Morning Coffee 38

As predicted, the XNA guys had a bunch of news to announce at GDC. They launched the XNA Creators Club Online with samples, forums and a new starter kit. Also they announced some cool partnerships for Creators Club Premium members (aka the folks who paid $99 a year to be able to run code on their Xbox 360) including access to the highly anticipated Torque X Engine.
From Don Syme, we here that the new 1.9 version of F# is almost ready. When I shifted from learning F# to learning PowerShell, it wasn’t because of a sudden lack of interest in F#, so I’m glad to see them still chugging along. And by the time they release 2.0 later this year, I hope to have learned enough PowerShell that I can spend some time focusing on learning F#.
Apparently Jenny Lam at Microsoft reviewed more than 10,000 images to pick the new Vista Wallpapers. Not sure if I would love or hate that job. But some that didn’t make the cut are available online. (via DotNetKicks)
Tomas Restrepo reviews a number of lightweight, syntax-highlighting text editors. Personally, I like Notepad2, but as Tomas mentions there’s no way to save your settings. Also, there’s no way to add new syntax highlighting without recompiling it. For example, Wesner Moise compiled a version that added Ruby syntax. I really want a version that that supports PowerShell. Maybe it’s time to give Notepad++ a closer look
Dale has some new SOAhlocis Anonymous shirts available.
Jeff Atwood discovers that the French acronym for object oriented programming is POO.

Morning Doughnuts 5

Joel Dehlin, a former Microsoft employee and the CIO of the LDS church is conducting a series of tech talks. The next one is being planned for the bay area. If you are interested you can respond to his post here. The dates would be between April 22 – 26 with a tentative agenda as follows:
- Keynote
- Infrastructure breakout
- Development breakout
- Interaction Design breakout
- Community breakout
- Building to building video breakout
Everything needs a 12 step program now. CNN has a 12 step program to cure your email addiction here. I started thinking about this after Harry’s post saying he had hit zero email bounce prior to going on his secret mission.
I read an interesting blog on XNA and how it fits into Microsoft’s strategy in gaming. I am not sure I agree with all of the points, but I found the arguments to be compelling.
My BYU Cougars are now up to 21 in the AP Poll. I can’t think of a year when both the football and basketball teams have both had such successful seasons.
Between today and tomorrow I will be finalizing my vision document for how I think monitoring should work in the Service-Oriented Infrastructure project I am on. As I was outlining my vision it really hit me how much there is to do.

Morning Doughnuts 4

According to Reuters surgeons who play video games are more skilled. Remind me to ask the doctor if s/he owns an XBOX 360 the next time I am getting operated on.
I have reached the National Championship game in dynasty mode of NCAA Football 2007. The opponent of my BYU Cougars…why that would be Harry’s alma mater, the USC Trojans. Funny how that worked out.
Nicholas Allen writes in his blog about when you should use Indigo to write a channel, and more importantly when you should not. As most of you know Harry and I are doing quite a bit of work with WCF so we are interested in this type of advice.
Our team has been thinking about how to manage a large number of services in an automated fashion. This would include deploying new services, monitoring the services, automatically handling scaling, service discovery, and automated provisioning to name a few possible capabilities. I almost think of it like the next version of UDDI, especially when it comes to provisioning. I think that as systems become more distributed that the ability to automatically manage these systems is going to be key to their success. I know that some thought has already gone on in this area by people far smarter than I, but as I consider how to operate an infrastructure with thousands of services in it it is apparent that the opportunity is there for us to design and implement a system management framework that automates the majority of the tasks. I need to spend some time to consider how the framework would work, and document the capabilities.

Morning Coffee 28

From the “Ask and ye shall receive” department: A couple weeks ago I wondered how good or bad my Gamerscore conversion rate is. MyGamerCard.net just launched a completion leaderboard where they rank you on your Gamerscore times your completion rate.
Shane Courtrille pointed out that the prize you receive in from the Xbox Rewards program gets better if your Gamerscore is higher. With a meager 1090 points, I’m in level 1. But those with 10,000+ or more can get a copy of Fuzion Frenzy 2 for completing the challenge.
Yesterday, I complained that code in my RSS feed looks awful. It appears to be a problem with dasBlog. In validating the HTML is actually XHTML, it screws up the white space. Of course, usually that’s not a big deal, but inside a <pre> tag, it is. Until I get a chance to submit a patch to dasBlog to fix this, I’m using CodeHTMLer, which has a “convert white space” option that doesn’t use the <pre> tag at all. As a bonus, it even support PowerShell! Note, you have to use the website, not their WLWriter plugin, if you want the convert white space option.
There’s a new beta of Ruby.NET available. Now that I’ve moved on to PowerShell, I’m only slightly interested in Ruby these days. If I can figure out how to create internal DSLs with PS, what would I need Ruby for? (via Larkware)
My old team just shipped a single-instance multi-tenancy SaaS sample called LitwareHR. Details are on Gianpaolo’s blog, code is up on CodePlex.

Morning Coffee 27

Is there a good solution to colorize source code that looks good in RSS feeds? I’ve tried Insert Code and Paste from VS for WL Writer and both look fine in HTML but awful in RSS.
My friend David Geller launched his latest venture Eyejot recently. Eyejot is a Flash-based video messaging system, so you can send and receive video clips without having to install anything but a webcam. According to the Eyejot blog, they’re getting some good press. See an interview with David about Eyejot up on YouTube.
Here’s an interesting article on using WF with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Invoking MTurk isn’t that interesting – it’s just a web service and WF has a built-in InvokeWebService activity. But since MTurk has no way to asynchronously call out to the WF, you have no choice but to regularly poll MTurk to see if the task is complete. Yuck. (via Larkware)
Yahoo! Pipes looks interesting. At least the screen shots of it on various websites and blogs look cool. Too bad the site is absolutely hammered this morning. (via Dare Obasanjo)
Like GAT? Like DSL? Then use them together!
If I can more than raise my Gamerscore by 1,500 points by April 12th (i.e. more than double it), I can get a free $5 game. But why wait to start the contest until next Monday? Doesn’t that discourage people from playing until then?

Series

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The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion.