• For the first six months of 2007, I posted 158 times in 181 days. I’m obviously off the pace I set in January of averaging a post a day, but I am averaging just under nine tenth of a post per day. Not bad. At this rate, I’ll post almost as much this year as I did the last two years combined.
• It was a great family weekend. Saturday, three of my friends helped me move an upright piano that we got used for a great price. Luckily, one of said friends is also a physics teacher, otherwise I don’t think we could have gotten that heavy thing in the truck. To say thanks, we BBQed for them Saturday evening. Then yesterday we took the kids to see a Sesame Street Live show. Both days were beautiful, which my wife greatly appreciated.
• The Caps hit the free agent market running yesterday, picking up Tom Poti (four years, $14 million) and Victor Kozlov (two years, $5 million). They weren’t the A-list free agents, but they both seem like solid pickups. According to Japer’s Rink, the Caps were about $6.5 million under the new cap minimum. These two signings just about close that gap, but it doesn’t sound like they’re done. That’s good news for Caps fans.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on LINQ to SQL. While I’ve seen most of this before, the cool thing Scott shows is hovering over the LINQ to SQL result and bringing up the exact SQL statement in a debugger window. That’s pretty cool.
• Nick Malik is now “Mr. SOA” inside MSIT. As you might imagine, I’ll be working with him fairly closely. Actually, he’s late to a meeting with me as I type this.
• John Shewchuk announces a new version of BizTalk Services coming soon. The big new feature is access control for services exposed via the BizTalk Services. If you can’t wait, you can try out the new stuff in their pre-production environment right now, before it’s live. Is this a beta of a beta?
• Soma announces the MSDN Small Business Developer Center. I took a quick look thru the site. Strangely enough, it doesn’t cover Dynamics – Microsoft’s business software primarily targeting small and medium size businesses.
• Ted Neward called object/relational mapping the “Vietnam of Computer Science“. David Chappell gives us our next war / technology analogy, declaring that the REST vs. WS-* war is over, ending in a truce like the Korean war rather than “crushing victory for one side”.
• Like Jeff Atwood, I didn’t realize About Face has been updated, twice. I am a huge fan of the first edition, but Jeff calls About Face 3 “the best edition of this classic yet”. I just ordered a copy for myself.
• David McGhee transcribed a fantastic session with Dr. Don Ferguson at the Australian Architecture Forum on SOA/ESB integration in the real world. Go read the whole thing. Udi Dahan pulls out the quote “there is no such thing as a centralized ESB.” Amen to that. My other favorite quotes from this discussion is “The temptation is often to get everything in a repository, but often you cannot rely on people to put everything in the registry” and “there is sometimes the “Highlander” philosophy of there can be only one service”. If you’re design depends on centralization and/or significant change in human behavior, it’s doomed from the start. Frankly, it’s amazing how often that happens.
• In response to my What is the Rails Question post, Hartmut Wilms wonders why “the .NET community (for the most part) ignores Open Source Projects”. I wonder the same thing, though I don’t think you can lump the whole .NET community together on this. While some parts of the community ignore anything they can’t download from MSDN, other parts strongly embrace open source projects.

• My friend David “LetsKillDave” Weller writes a long post on corporate blogging, responding to comments on the subject from Penny Arcade. Andre “Ozymandias” Vrignaud also responds. David is specifically talking about blogging within the gaming division, but they apply pretty broadly to Microsoft as a whole when it comes to blogging. “I don’t want to get fired”, “I don’t want to do things that needlessly hurt my company” and “We can say things that PR or marketing people can’t.  Or won’t.” all ring true to me.
• Speaking of gaming, there seems to be more that your average cool games coming our for Xbox 360 this summer. I just picked up Forza 2 which rocks with the Racing Wheel. The Darkness looks very cool and I laughed my ass off playing the Overlord demo. Both shipped this week and have gotten good reviews. On their way in August are Bioshock and Blue Dragon. Of course, there are a few other big games coming this holiday. A good, but expensive, year to be a gamer.
• I laughed my ass off reading Larry O’Brien’s Top 10 Things To Do With Your Petaflop Supercomputer, esp. #9.
• WSDL 2.0, it’s official. Nick Allen has the news. Personally, WSDL seems to be the spec most responsible for driving RPC-style request/response web services, so let’s just say that I am not a fan.
• Joe McKendrick thinks something is “holding back SOA”? I don’t think it’s any one thing, but certainly the RPC style that most web service toolkits pretty much force down your throat isn’t helping.
• Nick Malik thinksAcropolis is promising as a SOA service consumer, but Udi Dalan thinks it doesn’t support multi-threading well enough. I lean towards Nick on this one since I see multi-threading as a language problem, which a library like Acropolis can’t solve on it’s own.
• Jon Flanders has been busy building the BizTalk Server 2006 extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (June CTP) SDK Sample. I’m not sure why the marketing folks gave this such a long and involved name, but the sample does look pretty cool. Paul Andrews has the project overview and demo video. However, given that the WF workflows are hosted in BTS, is it accurate to say “No Biztalk Experience Required“?
• Speaking of WF, Tomas Restrepo takes a detailed look at the new WF service hosting in .NET FX 3.5. Mostly, he likes what he sees. I have the same problem he does with the message correlation IDs. I’d like to have other options here, including support for what I call “message data correlation” (Tomas describes this as “natural correlating identifiers”) and “address correlation” which is basically the REST model.

