It is really heart-wrenching to see the death toll count from the tsunami(s) continue to increase beyond belief . This count will only keep increasing due to disease and starvation. So, please visit Amazon and donate $5, $10, $20, or whatever amount  you can afford. Any amount will further help impede the sadness that is occurring in...

This past week I repaved my entire machine; It has been over a year since I last cleaned house and I also felt it was time to “virtualize” my development approach. I figured I have dirtied my box with too many beta bits lately and I needed to start sandboxing my various dev environments (home, work, mono). Undo disks....

Today, I had the chance to attend the Microsoft Architect Forum at the campus in Redmond. The forum's agenda included a talk about Software Factories by Jack Greenfield, Visual Studio Team System, and a presentation about Connected Systems. The talks were good and provided little nuggets of interesting information. I don't want to give an...

VSLive is having an Indigo day; Perhaps at the PDC 2005, attendees will be digesting Indigo for an entire week. While Indigo was introduced at the PDC 2003, I have a sense that the next PDC will provide a lot of insight into what Indigo really promises and produce a version of Indigo that is essentially baked. Regardless of Indigo, I had the...

Seems like a BPEL book has been released just in time for the Holidays. Here is the official title: Business Process Execution Language for Web Services an architect's guide to orchestrating web services using BPEL You want more info: check it out at www.bpelbook.com.

Aaron throws out his wishlist. Here is mine: Specs and More Specs - The inclusion of a couple of new specs would be nice; WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-MetadataExchange would be the most useful and interesting additions. Also, a simple reliable persistance store along with the WS-ReliableMessaging implementation would be helpful. Dynamic Policies...

The second rendition of Master Chief and company are arriving shortly... very shortly. The review of Halo 2 over at IGN was just released and oh boy I can't wait. Go read it now.  Here are the three features of Halo 2 that get me all warm and fuzzy.     Dual wielding of weapons.     Online clans (I...

Since my family is still in Nebraska, I think I will head to the Geek Dinner tom. night and enjoy some delicious food court grub.  It will be my first Geek gathering in the Northwest should be interesting.

Steve Maine provides a nice descriptive summary of Don Box's DevCon talk. He also describes how inevitably these specs will be hidden from users and just work; Whether that abstraction be through tooling, well designed programming models, or both.. only time will tell. Steve also uses DCOM as an example on how developers were successful in...

I finally had the opportunity to listen to episode 46 of the .Net Show. I really think the guys are nailing the guidance on the head. The present and future is not about ripping and replacing current IT systems/programs/whatever. It is about leveraging IT investments of yesterday, today, and tomorrow and then composing these investments into...

After two long days of driving from Omaha (25+ hours), I finally arrived in Washington late Monday. I started at Attachmate on Wednesday and I am quite pumped about the job ahead of me. The real nice aspect of my job is the focus on the server side and developing highly performant and scalable server code... no more dealing with the pain of...

An interesting piece on the Indigo Design Preview from Gregor Hohpe. I think it is an important to note that Microsoft still doesn't have an orchestration/choreography story outside of Biztalk (at least that is public). Gregor writes that little was shown or said about Indigo and orchestration.. Hopefully, we will hear about where Microsoft...

A new open source BPM engine has been incubated through Apache. The engine has been donated to Apache from Gluecode. The code donated is an embeddable engine, but, doesn't contain an implementation of BPEL or BPEL-J (I think it currently houses a proprietary language geared towards human workflow). However, It does seems as if a BPEL...

It has been very quiet on my blog lately and for some good reasons. Job.. Kids.. Wife.. Friends.. Xbox.. you know something called "[geek] life". Also, I have been through a pretty intense process over last month as I have accepted a full-time Sr. Software Engineer position on a new SOC product line at Attachmate. That's right, I moving the...

A nice list of Service blogs and new sources on the newly revamped WebServices.org.