Morning Coffee 115

Scott Guthrie has two new posts in his series on LINQ to SQL. The first covers updating the database using stored procs instead of dynamic SQL. I was somewhat surprised that there wasn’t the capability to auto-generate vanilla Insert, Update and Deleted procs, but I guess DBA’s probably hate that anyway. The second shows how to use ExecuteQuery to execute arbitrary SQL instead of using the cool LINQ query syntax. I’m doing a bunch of loosely-typed SQL work right now, so I’m going to take a deeper look at this.
Speaking of LINQ, I just discovered this great series on IQueriable by Bart De Smet. It’s four months old, but takes an incredibly detailed look at what happens under the hood with LINQ. Bart also has a reference implementation of LINQ’s standard query operators as well as LINQ to Sharepoint.
Dan Maharry has pulled together what looks like the definitive guide for really slimming down and speeding up your VPC. It’s XP specific, but I’d bet most of the guidance would also apply to WS03, which is what I mostly use in my VPCs. (via Larkware)
Jimmy Nilsson thinks it’s the operations department that holds the power in today’s IT world. I agree 100% That’s why I value Dale’s input so much.
Nick Malik wonders if it’s time to translate the Federal Enterprise Architecture for use in the commercial sector. My dad just retired from 5 years in the FAA and he thinks FEA is too high level to be particularly useful.
The 2007 edition version of Scott Hanselman’s ultimate tool list is now available.
A bunch of XNA Gamefest sessions are now available for on-demand viewing.

Morning Coffee 110

Monday @ Gamefest, the XNA team announced XNA Game Studio 2.0. The two big new things are support for the entire VS product line (1.0 only works on VC# Express) and the addition of networking APIs. Let’s Kill Dave has a good wrapup of the announcements from Gamefest Day One.
Speaking of Xbox 360, I played thru the demos of Stranglehold and Bioshock. Two thumbs up on both. It’s gonna be an expensive year for Xbox gamers.
Mark Cuban noodles on taking your house public. “Why not create a market or exchange where homeowners can sell equity in their homes?” I’ve thought about this myself from time to time. However, Mark thinks making it happen would “probably take the country’s biggest banks working together”. I wonder if there’s a more Web 2.0 social lending approach that would work better.
Jeff Atwood calls virtualization as “the next great frontier for computer security”. I agree 100%. But I don’t think the action is going to be in “full-machine” virtualization like Virtual PC. Rather, it’s going to be sandbox virtualization. Jeff mentions GreenBorder (now part of Google) but it’s not the only solution. Some time ago, Microsoft acquired SoftGrid which uses sandbox virtualization for application deployment, but using SystemGuard for security sandboxing seems like a logical step.
The WCF LOB Adapter SDK has released. Sonu Arora has the details. As part of the Integration team @ MSIT, I have a feeling we’re going to become fairly familiar with this technology. (via Jesus Rodriguez).
Speaking of Jesus, he thinks the six new SCA4SOA committees are “going to help”. Why? Because inventing technology in committee has turned out so well in the past?
John deVadoss cements BPM’s fad du jour status by contrasting “big” BPM and “little” BPM. It’s fairly obvious to me that big *anything* just doesn’t work in the enterprise. But I worry that little *anything* doesn’t work that well either. So how long until someone (probably Nick) starts arguing for “middle out” BPM?
David Bressler wonders “What is it about registries that everyone thinks is a panacea for all things SOA?” Amen, Brother! Joe McKendrick claims it’s required for governance, but then gets to what I think is the *real* reason for focus on registries: the “registry is a tangible offering” that vendors can sell. Just because it’s productizable doesn’t mean you need it.
Hartmut Wilms responds to my retire the tenets post, but he seems to contradict himself. On the one hand, he suggests that “the four tenets just expressed, what “almost” everybody outside the MS world knew already”. But then he goes on to dispute that the SO paradigm shift has even occurred! Hartmut, I’ll grant you that WCF (among other similar stacks) are way too focused on “you write the classes, we’ll handle the contracts and messages”. On the other hand, if you don’t provide a productive interface that most everyone can pick up and run with, the technology won’t get adopted in the first place.

