It was a little too cold to make a snowman at my house, so we headed over to the big hill near our house for a little sledding. The hill was pretty trashed – we weren’t the first ones to down the hill – but we all had a fun time nonetheless.

Here’s Mommy and Riley, riding together:

And here’s Patrick, riding by himself like a big boy:

Riley calls Patrick “Bubba” because she can’t say “brother”.

And since I promised my teammate Maureen a snowman photo, here’s the last one we built:

On top of all this snow play and sledding, I got my STS working with WCS. More on that tomorrow.

The news got the amount of snow right, but the day wrong. Instead of hitting yesterday morning, the storm hit yesterday at rush hour. My boss declaired today “1st Annual Architect work from home day” even though we’ve already had several weather induced work from home days this winter.

• Growing up in Northern VA, when we got snow it was fairly consistent. If there was about four inches at my house, everyone had about four inches. Here, it seems like there’s much more variance. My teammate Buzz who lives only 15 minutes from me (when it’s not snowing) said he had 10″ of snow while I have about half that.
• Speaking of Northern VA, the last few winters have been easy on us but hard on my parents who still live in McLean. This year seems to be the opposite. The forcast for McLean today is only 45, but it’s supposed to get up to 65 by the weekend.
• As it turns out, my parents are in the Bahamas right now anyway, so while I make a snowman with my kids today, they’re probably on the beach!
• I almost didn’t make it home yesterday as I was trying to get my STS working with CardSpace. I have WCS workng in a direct client to service scenario, but not federated with an STS. I probably would have stayed there all night saying “just one more config tweak, and I’m sure it will work” if I had gotten snowed in.
• Speaking of WCS, check out Kevin’s screencast on extending ASP.NET’s built in SQL membership provider to support WCS. And Garrett published a WCS security token processor for .NET 1.1 and 2.0 a couple of months ago. So you can use WCS on your website, even if you don’t have .NET 3.0 on your server. Pretty cool.
• My old teammate John doesn’t like the JBOWS acronym. I agree with John that defining a “proper” SOA is waste of time best left to SOAholes. But web services != SOA. Making a distinction between having an architecture where the business and IT levels that rely on independent capabilities and services versus using web services as the protocol between tiers of a distributed application and hoping that you’ll be able to integrate in the future makes sense to me.

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.