Morning Coffee 131

On a recommendation from my mother-in-law, I’ve been watching Torchwood. Sort of Men in Black, the series and set in Cardiff. Since it’s made in England, it’ll be one of the few shows still running in the new year due to the WGA strike.
A while back I pointed out that many DotNetKicks articles were submitted by their authors. I submitted a few of my own, just for kicks (har har), with mixed results. Today, I discovered that the parse buffer post from my Practical Parsing in F# series was submitted, picked up some kicks, and made it to the home page. That’s pretty cool. I guess writing more dev-focused articles is the way to go to get attention on DNK.
Amazon has rolled out a limited beta of SimpleDB, which appears to be S3 + query support. Cost is based on usage: 14¢/hour for machine utilization, 10¢/GB upload, 13-18¢/GB download and $1.50/GB storage/month. I’d love to see SimpleDB software that I could download and install, rather than hosted only. Even if I was going to use the hosted service, I’d like to develop against a non-hosted instance.
Research for sale! I was checking out the MS Research download feed and discovered a link to the Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL) library. This was previously called GLEE (Graph Layout Execution Engine) and was “free for non-commercial use”. Now, you can buy it for $295 from Windows Marketplace (though the previous free version is still available). The idea of directly commercializing research like this strikes me as pretty unusual. It must be a really good library.
Scott Guthrie shows off the new Dynamic Data Support that will ship as part of the ASP.NET Extensions. I’m like, whatever. Scaffolding wasn’t that that interesting to me in RoR, so it’s no surprise that it’s not that interesting in ASP.NET.
Jeff “Party With” Palermo blogs about the IoC support in the new MVC Contrib project. Also looks like they’re porting RoR’s simply_restful. (via Scott Guthrie)
I need to try out some of Tomas Respro’s VS color schemes (also via Scott Guthrie)

Morning Coffee 129

Short coffee this morning, as I’m home with a tweaked ankle.
I started playing Indigo Prophecy over the weekend. It’s an original Xbox game, released as part of the new Xbox Originals program. It has a good metacritic score (84), though apparently it wasn’t much of a retail success. I’m enjoying it, though it’s not very challenging. It’s more an interactive movie than a game. Good story, though.
The ASP.NET MVC preview dropped today, Scott Guthrie has the details. Scott Hanselman has a 40 minute how-to video and Phil Haack has several articles up already.
Speaking of ASP.NET MVC and Scott Guthrie, he’s got another post in his series on ASP.NET MVC. This time, he’s covering how to handle form input / POST data.
Erik Meijer has posted some of his thoughts on Volta. He’s one of the guys behind Volta, so it’s worth a good look. (via Dare Obasanjo)
Late Addition – the ASP.NET Extensions is more than just the MVC stuff. It also includes AJAX improvements, Silverlight support, ADO.NET Data Services and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support. Data Services (formerly Astoria) let’s you easily expose your database via RESTful services. I think Dynamic Data Support used to be code named Jasper. It’s a “rich scaffolding framework” for ASP.NET. I assume that’s to compete w/ Ruby on Rails.

Morning Coffee 128

After using Outlook 2007 as my RSS reader for a few months, I’ve gone back to RSS Bandit. I run two work machines (desktop + laptop) and I finally got tired duplicated blog entries because each copy of Outlook downloads the same post. Also, for some reason Outlook downloads the same Technorati posts over and over again.
ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 was released. The latest CTP of the EF Tools is also available. And as per the press release, EF has gained support from “Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, Firebird Foundation Inc., IBM Corp., MySQL AB, Npgsql , OpenLink Software Inc., Phoenix Software International, Sybase Inc. and VistaDB Software Inc”. I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but I guess you’ll be able to LINQ to Entities on a wide variety of DB platforms. Interesting Oracle isn’t on that list. Not really surprising, but interesting.
Here’s a new ASP.NET MVC article from Scott Guthrie, this one on views and how you pass data to one from a controller. Using generics to get strongly-typed ViewData is pretty sweet. But where’s the MVC CTP that was supposed to be here this week?
In news about web app tool previews that did ship this week, Live Labs announces Volta. Haven’t installed or played with it yet, but I did read the fundamentals page. It primarily looks like a tool to compile MSIL -> JavaScript, so you can write your code in C# but execute it in the browser. Sam and Jesus are excited, Arnon not so much. Arnon’s argument that being able to postponing architectural decisions is to good to be true is fairly compelling, and not just because he quotes me to support his argument. But I’ll download it and provide further comment after I experiment with it myself.
Simple Sharing Extensions is now FeedSync. Not sure what else is new about it, other than it’s been blessed with “1.0″ status. The Live FeedSync Dev Center has an introduction, a tutorial and the spec. (via LiveSide)
Dare likes tuples. Me too. I also like symbols.

