• Forgot to say this yesterday, but I’m happy the Colts are in the Super Bowl. Well, I guess I’m more happy that New England isn’t in it. They’ve won it enough lately. I wish the Saints has made it, but at least this way I have no question who to root for on Super Bowl Sunday.
• My Gamerscore cracked 1000 over the weekend. I got 60 points in Dead Rising and 100 points in NHL 07k0%01%02). I have played ten games + three arcade games for a maximum possible Gamerscore of 10,600 and a Gamerscore “conversion rate” of 10.28%. I wonder how good that is? All the leader boards I’ve seen rate purely on Gamerscore.
• Speaking of games, Obsidian (of Neverwind Nights fame) is working on an Aliens RPG! Check out this post by Chris Avellone of Obsidian on Game Design Research (via Game Tycoon).
• Richard Grimes’.NET Instrumentation Workshop rocks. Richard also has extensive workshops on .NET Security and .NET Fusion (aka runtime binding). If they’re as good as the instrumentation workshop, they’re worth a read.
• In my SSB/WF prototypes, I’ve simply been writing to the console. The lo-tech brute force works okay for a console app, but not at all when I move my code into a shared library. So I decided to bite the bullet now and translate the Console.WriteLine calls into TraceSource calls. My prototype isn’t that big (yet), but it went pretty smooth nonetheless. I currently have three TraceSources in my solution – one for the host, one for my SSB activities & workflow service and one for the persistence engine (I just inherited from SqlWorkflowPersistenceService and added the trace calls). I’m sure in time, I’ll wish I had set up my TraceSources differently, but for now it works.
• The one feature I lost moving from Console.WriteLine to TraceSources was color support. Since I am creating voluminous tracing data, I used color coding to indicate which part of the application the trace information was coming from. Of course, the OOB ConsoleTraceListener doesn’t have any mechanism to color code the output. I hacked up a ColorConsoleTraceListener in a couple of minutes that worked great. I say “hacked” because my color choosing code is currently hard coded, rather than being stored the config file. If I get the time to change that, I’ll post the code here.
• While researching ASP.NET’s Membership system, I found this Scott Guthrie post with links to ASP.NET providers for MySql, Oracle and SQLite. I’ve wondered about the lack of a simple file-based ASP.NET role/membership provider and even started hacking together an XML based one. But the availability of a .NET SQLite data provider makes that an interesting option. XML would be human readable, but porting the existing SQL providers to SQLite would probably be easier.
• Politics 2.0 in action: Talking Points Memo is enouraging you (aka Time Magazine’s Person of the Year) to record your own response to tonight’s State of the Union. Basically record your response via camcorder, webcam or cellphone. Then upload it to YouTube and add it to the TPM SOTU group. With President Bush’s approval rating at all time lows, I’m guessing these videos will be venting some of the pent up hostility towards this administration.

Took part of the morning off this morning to let the sun shine down on the icy roads. No major incidents getting to work, though the office parking lot is like an ice rink.

• As mentioned yesterday, I finally got my STS implementation working with WCS. Turns out that using WCS with the wsFederatedHttp binding requires you to specify which claims you want to send to the service. In comparison, using WCS with wsHttpBinding automatically requests the PPID claim. It would be nice if this was documented somewhere. I only figured it out by finding this demo from Michele.
• Last week, I said that we need a better tool than SvcConfigEditor. This tool is only marginally better than hand-editing the config files with intellisense. A “real” tool would keep you from building invalid config files. While I appreciate the need for this level of flexibility at the transport layer, we really need a better web service hosting story than IIS + ASP.NET + web.config. WCF makes me long for the days of the MTS/COM+ GUI interface. I never wasted hours troubleshooting config issues with MTS/COM+.
• Apparently, Xbox 360 outsold Wii and PS3 combined in December. That’s probably more of a statement about PS3 and Wii shortages, but there’s no arguing with numbers like 10.4 million Xbox 360 consoles, 5 millions Xbox Live users, and nearly 3 million copies of Gears of War. Congrats to the Xbox team!
• David may be hiding from his blog of late, but he did venture out long enough to point me to SOA Facts. My favorite: Dante has a special level in hell for consultants whose resumes do not say SOA.

