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.

Here. The one where I stop working for MSDN.

“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! : )

I am completely swamped this year and sellsbrothers.com needs a serious upgrade, so, I’m looking for one or more interns interested in the following work:

• rebuilding sellsbrothers.com from scratch in ASP.NET 2.0 and either Community Server or dasBlog
• real-world requirements like porting the existing content and keeping existing links working, even embedded links
• real-world working conditions (like this is the entire spec of the site reimplementation)
• working with a graphics artist to implement a new site design (I like Ed’s site)
• experimenting with ways to close the gap on RSS comments based on work already done with the wfw:commentRss standard
• hands-on mentoring from an experienced member of the Windows developer community (aka I promise to complain loud and long if you build stuff I don’t like… : )
• exposing the complete content of the site for consumption by other web sites and smart clients
• hosting MSDN content in the site’s chrome
• no money, but you do get to brag about reimplementing one of the web’s most popular one-person developer-centric sites, serving almost 1M unique visitors/month
• integrating existing features, like the Windows Forms FAQ and the Wahoo! check for the .NET Framework
• free access to the new site for life for you and your ancestors (and let me throw in 256 free GUIDs while I’m at it… : )
• integrating ads into the overall design
• btw, did I mention there’s no money?

If you’re interested, drop me a line (I’m sure I’ll be flooded… : ).

Here. This application demonstrates the two things I’m finding that Avalon has changed about my thinking. The first is that data binding makes itself into even trivial Avalon applications and its presence is appreciated. The second is that I want to push as much stuff into XAML as I can. Keeping the data separate from the code makes a bunch of sense and, for my trivial application, keeping the data inline with the rest of the UI was very useful. It allows for easy maintenance and localization while pushing as much of my application into declarations and out of imperative statements. The more I can tell the computer what I want instead of how I want to accomplish it, the better off I am.