• New version of dasBlog is out, the final version on ASP.NET 1.1 (unless this release “kills a kitten” as per Scott Hanselman). I don’t have the time (make the time?) to run daily builds, but I do try and upgrade to new major releases in a timely fashion. I’m also moving hosters, so expect a little downtime around here at some point in the near future.
• Matt Winkler is doing a series on alternate WF execution patterns. His first is the N of M pattern. While I can nitpick some things in WF – especially the limitations of transaction flow – WF’s support for variability and extensibility of execution patterns is fraking brilliant. (via Sam Gentile)
• Joe McKendrick is all excited about a SOA built without web services! We’ve been “doing SOA” since the EDI days without web services, so I’m not sure this level of excitement – with an exclamation point and everything – is warranted. But it is good to see people realize web services != SOA. Instead of web services, CERN is using JMS to move messages around. I don’t know much about JMS, but I do know it supports async and durable messaging, two things I think are critical for enterprise services.
• I saw on LtU that there’s a new paper on Singularity out. For those who don’t know, Singularity is a MS Research platform designed for reliability instead of performance. But there’s more than just a new paper. According to the project home page, “Singularity Version 1.0 is complete. We’ve shipped the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) to a small number of universities for their research efforts.” I wonder if I can get my hands on that RDK?
• Jeff Atwood is starting to show ads on Coding Horror, but he’s donating “a significant percentage” of the ad revenue back into the programming community. He’s starting with $5,000 and Microsoft is matching for a total of $10,000 to be donated to open source .NET projects. Go tell Jeff which projects you think he should donate to. Castle seems to be an early favorite.
• On Monday, Nick Malik posted what he called the Simple Lifecycle Agility Maturity Model (aka SLAMM) as a way of measuring your “agile factor”. Surprisingly, the community response has been zilch. After Nick’s comments on Agile last week, I figured someone would have something to say about it, even if only to slam it. (Slam SLAMM, ha ha.) Maybe nobody opened the spreadsheet and saw Mort has an agile factor rating of 71%? Personally, SLAMM seems like a rather coarse tool for measuring how agile you are, but coarse tools are better than no tools at all.

Normally, I would simply note that Nick Malik had finally moved on from the Great Mort vs. Agile Debate^tm in my next Morning Coffee post and be done with it. But man, his post on the Unimportant SOA Catalog is just too good to leave until then…

Nick has come around to the view that the catalog does “a really good job of solving the wrong problem”. I agree 100%. I haven’t talked about it much here, but my teammates could tell you I have been on a rampage about this internally. People think a service catalog will create adoption and reuse. That suggests that the big obstacle to service adoption and reuse is simply the issue of finding something to adopt or reuse.

It’s not.

The next PM I meet who says “I wish I had a big catalog of services so I can search for something that I can take an external dependency on” will be the first. And they’ll probably be wearing a straightjacket, because looking for dependencies on purpose like that is crazy talk. Project managers avoidexternal dependencies like the plague. So when a PM looks at a service catalog, what they see a big list of stuff they don’t want to take a dependency on. Not exactly the mindset to stimulate reuse and adoption, is it?

Nick suggests that a catalog might work if it was small (20-50 services) but not for hundreds or thousands of services. I think it’s a culture issue not a scale issue, so I don’t think it would work even for a small number of services. But in the end, it’s a moot point since he expects a large number of services. Different reasons, same conclusion. ’nuff said.

However, while I rail against wasting time building a service catalog that won’t do what everyone thinks it will do, I haven’t had a better idea.

Nick does. The Periodic Table of Services. Go read. More of my thoughts on this later.

Harry will be back on Monday so I will returning to blogging on my website, while I will let the expert return to his normal posts here (not that he really took a break). I agree with Harry’s post in that I really want to get something built so that we can talk about more than theoretical models. Like last time I appreciate the opportunity to sub for the master this last week. I hope that you found some of my entries interesting.

• Sam Gentile wrote the other day why it’s great to be a Microsoft developer. I enjoyed that post because I just celebrated the end of my first year here at Microsoft. At this point I am not sure what I have contributed, but I have learned a great deal and want to apply that knowledge over the next year to help the company to succeed. We really do have great people and great technologies.
• The Seattle/Oklahoma City Sonics hired a GM who is only 30 years old. You know you must be getting old when the people running the sports teams are younger than you. 😄 He comes from the Spurs organization though so at least he has a background from a successful franchise.
• Ben Pearce listed out his top 5 questions about PowerShell this week at TechEd. He also recommends the book “PowerShell in Action” by Bruce Payette. I heartedly agree with this endorsement as the book is excellent.
• It looks like there are going to be more family friendly games for the Xbox 360. I for one am glad to hear that. The other day as I was trying to find some games my 4 year old with the broken leg could play I realized how many games I have that wouldn’t be appropriate for him. This is very good news in my opinion.