I was hoping to blog my thoughts on Lang.NET as the event went along. Obviously, that didn’t happen, though I was pretty good about dumping links into my del.icio.us feed. The talks were all recorded, and should be up on the website in a week or two. Rather than provide a detailed summary of everything that happened, here are my highlights:

• The coolest thing about conferences like this is what John Rose called “N3″ aka “Nerd-to-Nerd Networking”. It was great to meet in person, drink with and geek out with folks who’s blogs I read like Tomas Petricek, Wesner Moise and Larry O’Brien. Plus, I got to meet a bunch of other cool folks like Gilad Bracha, Stefan Wenig and Wez Furlong. That’s worth the price of admission (which was admittedly nothing) right there.
• Coolest MSFT talk: Martin Maly “Targeting DLR”. I was wholly unaware that the DLR includes an entire compiler back end. Martin summarized the idea of DLR trees on his blog, but the short version is “you parse the language, DLR generates the code”. That’s pretty cool, and should dramatically lower the bar for language development. Of course, I want to write my parser in F#, so I’m going to port the DLR ToyScript sample to F#.
• Runner-up, Coolest MSFT talk: Erik Meijer “Democratizing the Cloud with Volta”. Erik is a great speaker and he really set the tone of his session with the comment “Division by zero is the goal, not an error”. He was referring to an idea from The Change Function that user’s measure of success is a function of perceived crisis divided by perceived pain of adoption. Erik wants to drive that adoption pain to zero. It’s a laudable goal, but I remain unconvinced on Volta.
• Coolest Non-MSFT talk: Gilad Bracha “Newspeak”. Newspeak is a new language from one of the co-authors of Java. It’s heavily smalltalk influenced, and runs on Squeak. He showed developing PEGs in Newspeak, and they were very compact and easy to read, easier even than F#. He calls them Executable grammar, and you can read his research paper or review his slides on the topic. Unfortunately, Newspeak isn’t generally available at this time.
• Runner-up, Coolest Non-MSFT talk: Miguel de Icaza “Moonlight and Mono”. The talk was kinda all-over-the-place, but It’s great to see how far Mono has come. Second Life just started beta testing a Mono-based script runner for their LSL language (apparently, Mono breaks many LSL scripts because it runs them so fast). He also showed off Unity, a 3D game development tool, also running on Mono.
• Resolver One is a product that bridges the gap between spreadsheets and applications, entirely written in IronPython (around 30,000 lines of app code and 110,000 lines of test code, all in IPy). Creating a spread-sheet based app development environment is one of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect, at least to me. If you do any kind of complicated spreadsheet based analysis, you should check out their product.
• If you’re a PowerShell user, you should check out PowerShell+. It’s a free console environment designed for PowerShell and a damn sight better than CMD.exe. If you’re not a PowerShell user, what the heck is wrong with you?
• Other projects to take a deeper look at: C# Mixins and Cobra Language.
• I thought my talk went pretty well. It’s was a 15 minute version of my Practical Parsing in F# series. Several folks were surprised I’ve been coding F# for less than a year.

• I only posted one Morning Coffee post last week. It wasn’t a lack of content, it was a lack of drive on my part. I had 20-30 items flagged in my news reader, but for some reason I couldn’t work up the interest in posting them. So some of these are a bit old.
• I’m at the Language.NET Symposium this week, so look for lots of language blogging. I’ve already chatted with Tomáš Petříček and John Lam. If someone kicks Ted Neward’s ass because he hates Perl, I’ll try and liveblog it.
• Speaking of Ted Neward, he discusses the question “Can Dynamic Languages Scale?” without devolving into a flame-fest. I agree 100% with his point about the difference between performance scaling and complexity scaling. Personally, I tend to err on the side of better complexity scaling, since buying hardware is easier than hiring developers.
• Nick Malik responds to me calling his shared global integration vision flawed. He points to NGOSS/eTOM as an example of a shared iterative model that works. I know squat about that shared model, so I’ll refrain from commenting until I do a little homework on the telco industry.
• Speaking of shared interop models, Microsoft is joining DataPortability.org. Dare Obasanjo and Marc Canter are skeptical that so far this effort is all hype and no substance. Reminds me a bit of AttentionTrust.org. But if DataPortability.org can get off the ground, maybe there’s hope for Nick’s vision (or vis-versa).
• Don Syme lists what’s new in the latest F# release. As I said, this release is pretty light on features. Hopefully, I’ll get some details
• Tomas Restrepo shows how to change your home folder in PowerShell. I need to do this.

