Clemens blogged the Microsoft EMEA Architect’s Journal a couple weeks ago. In addition to his article on dasBlog, issue 1 contains articles on SOA, architecture design, business process, meta-data driven design and rule-based application development. You can download the entire issue as a PDF. Major props to Arvindra Sehmi, editor of the Architect’s Journal. When I first took this job, Enrico Sabbadin suggested that MSDN Magazine should have a regular architecture focused article. I think we will all agree that Arvindra’s journal dedicated to the topic is an even better idea.

Going forward, my group will be working Arvindra’s group to help publish the journal. It’s interesting to note that none of the six articles in issue 1 are written by Microsoft architects. While I hope to see some articles written by Microsoft architects, the plan of action is to primarily feature architects from our partners, our customers and from the community. Anyone interested?

After reading Sam’s slides on Atom, Scoble posted three times about how syndication could evolve. Of course, Scoble has his Longhorn-colored glasses on. Dare pointed out that “The major problems with syndication today have little to do with the syndication format and more to do with it’s associated technologies.” I agree with Dare. IMO, the only thing that the ATOM syndication format has over RSS is a namespace declaration. I care about that because one of the “associated technologies” I care about is SOAP and the lack of an RSS namespace makes it hard to embed an RSS item inside a SOAP message.

I think Scoble should be asking how syndication will evolve in the face of Service Oriented Architecture in general, not Longhorn specifically. Granted, Indigo is going to make Longhorn a great platform for SOA. (If you check out the Longhorn Interoperability and Migration Guide, Chapter 2 is mostly dedicated to describing SOA.) But I think the real change to syndication is going to come from WS-ReliableMessaging. In order to truly evolve syndication, I think we need to break free of the synchronous polling model we have today. Polling only works in scenarios with a central syndication source (like a weblog). However, as the sources of syndicated content get to be more distributed (phones, P2P networks, etc) that polling model breaks down. I need to be able to send messages when things change without regard to network availability. With WS-RM, I can send messages and the infrastructure (i.e. Indigo) can take care of the ugly details of making sure the messages get delivered to their final destination.

So I’m finally caught up on my blog reading. After being on vacation for five days, I had over 500 unread entries. Read some, marked most as read even though I hadn’t. This problem is going to only get worse as I find more interesting blogs to read.

What I want is for my news reader to suggest to me which of my unread entries I am most likely to be interested in. The question is, how to rank all the unranked entries?

My friend Matt blogged ReMail, a research prototype email client from the IBM Watson Research Center. Matt’s right that many of these features of ReMail are already in Outlook 2003 (List Seperators, Annotations, Threads, Collections). But what makes ReMail really cool is their visualizations. “The visualizations in Remail were designed to help people see connections between messages and people that would otherwise be invisible.” I’m going to need to read more about Thread Arcs.

This cool visualization reminds me of a research talk I got to see by Alison Lee from IBM Watson Research on campus a couple of weeks ago. Among other things, she showed off eTree: “A Browse and Query Interface for Online Communities”. Basically, its a tool for visualizing the activity of a web discussion forum (such as the ASP.NET Forums). In this idiom, each branch of the tree is a forum and each leaf on the tree is a thread. “Hot” threads become flowers on the branch. Older posts are dark green while newer posts are lighter. Members of the community are rendered as circles around the outside of the tree – selecting a user highlights the threads they have participated in.

What’s really exciting is that researchers are starting to look at blogging. I know lots of people were interested in the Wallop project from the MS Research Social Computing Group that was highlighted @ PDC. I want to see this technology make it into blogger tools.

There’s a new Pattern and Practice out: Application Interoperability: Microsoft .NET and J2EE. This is complementary to the .NET and J2EE Interoperability Toolkit by my teammate Simon Guest.

FYI, I have links to many of the Patterns and Practices under “Architecture” on my Linkroll. This new one is under “Guidance”. There are also sections for Application Blocks, Lifecycle Management and Patterns.