Winterdom

I was reading yesterday (a couple months late, as usual) the March issue of Communications of the ACM, and ran into Phillip G. Armour's The Business of Software column talking about the need for an Operational Executive Sponsor to ensure success of any software development process change initiative.I can say...

Steve Vinoski reports here on the creation of a Working Group to advance the formalization of a standard spec for the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). I think this is pretty interesting: Queuing mechanisms are an extremely powerful and very handy tool for many applications and are a great way...

Clemens has a pretty interesting post (as usual) on his recent XML is the assembly language of Web 2.0 entry. He makes a good point that the WS-* stack has grown so complicated that it's pretty hard for humans to directly grok at the XML level (i.e. at the message...

Lately, I've been getting a little fed up with the poor performance I was getting out of my virtual machines in Virtual PC 2004 (which I still prefer compared to using Virtual Server 2005 R2 directly). Performance was particularly bad on VPC image with SQL Server 2005, which has a...

Wallace B. McClure posted here about some of the concerns he has regarding WCF. I'm not sure I agree 100%, but he does make a pretty good point about the fact that MS is pushing WCF pretty hard as a solution to all problems, and we'll just have to see...

Robin Davies commented on my earlier post about custom controls in WPF, and he makes a pretty good point, I think, that perhaps WPF will help drive the presentation layer to have more designer involvement in the layout and presentation of rich clients, similar to how they now "own" the...

Clemens has posted an interesting entry on the topics of Service Orientation, Service Autonomy and Caching here. It's worth reading. Several things caught my interest from Clemens' piece:The Service Orientation Principles and Autonomy: Clemens comments that he was initially confused by the meaning of the word "Autonomy" as part of...

If you're building an ASP.NET 2.0 site that uses the SiteMenu control with a custom SiteMapProvider implementation as the underlying data source, take care how you populate the properties of the SiteMapNode objects you return from your custom SiteMapProvider class. While trying to fix some code here I noticed that...

I've always been fascinated by computer fonts. There's a lot to be said for the creativity and the care taken in designing a good, usable font, and some are really beautiful on their own. While browsing around this afternoon, I ran into a page listing some fonts available for free,...

First we had WinFX Beta 1. Then we had several WinFX CTPs. After that came WF Beta 2 (appearing in various CTPs, just in case once wasn't enough), followed shortly by WF Beta 2.2 (not compatible with any other WinFX components). And now, courtesy of the just released Vista Beta...