It’s interesting to see how consumer and corporate IM have finally started to evolve in different directions. I have a personal IM account (harrypierson at hotmail dot com) on MSN running the newly released MSN 7. I really like the integration with Spaces, the contact cards and the new Personal Message feature that also integrates w/ WMP and iTunes to show “what I’m listening to” (in case you’re curious, baby lullabies – I’m sitting in Patrick’s room as he goes to sleep). I hadn’t realized how many of my coworkers (primarily ex-teammates) have started blogs on MSN Spaces.

I also just installed Office Communicator 2005, the new corporate client for Live Communications Server 2005. While we’ve had LCS installed internally for a while, I rarely used it. I mean, the only real value I saw in corporate IM in general was security – if your employees are chatting on IM, better to keep it off the public Internet. But w/ LCS 2005 & new new client, there are several cool new features. First off, LCS 2005 connects with both AOL and MSN public IM services. So if you want to, add me as an IM contact via my corporate email address (hpierson at microsoft dot com). Next, LCS 2005 & the new client integrate with your Exchange calendar. So if you’re in a meeting, you’re status changes to Busy. I can also hover on a contact and see what they’re up to now (in a meeting until noon, free until 3:30, etc). Finally, the new Office Communicator client integrates with PBX systems. So I can select a conact, hit call, and my desktop phone automatically calls the person. For incoming calls, I get notification even if I’m not in my office. So if I’m in a meeting, my wife calls, I can click on the notification to forward the call to my mobile phone.

Finally, I’m running Skype (callto harrypierson). I was in Barcelona most of last week and I used the SkypeOut service all the time, except when I was making connections in the Amsterdam airport. I racked up the big 2 Euros in calls over the course of a week. I seem to remember MSN IM having support a similar service via Net2Phone, but they stopped some time ago. I’d probably can Skype if they brought it back. I don’t want or need three contact points like this. Two is good – one for work and one for personal – but three is one too many.

If you want to reach me, you have zero excuse!

There’s a great demo on Channel 9 of the new Class Designer for Visual Studio 2005. Note, as per the CD team blog, Class Designer is available in the standard, professional and team systems editions of VS2005. (i.e. everything but express). More info on the differences between the products in the VS05 product line are available on the VS05 web site.

I love this. Except Scott, didn’t you mean to say “I’m an architect MVP”?

I met John Crupi – CTO of Sun’s Enterprise Web Service Practice – at OOPSLA last year. Very cool guy. I hadn’t realized he started blogging last month until Steve Vinoski linked to him. There seems to be some disagreement regarding using a top-down approach to SOA. Steve writes that SOA, like other “real-world development” is usually a mix of top-down and bottom-up. John writes that SOA is about a business driven architecture instead of an IT driven architecture. I liked this quote:

“[W]e cannot do SOA without a mutual effort between IT and the BU. Gone are the days of throwing the requirements over the fence and hoping it hits. Not only do these two groups have to work together, they have distinct roles and responsibilities. Basically, the BU runs the show and owns the business drivers, use-cases and processes. IT implements the BU requirements and owns the service definitions.  It’s unfortunate that we really do have to refer to this as a “shift”, because we should be doing this anyway. But, the reality is that IT and BU typical function as disparate groups and rarely work together to have the business use-cases drive the process and service definition.”

John Evdemon made two points  relevant to this issue several months ago:

• SOA does not enable or ensure the alignment of IT and business. The IT industry has been promising this for decades – there is no silver bullet for aligning IT and business. Alignment of IT and business is an organizational issue that will not be resolved by an architectural design philosophy alone.

• Service Orientation will happen in your organization in one of two possible ways: chaotically (typical approach) or in a disciplined manner. The path your organization takes (and the cost of later fixing that path) is up to you.

I’m with John on this one. Traditional approaches to new problems are rarely successful.

Talk about transparency: Pretty much everyone involved in the DSL toolkit is blogging. Keith, Jack, Steve, Stuart, Gareth, Alan and Jochen. Plus, I bug these guys on email alot and they always have answers. A couple of recent items from these folks:

• Steve was interviewed by DNJ Online about Software Factories. I didn’t get to read this until yesterday afternoon, but I had to present the Microsoft Technology Roadmap at the Executive Briefing Center yesterday morning. We started talking about factories and one of the things that came up was the massive value of partial classes. Steve hit on this in his interview as well. As cool as yield, anonmous delegates and especially generics are, I now consider partial classes the most important new langugage feature in .NET 2.0. Funny, as it was probably the easiest to build.
• Gareth blogged about a very strange bug in the March CTP release involving the letter ‘A’ and a slightly hacky technique for dealing with blank files. He also talks about the model serialization format. Sounds like they’ll be fixing both down the road a bit.
• Stuart confirmed that there will be a version of the DSL Toolkit for Beta 2 of VS05 “a small number of weeks” after it ships. He’s also talks about some of the features in the next drop: better code generation and better support for containment hierarchies (i.e. classes contain fields and methods).
• Keith blogged a software factories elevator pitch and then refined the definition of a software factory into a single sentence.