 for the weekend so I could pump my gamerscore (a practice called gamerscore whoring). I still need 255 points by April 22nd to complete the Old Spice Experience Challenge. I’m not proud of it, but it’s not like I have much time to play these days.
• Mads Kristensen has a new .NET blog engine intuitively called BlogEngine.NET. I wonder how it compares to dasBlog, which powers DevHawk. (via DotNetKicks)
• I wrote a last week that unit test support should be in the Express editions of VS. Thanks to Jamie Cansdale, it is. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman saved his C# Tiny OS project from the impending shutdown of GDN and reposted it to his blog. I first met Scott at TechEd Malaysia 2002, so I remember seeing him present this “back in the day”.
• EMI is going to start offering songs sans DRM @ $1.29 a pop. Assuming other labels follow suit, this is gonna be huge. (via Loke Uei)
• Jomo Fisher writes about using LINQ as a string switch compiler that’s about 900% faster than using a hash table. Money quote: “Any time I see a data structure with a capability I’m not using it makes me wonder whether I can trade that capability for something I do need—in this case a speed boost.” LINQ is turning out to be much more interesting than just a (much) better way to query databases. (via DotNetKicks)

• The black Xbox 360 Elite is official. Details on Gamerscore and Major Nelson.
• Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games writes about XNA and the approval process for making an Xbox Live Arcade game. At the end of his post, he confirms that his team is using a “pre-pre-alpha” version of XNA Game Studio Professional. I wonder how long before that’s widely available?
• Politics 2.0 Advice: When building your MySpace page, don’t use images hosted on other peoples servers. John McCain found out the hard way. (via Balloon Juice)
• Speaking of Politics 2.0, you can check out the Roots Project, described as “a social networking site for people with progressive values, allowing them to form their own groups, sharing information and best practices nationally while acting together locally.” (via firedoglake)

• 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.

• The eBay Architecture SD Forum presentation that spawned the whole Transactionless meme is available here. As I reported yesterday, it doesn’t call for going completely transactionless as Martin suggested. It calls for going without distributed transactions, which I agree with 100%.
• More interesting than the transactional aspects, I found the data tier functional segmentation information facinating. Too bad those guys aren’t using our platform, SSB was expressly designed for exactly this sort of segmentation. I also liked that step 1 for “massively scaling J2EE” is to “throw out most of J2EE”.
• After going mostly dark since last august, the manager of my old team John deVadoss has been blogging up a storm since the beginning of March. So has my old boss Mike Platt. I wonder what happened at the begining of March? Here’s hoping this blogging fever spreads on my old team.
• Joe McKendrick: “The bottom line is that ROI on SOA is an enterprise challenge, not an IT challenge.” Truer words are rarely spoken.
• The rumor mill on the Black Xbox 360 “Elite” are coming fast and furious. I don’t care about the HDMI port (my HDTV is five years old and doesn’t have one) but I would like a bigger hard drive…

Ever since I got back from vacation, it’s been all about the Morning Coffee. I’m happy to be getting a daily post out, but I haven’t written anything deep in several weeks now. My one non-MC post in the past two weeks was The Virtuous Cycle of Virtual Platforms which frankly I wrote over a year ago for internal usage and adapted for my blog after reading Dare’s post.

One of the reasons for my lack of “deep” posting recently is post vacation re-engagement. Also, things at work that I can’t blog about (yet) have been taking my attention. But I worry that this daily MC post is causing me to focus on “shallow” blog topics. Since I’m trying to average a post per day, that means at least two non-MC posts every week. Of course, more than two non-MC posts a week would be just fine.

• On the XNA Team Blog, Michael Klucher announces the XNA Game Studio Express Update is coming in April. Among the new features are Vista compatibility, 3D audio, bitmap fonts, game icons and most interesting the sharing of compiled XNA games. Currently, the only way to share something you build with XNA with the community is by sharing the source code, which is less than optimal. For more, check out the XNA GSE Overview presentation by Mitch Walker from GDC.
• Speaking of gaming consoles, Sony’s “big” announcement is a Second Life clone? Kotaku thinks “this is going to be one of those features that people didn’t realize that wanted until they get it.” Personally, I doubt that very much, but what do I know about game consoles? I just play, man.
• Jafar Husain suggests a way to do Ruby symbols in C# 3.0. Sort of. He defines an extension method that returns the name of the property defined in a lambda function. On the plus side, it’s strongly typed. On the minus side, this.GetPropertySymbol(o =\> o.Name) isn’t as easy to type as :Name. (via DotNetKicks)
• While pseudo-symbol support is fairly verbose, Scott Guthrie goes thru some of the new language features for terser syntax: automatic properties, object initializes and collection initializes. While I like object and collection initializes, I’m not really sold on automatic properties. Personally, I like the VS prop snippet approach, where you automate the creation of the property once time when it’s authored rather than leaving the shortcut syntax in the code in perpetuity.