Morning Coffee 127

I’m back at the office today after almost two weeks away. So “catch-up” is the official hyphenated word of the day.
Big news last week was an update on Silverlight. The next version (the one with the embedded cross-platform CLR in it) was rebranded Silverlight 2.0 and will include higher-level UI framework features and richer networking support. Look for a go-live beta Q1 next year.
According to Scott Guthrie, there should be a CTP of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions this week, including the new ASP.NET MVC framework that many folks await with baited breath. Scott posted the second in new series on this framework, this time covering URL Routing.
After a long blog silence, Pat Helland posted four presentations that he delivered @ TechEd Barcelona. They’re pretty much required reading as far as I am concerned. Here’s hoping the TechEd Barcelona folks recorded at least the audio of these sessions.
There’s a new drop of F#, v1.9.3.7. Don Syme calls it “a release candidate for F# 1.9.3″. Full release notes are over on his blog.
Speaking of F#, Douglas Stockwell explains how to roll-your-own F# Express by combining the F# download above & the VS08 shell.
Still speaking of F#, Robert Pickering has written an article on Active Patterns as well as a series on concurrency in F#. So far he’s covered Async Workflows (twice), Erlang style messages and message queuing.
Speaking of concurrency, Soma announced the CTP of ParallelFX last week. This includes Parallel LINQ (aka PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (aka TPL). Also check out their whitepaper, team blog and dev center.
I’m a big fan of the Architecture Journal. Now you can get all that great content in a great WPF-based app. Simon Guest has the details.

Afternoon Coffee 123

Morning Coffee is late this morning because we went for our Christmas portrait this morning and it took forever. The pictures turned out great though.
Nick Malik finishes up his series on business operation models by covering the diversification model. Also, Nick’s points about the synergy between a diversified model and the coordinated model are spot on. I happen to be a big fan of those models (aka the models with low standardization) which probably drives some of the more my “unique” perspectives on SOA.
Scott Guthrie starts out a new series and future technology, this time it’s ASP.NET MVC Framework that gets the series treatment. The first entry in the series is a general overview. I wonder why there’s no cool code name for the MVC framework? Whatever it’s named, I like the auto routing and action rules – it seems very Rails-inspired.
Over the weekend, Don Box points out that the REST authentication story “blows chunks”. I’ve recently given up on the reliable part of the original “Secure, Reliable, Transacted Web Services” vision – and I never believed the transacted part. Security, on the other hand, is the one part of that original vision that has worked out IMO. My experience with the WS-* security stack has been pretty good, though Dare Obasanjo thinks that OpenID and OAuth are the final nail in the WS-* coffin.
Speaking of Dare, he goes on to say WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice. He makes the point that “The only times I encounter someone with good things to say about WS-* is if it is their job to pimp these technologies or they have already “invested” in WS-* and want to defend that investment.” I gave up ~~pimping~~ evangelizing technology a while back and I don’t want to be in the position of defending a bad investment, so I’m spending lots of time looking at REST.
Jesus Rodriguez takes a look at the Managed Services Engine and comes away excited. Jesus is a self-described “strong believer” in SOA governance. I’m a self-described strong disbeliever in SOA governance, so MSE sounds like more of the Worst of Both Worlds to me.
A little light reading: I pulled Applied Cryptography and A New Kind of Science out of my garage last weekend. Plus my copies of RESTful Web Services and Programming Erlang just arrived yesterday.

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