Yesterday, the Dallas Stars signed the Capitals captain Jeff Halpern to a four year contract worth around $2 million a year. My mom (even more rabid a Caps fan than I am if you can believe it) thought this was a mistake, but I’m not so sure. As reported by the Washington Post, the Caps are stocked w/ checking-line forwards. They apparently offered Halpern $1.5 million a year for two years. Sure, Halpern is a fan favorite – he grew up a Caps fan in Maryland – but $8 million seems like a lot to tie up in a checking forward / face-off specialist.

In the “old” NHL, you often saw teams throw crazy money (typically the same teams every year) at marginal players, hoping they would be the last puzzle piece to put them over the top and help them win the cup. Now with the salary cap, I think it’s going to shift from dollars to contract length – plus all teams will have a chance to be involved, not just the same five teams year after year. Players want longer contracts and teams want shorter contracts (go figure). A team in the Stars’ position – Dallas won their division last year but were bounced from the playoffs by the Avalanche – is more willing to tie up long term money for short term gain than a team that’s rebuilding as the Caps are.

So while I’m sad to see Halpern go, I think it’s a good move in the long term for the Caps. As much as I’d like the Caps to be competitive next year, I’ll believe it when I see it.

By coincidence when I was in DC last spring, I got an email from Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of American Online and owner of the Washington Capitals. Long time DevHawk readers might remember that I called Ted “an abomination to the sport of hockey” in the wake of trading Peter Bondra in the “Great Caps Fire Sale of 2004″ (Jagr, Lang, Nylander, Gonchar and Bondra). So I was somewhat surprised that wrote that he wanted to meet me since I blog a lot about the Caps. As I was in town, we arranged a meeting on short notice. I gotta say, it’s much easier to call someone an abomination on your blog than to their face. 😄

I got to spend an hour chatting about hockey – both from a game and ownership standpoint. Not that I’m likely to own a hockey team any time soon, but it was cool to hear about. I agreed with the owners during the lockout before Ted’s hockey team math lesson, but it was useful to see all the numbers laid out. We also spoke about Web 2.0 and new media to some extent. I guess it’s not surprising that a vice chairman of AOL is acutely aware of the changing face of the media – hence his reaching out to bloggers, even ones that have said bad things about him.

Anyway, expect to see more hockey coverage on these pages in the future. And significantly less owner name calling, unless we trade Calder Trophy winner Alexander Ovechkin:

I didn’t post a day two wrap up of the Gartner EA Summit because I only made it to my session and booth duty right afterwards. That wasn’t the original plan – the pipes in the bathroom of my hotel room kept banging so I didn’t get much sleep.

My session went well. I heard from several people afterwards that it was their favorite session or that it was the highlight of the conference. Nice anecdotal evidence, but I still want to see the scores. They recorded the session, hopefully I can get it so I can publish it here. I had lots of great conversations afterwards (as expected). Maybe Gartner will have me back next year with twelve months of my new project under my belt.

One suggestion for the Gartner folks. Next year, don’t pick a logo with an arrow in it. I got a little confused when I first showed up because I followed the arrow and ended up on the wrong side of the hotel from the event. My friend Scott snapped this picture of a sign with two arrows pointing in different directions.

My pal Tim dropped me an email last week to let me know they (the ADO.NET team) were publishing their vNext vision around entities. Of course, they picked the week when I’m in San Diego! So I didn’t get a chance to look at it until today. In a nutshell, they are raising the level of abstraction for databases. Regular DevHawk readers know I talk about abstraction a lot around here. In fact, one of my earliest posts on this blog – 1 house, 2 kids and 5 jobs ago – was on Disruptive Programming Language Technologies. So this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

This is an amazingly good thing. Think of the impact VB had on the development industry, but bigger. The abstraction level of databases hasn’t been raised in decades. It’s about freaking time we did.

My only problem with the article is that it’s pretty obtuse. Referring to this as “Making the Conceptual Level Real” makes it sound much less exciting than it really is. Nobody refers to C# as a “conceptual” programming language. But if you use the terminology from the vision article, that’s exactly what it is. Machine code is the physical level, IL is the logical layer and C# would then be the conceptual layer. But lets say you build a compiler that compiles C# directly to machine code. Would it suddenly become the logical layer? Who knows? Who cares? Let’s just raise the level of abstraction and not get all caught up naming the level we’re currently at.

VB was introduced 15 years ago in 1991. Most developers in the industry are aware and remember the impact VB had (if you don’t, check out Billy Hollis‘ History of BASIC). The relational model was introduced 36 years ago, The first RDBMS was introduced in 28 years ago. I’d bet the majority of developers in the industry today don’t remember a time before databases. Hell, I was introduced 36 years old myself. (I’m sure my dad remembers programming before databases, but he doesn’t code much these days.)

As I said, this is going to be big and it’s about freaking time. So hats off to the ADO.NET team. Can’t wait to see this running. According to this, first CTP drop is August, so you don’t even have to wait too long.

Adam Stanley left the following comment about the MS booth @ the Gartner EA Summit and I just had to share.

One of the true revalations of being an enterprise architect is in the books that Microsoft was giving away. One on enterprise patterns, one of powerpoint. I do a lot of powerpoint! 😄

The book in question is Beyond Bullet Points, which I highly recommend to architects and non-architects alike.