Gene Webb, Microsoft developer evangelist, has posted the recorded LiveMeeting Indigo SDR (Software Design Review) dry-run videos and slides. And as if that weren’t enough, you can see Steve Swartz, Indigo Architect, give an intro to Indigo on MSDN TV.

I remember a day when SDRs were deep, secret mojo that even folks that knew about them were special, let along actually attending them. Now, we’re posting them on the internet. I love my company.

[from Aaron Skonnard]

My new group, DSG, is hiring:

• Program Manager
• Software Development Engineer

“Join the Model Engine team and help make modeling a core feature of the Microsoft distributed application platform. We’re building an engine and repository that supports a broad range of model domains, from the way we describe the structure of programs and data to the way that pieces of an application work together across machines and platforms. Using models makes it quicker to write programs, simpler to evolve them, and easier to analyze them. Model-driven development represents a major and fundamental shift in the way that software is built and managed; our team is chartered to bring those benefits to the people who are using our platform.”

Submit your resume today!

RegexDesigner has been updated to v1.1 with support for replacement patterns, national and special symbol support, Ctrl+Tab hotkey support, updated highlighting support for color blind users, Ctrl+A support and the use of a bullet instead of @ for matched whitespace. Thanks to Victor Serbin for putting this update together from source contributed to the GDN workspace.

You can hear Omri sing a few bars of “These are a few of my favorite things” to the tune of Indigo.

In case you missed it yesterday, Don Box and Andrew Layman, two of Microsoft's top thinkers, proposed a means of increasing XML performance by looking into areas of technology outside the core domain of XML.

“I first heard about it at a Seattle area Starbucks. I mean, I was just like sitting there drinking my Venti no-whip triple shot soy latte and I looked over at this dude sitting next to me who was working on a laptop and I saw something on his screen. So I said “Dude is that the new version of Eclipse?” and he said “No, it’s Visual Studio 2005 Linux Edition″. Then he typed a few lines of code and created an Indigo service that runs on the Apache web server. I was like “Dude!” and almost spilled my latte.”
–Anonymous Seattle Youth

“We still believe that Java is a strong language for development. However, we will no longer continue to build on that technology preferring instead to move developers to .NET.”
–Anonymous Sun Representative

I’m sure you’ve heard the uproar about “saving VB6” by now. Since I’m not a member of the VB programmer community, I don’t feel qualified to judge them, their tools or their plight.

However, I am a charter member of the COM community, so when I hear about Microsoft’s plans to halt the support for IDL, I get burning mad! Save IDL! Sign the petition! Viva la IDL!

Today’s my last day at MSDN. I will no longer be content strategizing for Longhorn/WinFX or smart clients or acting as liaison between marketing, evangelism and the product teams internally and developers externally. And I’m really going to miss it. MSDN took a flier on me being a successful Microsoft employee in a culture that doesn’t much like remote folk and made a very comfortable home for me. I could’ve gone on for a long time in that role.

Still, I felt another calling. At Microsoft, it seems like all of the action is with the product teams. To come to Microsoft as a software engineer and not work on a product team seemed like starting with the Yankees but never getting out of the dugout.

So, on Monday, I start in DSG (the Distributed Systems Group) aka the team that owns Indigo. I’ll be “are looking at ways to extend the notions of modeling that we’ve incorporated deeply into the stack and make them more general” (or so my new boss says). I can’t tell begin to describe how lucky I feel. Not only do I get to be on a real product team, still mostly from my house in Oregon, but I get to work on a very juicy problem. Further, I get to do it with Oliver Sharp, one of the prime movers on the Indigo team, along with a growing group of other people way smarter than I. It reminds me of the heyday of a certain training company with which I once had a deep relationship.

Two weeks ago, Oliver sent me a list of 10 fun computer sciency things to dig into that could take months. Last week I was helping the team get ready for a BillG review. This week I was trading emails with the team and a Sr. VP on the direction of the market and how it affects our product plans. Is this what it’s like for an addict that’s given up their habit to take it up again? If software engineering is wrong, I don’t want to be right! : )