Morning Coffee 109

I forgot to add a number to my last morning coffee post. However, after extensive research, I have determined that it was #108. So thing are continuing as usual today with #109. On the other hand, do you really want development and architecture opinions from a guy who can barely count? 😄
The finalists in the Dream-Build-Play contest have been announced. I haven’t played any of them yet (some are available for download) but they several of them sure look good.
And speaking of gaming, MS announced an Xbox 360 price drop yesterday. So if you want to get in on some of the XNA action, here’s your chance (or you could just build for your PC – take your pick).
Finally on the gaming front, if you’re not busy Monday you can watch the first day of Gamefest 2007 online. Get the scoop on XNA 2.0 as well as the new XNA networking support. I, alas, am busy Monday so I’ll have to catch it on demand.
On to, you know, actual geek stuff things. Scott Guthrie seems to have retired his LINQ to SQL series and moved on to LINQ to XML. He shows how to build an RSS reader application with LINQ to XML. An oldie demo, but a goodie.
Wanna learn F#, there’s a whole site of samples up on CodePlex. (via Don Syme)
Jeff Atwood is annoyed at how many different products you have to install to get a current & complete setup of VS 2005. Of course, MS shipped two parts of that stack since VS05 shipped (TFS & DBPro), three service packs (VS05 SP1, SQL 05 SP2 and DBPro SR1) and a major OS upgrade (VS Vista update). Doesn’t the same thing happen with any shipping product after a few years? BTW, if this is such a huge hassle, I wonder why Jeff doesn’t create a slipstreamed VS installer?
Udi Dahan has a great post on estimation where he claims “Developers don’t know how to estimate.” No argument, but the way he phrases it sounds like it’s the developer’s fault they suck at estimation. It’s not. Developing – by definition – is building something you’ve never built before. Is it any surprise we suck at estimating how long it will take us to do something we’ve never done before?

Morning Coffee 103

My Virtual TechEd Session What is Project Rome? got posted. It’s only 8 minutes long, so as you might expect it’s fairly high level. Thanks to Jon Flanders for handling interview duty.
QUT’s Garden Point Ruby.NET compiler is now the Ruby.NET open source project.
The NHL is partnering with NeuLion to provide IPTV services for NHL team websites. They piloted with the Islanders last season. Wouldn’t it be cool to get my favorite team’s IPTV channel on my Xbox 360?
Speaking of Hockey,
I like this new NHL 08 trailer. It’s about Reebok’s new uniform system, so it focuses on the teams with new uniforms, including the Caps. It does feature marquee players from rival teams like Sidney Crosby and Eric Staal (who is the cover athlete) heavily. But any video featuring Ovechkin’s stick handling, Semin scoring and Crosby falling to the ice is OK in my book.
Speaking of Video Games, the XNA Dream-Build-Play contest is over. You can see and download some of the submitted games over on Ziggyware. Some of them look awesome. (via Michael Klucher)
I said on Wednesday that it was a slow week. It may be, but I’ve also been less than motivated on pretty much all geek fronts this week. Not sure why.

Morning Coffee 101

In doing a little LINQ research, I stumbled upon Wes Dyer’s Yet Another Language Geek blog. Fascinating stuff. Subscribed. Be sure to check out his recent posts about Partial Methods, another new C# 3.0 (and VB9) language feature.
Werner Vogles has a great post on what a CTO does, including a summary of four different approaches to the job.
Somasegar lets us know that even though VS08 doesn’t launch until February of next year, MSFT is “still aiming to release Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 by the end of this year”.
There’s a new version of the Windows Live Mobile Search client. The Virtual Earth / Live Search team blog has the details. New features include Movie Showtimes, More Local Data with Reviews and improved Maps and Directions (including GPS integration). Can’t wait to get this installed. (via Dare Obasanjo)
XNA Gamefest is coming up next month. It’s sort of like PDC for game developers. It’s where we make our big game dev announcements – last year, we announced XNA GSE there. They recently published their session abstracts, including a whole track on XNA Game Studio ~~Express~~. As Shawn Hargreaves points out, an “enterprising reader could probably make a good guess” about some of the new stuff getting announced @ Gamefest.

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