Sam Gentile's Blog (if (DeveloperTask == Communication && OS == Windows)

Completely buried with two projects and the main one is going to CTP #2 at a major back in Paris/London next week so going to scrape this together quickly. I have also been pairing with Steve back on the main project on solving performance problems - yesterday, he and I optimized a section of the system where an operation was taking 25 to 30 minutes and got it down to 30 seconds! Now that's a good boost! I have much in my head concerning where we are at and my current feelings on being agile, architecture and such but they will have to wait. I tried to blog about the Apple iPhone announcement but couldn't muster up enough interest...

Architecture and SOA, Agile

• SOA and BI Impendence Mismatch
• Arnon has great comments on  a presentation (via Shahid Sah's blog) by Ron Jacobs on the Software Architect's Role. he says, "In this presentation, entitled Architects and the Architecture of Software, Ron compares the architect's role to that of an explorer, advocate, and designer," and "However, I would personally replace "advocate" with "mentor", and "explorer" with a "polymath" or "Renaissance" man. I'd also add a leader and visionary (although Ron mentions that as part of the discussion on explorer)." I agree with his additions, at least how I see my role.
• He also has some outstanding comments on Agile Iterations and what I really want to write about (and finding) when I have time: "To me, that is just a reminder why JEDUF is important. I find that in projects that are large or overly complex "sacrificing" one, two, or even three iterations for handling technical risks and forming a candidate architecture goes a long way (and I don't care if this makes my project not agile. I am fine if it is pliant, lagum or what-not)." I am actually finding its quite a bit more than 1-3 Iterations depending on the project and environment. Actually this ties in with Jim's Design Maps. 
• Cazz on Building Software Factories Today
• Richard Venyard on SOA Algebra

WCF/Indigo

• Harry finds Indigo daunting. Me, I find mastering 8 different stacks (COM+/ES, ASMX, WSE, Remoting, MSMQ, etc) to do the same thing and all the strange nuances a hell of a lot more daunting but that's just me, although the number of timeout settings and config settings is astronomical
• Pablo points to the fact that the NetCF team is working on a subset of WCF for the next version of the compact framework and this post "Windows Communication Foundation (Compact Edition) and the story of the Lunch Launcher" from Roman. I must say that Phil and I passionately presented these "mobile" scenarios to certain distinguished members of the Distributed .NET teams at Microsoft in phone calls a couple of years ago and they just couldn't see them or "why" anyone would "want that" back then...
• Nicholas on Designing New Faults, Hosting on Machines with Multiple Addresses, and MSMQ: Net vs Integration

Agile

• Jim Shore::How to be Agile
• I use the word Orthogonal a lot a work and Jeremy talks about Orthogonal Code

Orcas

• New Orcas specs

CLR/Win32

• My good friend DonXML says, "decided to use Visual Basic for this task.  Mostly, it was just to prove that you can build good architecture in Visual Basic just as easily as in C# (and maybe tweak anti Visual Basic guys like Sam Gentile a little, since I know he reads this blog.  Hopefully he doesn't go blind by accidentally seeing my Visual Basic code here ;))," in his post Creating Strongly Typed Stored Procedures Using Generics. I say, "it's okay for all you VB types to come out of the closet now. With the goodness that's the CLR, it's one beautiful managed world and it's all love." -)
• Hanselminutes Podcast 45 - IronPython ASP.NET and Language Extensibility
• You don't want to write an Interop Debugger
• Raymond Chen on the Evolution of version resources - 32-bit version resources and How do I load an entire file into a rich text control? among many others. Just read the whole blog!!

Avalon

• My friend Walt has become a Wintellectual on WPF and WPF/e!! Congrats!
• Yahoo Messenger for Vista Debuts at CES
• Why does the OpenFileDialog in WPF look so “1999” and how can I fix it?