Some programs get me as excited as a 4-year old who just discovered how fun running with your boots stuffed with mud is!

MaxiVista - Dual Monitor Software is one of those - everybody within shouting distance of my office (and a few I ran out and caught up with in the hallway) got dragged in to see me use the screen of my build-machine as an extra monitor for my laptop - NO WIRES - dig that !

Another tool I picked up after a reference in a blog I've now forgotten - but thanks - is Lookout for Outlook. It indexes your entire mailbox, including personal folders and then allows you to do Google-like searching across it all.

Finally I asked in an earlier post if anybody could point me to some good tools for posting to my blog and thanks to everybody for the responses. I am now using Sauce Reader as my main rss aggregator - it does pretty much what Sharp Reader and RSS Bandit does - but is does a great job of posting to my blog directly from an entry I'm reading. It is still a bit bug-ridden, but I think the advantages outway the occasional breakdowns.

One thing that Sauce Reader didn't give me was the "Blog This" button in Internet Explorer, but thanks to another feedback I am now writing this entry using BlogJet. As you can hopefully see BlogJet also supports uploading images via ftp for inclusion in posts. It has a nice simple interface and an editor with most of the features I feel I need.

That's the cool stuff I've come across recently, most of it I wouldn't have known existed if I hadn't read blog-posts.

One of the key tenets of MBF is to be able to support building systems based on a Service Oriented Architecture. Ram in his RunOfTheMillBlog covers approaches and challenges in supporting SOA with todays tools and systems as well as looking forward. He links to his  MSDN article on the topic : .NET Architecture Center Home: SOA Challenges: Entity Aggregation (Building Distributed Applications) which is part of PAG's Integration Patterns.

This is all very interesting reading. The goal is that MBF will give Enterprise Architects much better tools to solve some of the difficult challenges in implementing a SOA based architecture. Actually MBF will introduce something that could be referred to as "Entity Decomposition" rather than Entity Aggregation to give one common view of entities with varying subsystem representation, we should have more on that later I hope.

I've been watching - and reading - the recent debate over the announcement to postpone the launch of Objectspaces to Longhorn by aligning it with WinFS.

Barry Gervin has a report from TechEd on this issue that ties together this decision with MBF also being moved to the Longhorn timeframe. I think it makes sense to make every effort possible to make sure that when we [MSFT] decide to put out a new data-access API, we can say that we have done everything possible to make sure that it is aligned across all layers that will build on it, and that it will provide a stable programming model for many years forward.

I don't think it is prudent to dismiss WinFS as "Just a Filesystem" that does not have anything to do with data-storage. It represents a paradigm shift in terms of connecting structured and unstructured storage, database and filesystem, and provides an object-relational model for data access - That, combined with the need to support the requirements for data access that ObjectSpaces and MBF bring to the marriage will help make WinFS suited to be the data-access platform for the future. For MBF this partnership will surely mean that we can now rely on a strong underlying persistance platform that will also be the data-storage platform of choice for Longhorn generation apps.

So the crux of bloggin' is to be able to blog frequently about what's on your mind when it's still there for you to blog about.

That means that I need to increase my frequency a bit since it has taken me 3 months to get around to creating this, the first post in my blog. Having spent some time reading other people's blog's I've found that the frequency with which they are updated is almost as important as the content of the posts. Maybe it's just me taking voyeuristic pleasure in reading tidbits about other peoples life - work as well as private, but I think it has to do with how the blog becomes a storyline in itself - The best blogs evolve over time, they capture like a sort of real-time book - and I think that's the real difference in a blog as opposed to the "ordinary" website with news-updates.

So, now that the blog is officially opened - what storyline is this blog going to tell ?

It's going to be mostly about my work at Microsoft and certainly about the exiting work we are doing on MBF. I'm happy to see that a few of my colleagues have already started bloggin' about MBF so I can take the easy way out and point you to Tim Brookins, Dan's and Kevin's blogs (see the Link section), but I will try to add to that by focusing on the work we are doing in my team to provide framework and runtime support for UI and application patterns in MBF.

To get you started, a quick introduction to MBF is available in this deck from PDC03. You should note however that since then we have decided to release MBF as part of the Orcas Visual Studio release instead of the 2-phase release that this presentation mentions, with a release in Whidbey and another in Orcas. Tim Brookins talks about this decision and includes some links to comments in this entry.

I realize that maybe the first entry should have been an introduction of myself - but hey - isn't this what bloggin is about - I just wasn't on my mind when I wrote this, so the short intro for now will be that my name is Jesper Theil Hansen and I am managing the "MBF Client & Patterns" team (Pending a team name change) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Welcome here.