Julie, Patrick and I had dinner with my cousin David Schaffer tonight. David is a research fellow for Phillips and is an expert on genetic algorithms. He was one of the founding members of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation...

By now, everyone has seen the big news - VS2005 Beta 1 , Express versions and the new VS2005 Dev Center . I'm provisioning a new VPC to install it on. I'd love to move to VS2005 for all my dev work, but I'm writing a few apps that need to be working in...

Streaming producer presenations from TechEd US have been posted. However, the streaming presenation site has the same lack-of-url-addressability issue that TechEd Breakout session list had. Is it so hard to just post a simple HTML file with a list of...

I keep bugging Greg about better folder hierarchy support in NewsGator . While I have some news feeds directly under my news folder ( Don Box , Dilbert , my dad ) I categorize most of my feeds into subfolders. One subfolder is for MSFT architects - my...

Sure has been quiet around here. Standard end of the fiscal year craziness. Plus, I had some dogfood issue w/ XP SP2 RC1, Office 2003 SP1 beta and NewsGator. Upgrading to XP SP2 RC2 seems to have solved the problem. Regardless of the cause, I'm way behind...

TSS.net just published a new Tech Talk , this time with yours truly. Tech Talks are interviews with “.NET luminaries” (their name). Previous talks on TSS.net include Pat and Simon from my team as well as others such as Don Box and Scott Guthrie...

We've updated the Architecture Center blog page . We added John Evdemon (who I already blogged ), Stuart Kent and Alan Cameron Wills . Stuart and Alan work on the Enterprise Frameworks and Tools team which is producing the VS2005 modeling tools formerly...

If you were intrigued by my Software Factories post last week , you might want to consider attending OOPSLA '04 . It's in Vancouver this year, making it an easy trip from Seattle for me. There's going to be an all-day tutorial on Using Domain Specific...

My father said the other day that there are too many WS-* specifications. I've seen similar opinions expressed all over the web. I don't agree that there are too many - they are just too visible, at least for now. If you check out the WS-Security spec...

It's been a while - and a team name change - but another one of my teammates has made the leap into the blogosphere. John Evdemon is a member of our vertical industry architecture team focusing on near and long term web service solutions as well as regulatory...

Now that Tech·Ed is over, I've got some time for things like playing Xbox, yard work and reading. I just finished The Footsteps of God (not bad, but not great - fine for airplane reading below 10,000 feet and after my battery died). On the technical...

One of the big announcements at Tech·Ed was the Visual Studio Team System , a set of lifecycle management tools for architects , developers , project managers and testers . Check out this episode of MSDN TV introducing the Team System that was shot...

It's been days, but I'm finally getting around to posting my Tech·Ed wrap-up. I had a great time as a speaker, track owner and attendee. My Data in SOA talk ended up with an 8.0 score and our track overall scored a 7.5. Not bad for our first time...