You know what? Owning a pool really sucks-). Oh, it’s great to go in but not a lot of fun spending most of every Saturday going to the pool shop getting the water levels measured, spending $100 a week on chemicals, spending the rest of the day applying such chemicals, and endless vacuuming. Plus I have no F*&^^ idea what I’m doing-). Anyone sympathize?

I have a whole bunch of stuff saved up since I couldn’t blog because even with 8 of us busting our humps we totally blew this Iteration (more later) and we’re all working in pieces this weekend (Yes, even on an Agile team!). It was a really awesome week for Ruby, especially in CLR land:

Ruby/Rails

• Great news from John Gough (author of still the best CLR compiler book 4 years later) and crew at Queensland, with the preliminary Beta release of the Gardens Point Ruby.Net compiler download!! John, has some more in-depth analysis here. If you haven’t tried Ruby you owe to yourself to do so as it just may arguably be the most powerful yet simple language out there.
• Equally awesome news from my pal John Lam, who has released RubyCLR Drop 4. I plan to play with both of these as soon as we ship this Iteration-)).
• Day 1 report from the RailsConf 2006 Day 1 and Day 2 Report. Another Day 1 Report from Robby on Rails. Also Day 2 Part 1

CLR

• FxCop 1.35 release announced on FxCop blog.
• Shawn has a great post on Reducing Startup Time Due to Strong Name Verification

WPF/Avalon

• The WPF blog shows how to Implement a Mac OS X Dock in WPF. Also check-out the Slinky XAML ListBox!!
• On the LearningWPF blog, there is a sample using a re-usable WPF Template for displaying time information

WCF/Indigo/SOA/WSE

• Nicholas announces the availability of slides from the TechEd WCF chalk talks from the community site 
• Kiril talks about a subject very dear to me; controlling aspects of WSDL Generation from WCF. He states that there are three main phases:
• 1) Design time: settings on data contract, message contract, service contract, service behavior, binding,  
• 2) Runtime: implement IWsdlImportExtension and work with ServiceDescriptionCollection inside BeforeImport call.
• 3) Runtime: substitute  your own MetadataImporter and party on. 
• In Part 1 he covers Namespaces
• Martin Gudgin put together a nice STS prototype version here to play with
• There is a new Indigo book; Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Application. Right now the book to beat is the brilliant Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation: Hands-On with one of its authors being Craig McMurtry who developed our Indigo SDR labs and has been a huge help to me and my team as we use WCF in production. This book, which I will write a full review is brilliant and useful.
• I’m still mulling on Clemens’s incisive recent XML is the assembly language of Web 2.0 and Tomas’s response

Team System/Visual Studio/GAT

• Tom Hollander’s blog: The patterns & practices team is please to announce the availability of the June 2006 CTP of the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) and Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT)!
• Learn more about Orcas
• Awesome VS Usability Tip from Mark Miller, who with the latest CodeRush/Refactor! Pro have buried Resharper so badly it’s almost embarrassing

Data/LINQ/ADO.NET/SQL Server

• Tim Mallalieu is jazzed that we’re reading their documents and providing feedback; both positive and negative which is summarized on the Data Team Blog where I am known as “other.” I think it’s important for Microsoft and many others to remember that some of us have 20 or more years experience each doing data and want to see Microsoft doing the right thing here!
• Ayende responds with Part 2 of his feedback on the ADO.NET Entity Framework
• Adam Mechanic does a nice TechEd wrap-up on the SQL Server side

Other

• Windows Power Shell One Liner: List all the subdirectories in the current directory
• Managing ClickOnce publisher certificate files from Brian Noyes
• Cathi Gero's and Ted’s session from TechEd, "Pragmatic Architecture", is now available as a webcast