News was expecting inches, but we only got a dusting of snow last night.

• We had dinner last night with my old friend Matt, who moved to Amsterdam a year and a half ago and is getting to travel the world. Kids didn’t have a nap yesterday, so they weren’t quite on their best behavior, but it was great to see Matt. Hopefully it won’t be another 18 months before we see him again.
• For the second time in four months, the power cable for my laptop failed. I wonder if there is something wrong with the power supply that’s causing the cable to fail? At least this time I wasn’t in Canada.
• There’s a high resolution video of the Xbox 360 IPTV up on Xbox.com’s CES page. They make it very clear this is “something you need to get from your service provider”. Telling quote: “It’s kinda like what I have today, but better”. Doesn’t seem that much better, so far anyway.
• I’m knee deep in WCF security code again. Mucking about with X.509 certificates sucks. I tried to follow these directions to create a dev root CA certificate as well as dev certs signed by said dev root CA, but I get security negotiation errors because the system can’t check to see if the cert has been revoked. I guess I’ll just install Certificate Services instead
• My nominee for best new acronym: JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services), apparently coined by Joe McKendrick. Web services, to date at least, seem like they’re being used primarily for building distributed applications, rather than a loosely coupled services. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, unless you’re fooling yourself (or those holding the purse strings) that you’ll get integration “automagically” or “for free” just because you’re using web services. Joe McKendrick is definitely not an SOA-hole.
• The next new language I learn will be F#. Just not sure when or how.

“The paper sure loves to talk about
Selling out
Some of us never get the chance”
Stick Around by Mr. Jones and the Previous

• Didn’t see that coming. I guess the Buckeyes didn’t either. Congrats to the Gators. That makes at least three championships in a row won by the underdog. For all the complaining about the BCS, it’s hard to argue they got the champion wrong this year. However, with the exception of the Fiesta Bowl, the BCS games weren’t very good this year.
• There’s a video of the new Xbox 360 IPTV service up on 10. I realize it’s a demo and we’re nearly a year away from release, but I’m not impressed. Xbox 360 Fanboy pointed to a blogger who got a deeper look at the service at Microsoft’s CE booth. Frankly, it doesn’t look or sound like it’s much different than standard cable service (though I like the sound of 35Mbps bandwidth at my house). I realize familiarity is good, but do we really have to lock ourselves into the existing TV paradigm?
• I got roped into a webcast today on Optimizing Application Platform Infrastructure. It’s at 11am Pacific time. Stop by and say hi.
• My colleague Dale has a rant about Service Oriented Assholes. His definition: “Any person or team that pontificates on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) without considering the realities of implementing SOA in a real business environment with real suppliers, customers, and products. These people are great at designing something on a white board or on paper, but couldn’t produce a real workable production ready system if their life depended on it.” Sort of a more specific (and vulgar) version of Joel’s “Architecture Astronauts“. How many SOA-holes do you know?

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
I’ve been waiting for this moment, all my life, oh Lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, oh Lord
In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins
Covered by Nonpoint on the Miami Vice Soundtrack

• It was a tough weekend in the Pierson house. For several hours on Saturday, we thought we were going to have to put our dog D’art down. My wife has the details, but the good news is that he had spine trauma, but nothing broken and he seems to be back on his way to his old self.
• I grew up in Northern Virginia, so I’m a long time member of the Dallas Cowboy Hater’s Club. So watching them snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against my adopted Seahawks was sweet.
• Last night, Bill Gates kicked off CES with the usual assortment of product news and announcements. The biggest news, in my opinion anyway, is IPTV support for Xbox 360. (Did you know MSFT has a TV product division?) Details are fairly scarce at this point, but I’m hoping this allows for independent broadcasters to directly reach consumers, much like blogs have done for independent writers. Can I use IPTV to launch my own TV channel? Imagine the possibilities. I’d like a Washington Capitals channel, so I can watch post game highlights on my big screen TV rather than on my computer. A Rooster Teeth channel would also be nice.
• No coding this past weekend, though I did reinstall XNA Game Studio Express on my recently paved dev partition. I tried playing Lego Star Wars II with my son over the weekend and he’s still having trouble learning how to use the controller. I was thinking I might try making some simple “games” to help him learn.