New and Notable 145

Architecture/SOA

• Blaine Wastell has posted that PAG planning an update of the Smart Client Software Factory to be released in late April of this year. They are encouraging feedback at http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient and enter critical items into the issue tracker (http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient/WorkItem/List....). From where I sit, they have their Priority 1 stuff right with WPF Interoperability. We absolutely need to be able to move to WPF with the existing CAB/SCBAT infrastructure
• I have been listing posts on WS-RM and its implementation in WCF. Harry Pierson, has an autopost that  builds on his recent epiphany about WCF and long running services. He speaks about his conversation with Shy and "At some point in the three years between March 2003 and February 2006, WS-RM went from being the enabler of long running services to "yet another misnamed WS-* protocol". And with it, WCF lost (never had?) the ability to support long running services (as I've written previously)."  The main point is that it does not support RM-based durable messaging. As Harry says, "As I said before, lack of support for WS-RM based durable messaging isn't that big a deal. As long as you understand WCF's sweet spot - the current version's sweet spot anyway - and don't try and make it be something it's not, you should be fine. Furthermore, Shy mentions the need for an "interoperable Queued Messaging specification" and wrote that it's something he "expect[s] that we will get to it in the near future". Here's hoping that spec is less flexible than WS-ReliableMessaging."
• Sanjiva Weerawarana was interviewed by Stefan Tilkov from InfoQ on WS-* vs. REST and said, " I'm sure I'll be painted a WS-* fanatic by the RESTafarians now :)." Sure enough, read the comments, they attack in packs-)
  

CLR/Tools/Agile/TDD

1. The most indispensable tool in the .NET universe, Reflector, has gone through a big update to V5!
2. As Jamie states, "This is a significant update with lots of refinements and new features. Perhaps most significantly it includes support for C# 3.0 language features such as LINQ query expressions, lambda expressions and extension methods. See my screencast about using Reflector 5.0 from VS Orcas." He also points to a powerpoint presentation here about the new features in Reflector 5.0.
3. Jamie continues by talking about the truly awesome support in TestDriven.NET 2.3 for Reflector. Download TestDriven.NET 2.3 Beta from here.
4. I think I forgot to post that Virtual PC 2007 has been released and works with Windows Vista as both a host and a guest operating system

LINQ

• Daniel posts a whole bunch of his LINQ posts plus other great LINQ Resources

WCF

• Dr Nick begins his Channel series with When to Write a Channel
• My friend Tomas on URIs and WCF Transport Channels and a Continuation

Longhorn Server

• Another Community Technology Preview (CTP) build of WindowsServer “Longhorn” has been posted to the Microsoft Connect site for TechBeta participants. MSDN and TechNet subscribers also will be able to get the February 2007 CTP from their Subscriber Downloads site in the next few days.

I'm listening to Childhood's End by Pink Floyd on the album Obscured By Clouds