• Morning Coffee was canceled on Thursday and Friday on account of a kidney stone. So not fun. Luckily, it was a little one and it was alone, but I will be listening very closely to my doctor’s advice to avoid another.
• Took the kids to see Ratatouille last Tuesday and saw Transformers yesterday with my wife due to fluke babysitter luck. I liked Ratatouille, but I’m not sure it’s the 51st best movie of all time. On the other hand, major props for making a kid movie with a significant lack of toy tie-ins. Ratatouille is a better movie that Cars, but I don’t see my four year old boy trading in is Lightning McQueen toy car for a Remy the Rat. Transformers on the other hand obviously did not forgo the toy tie-ins! Still, it wasn’t bad. Kinda reminded me of The Rock with a bigger budget.
• Micahville listed DevHawk on it’s list of 69 Tech Blogs That Don’t Suck. Thanks!
• David Ing boldly writes that C# is getting fat. Or maybe it’s just big-boned. My take: no question that integrated query is a big feature that covers a lot of surface area. But given the prevalence of databases and other queriable stores, it’s critical to improving programmer productivity. Go read Todd Proebsting’s talk on Disruptive Programming Language Technologies. Two of his candidates for disruptive language technologies were Database Integration and Manipulating XML. LINQ neatly covers both.
• According to John Shewchuck, the new BizTalk Services release is available. However, when I click on the “what’s new” page, it tells me they’re experiencing technical difficulties. (Their error page is Oops.aspx. Funny!)
• Scott Hanselman has Programming Personas 2.0. Who are you? I thought I was and “Order n” Architect (the quote “Where’s the whiteboard” is spot on) but my CS background isn’t as strong as the persona’s.
• Sam Gentile is starting to dig into Concurrency and he has a great list of links that have influenced his design.

Once again I get the chance to fill in for Harry while he is gone. I will attempt to keep up with the high standard he has set.

• Be careful with trampolines. I have a four year old that was bouncing on a trampoline this weekend. He twisted his knee slightly on landing, and decided that the fastest way to get comfort was to jump off the edge. His knee gave out and he fractured his tibia. I don’t think this was how he planned to start his summer. At least he is pretty calm about the whole thing.
• It looks like there is a good product out there named CliSecure to obfuscate .net code. From what I was able to read it looks like a pretty decent product, even hiding the code while its in memory. (via Larkware)
• TechEd started this morning. While I am sure Harry will be giving some on-site reports there is a link to the virtual site here.
• There is a great video showing Gregor Hohpe talking about SOA, and the many unrealistic claims in the industry. If you have read any of Hohpe’s work it is clear that he has a great understanding of the topic. (via Nick Malik)
• The NBA Finals will begin this week with the Spurs playing the Cavaliers and King LeBron. I wonder if this will help rescue the NBA from what seems to be a real apathy on the part of the average fan. Other than the series between Dallas and Golden State earlier in the play-offs it really seems there haven’t been any compelling stories. The NBA really needs a shot in the arm to become relevant again.

• Google announces Gears, a browser plugin for taking your web application offline. Developer docs are also available. TechMeme has lots more, but obviously this is yet another significant bow shot in the upcoming unified client platform war. By my count, there are four horses in this race: Microsoft with .NET and Silverlight, Adobe with Flash and Apollo, Google with AJAX and Gears and Sun with Java and JavaFX. Did I miss anyone? (via Dare Obasanjo and Scott Hanselman)
• Alex James writes that REST is about intent and shows a pseudo-code sample posting multiple changes to a single endpoint as a way of demonstrating your intent that they be applied atomically. Andres Aguiar left a comment saying that Astoria does something similar. Personally, I like that model for transactions better than the transaction factory approach Jon Udell describes. But either way, you’ve moved beyond simple CRUD style services and into the world of protocol. Surfacing intent via protocol aligns with what Tim described as making the protocol explicit
• Windows Live posted new beta versions of Writer, Mail and Messenger. I’ve been on an internal build of the new Writer for a while and I’ve really been impressed. There’s also a new Provider Customization API, so I can’t wait to see what the DasBlog folks do with that.
• Scott Guthrie’s LINQ series continues, this time covering how to build the LINQ to SQL data model. Looks like they used the DSL toolkit to build the LINQ to SQL data model designer, cool!
• Martin Fowler digs intoracc, a yacc-esque compiler compiler for Ruby. Looks interesting as a internal DSL example (better than the now-canonical rake example). But why is the sexy new language on the block using old school CFG’s instead of new hotness PEG’s?
• Speaking of Martin, he writes about the opportunity Ruby presents to Microsoft, building on Scott Hanselman’s concerns that Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks. Sam Gentile also weighs in, suggesting that Microsoft is at the crossroads. Frankly, I don’t work in evangelism anymore so I’m going pass these links along without comment except to say that Scott, Martin and Sam are all folks I have much much respect for.