I am still reeling from seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Mars Volta 2 nights ago in Philly at the Wachovia Center. The Peppers were beyond great with Frusciante taking a very active lead role. Many of the songs contained a full-out Hendrix-type feedback solo in it that showed the depth of his talents. I think Stadium Arcadium is their best album since Blood, Sex, Magic (which they pulled out the title song the other night!!). You can't beat a start of Can't Stop-> Dani California! Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands (although hard to take at times) and I am listening to the brilliant new Ampheture right now which they played in full the other night. Live, they come off as a wall of sonic noise and Bixler-Zavala wailing singing, an assault on the senses that drove people nuts (my wife wanted to leave!) and their greatness only came through in sporadic moments (Viscera Eyes).

Okay, a lot of stuff today. Number one, I want to congratulate my good friend and master of these types of posts, Mike Gunderloy for hitting The Daily Grind 1000!! Mike is an incredible asset to the community and a terrific writer to boot. If you are one of the rare people not already subscribed, get your ass over there this minute and make it so!

I have started to write (for work) a Workflow XOML loader and executor. I want to do something like XamlPad or even Snippet Compiler to execute my workflows. I have the hosting of the runtime down and loading the XAML/XOML. More later.

WCF/SOA/Indigo/BizTalk/Workflow/Distributed .NET

• Another good friend of mine, Tomas Restepo. has some great stuff:
• He released his  MSMQ Activities for Windows Workflow Foundation.
• He addresses MsmqListenerService concerns with the above
• Gets answers for the question of how to get the SOAP Action associated with a given operation when all  you have is the OperationDescription for it
• Points to Ralph Squillaces post an walkthrough entry of how metadata publication (MEX + WSDL) is enabled in Windows Communication Foundation
• Last but not least, he uploaded an updated version of the SqlTrackingQuery sample application he had created in January
• BizTalk Server 2004 SP2 released [via Tomas]. You can find the download here, and the list of fixes included in SP2 can be found in KB article 924330.
• WCF Oracle Application Server WS-Security interoperability Part1: from WCF to Oracle, from Jesus Rodriguez
• More of the WCF Energizer Bunny, Nicholas Allan, with Keeping Connections Open in IIS, Configuring IIS for Transport Security, Asymmetry Between Listeners and Factories, and Implementation Guidelines for GetProperty. Has this guy ever produced a bad post?
• Udi complains that he is sick of (as am I!!!) of the fact that Microsoft is doing the same thing with Indigo that they have done with the Whitehorse Designers, VB6 to VB.NET migration, (and I think of many more) spinning everything as "easy" and "quick".  He points to Learn how to quickly convert your .NET Applications to Service Oriented Solutions w/NET 3.0? (Web Cast) and says "to me, it sounds like a serious downplaying of the 'A' part of SOA. Actually, I find this to be true around most of Microsoft's "Service Orientation" message." Amen, no wonder no one gets the benefits of SOA as they NEVER do it. A IS FOR ARCHITECTURE world! It's not easy and does NOT come by default with WCF!!
• He also takes on this Sound Advice entry: which for some bizarre reason says "Services should be objects with lots of methods and represent effectively a whole application." Huge no! Well defined Messages/Documents anyone?

Avalon/WPF

• I learned about Kaxaml from nonstatic. As he says, "Introducing Kaxaml, a “live view” XAML editor and the long ago promised upgrade to SplitView .  It’s finally done-ish, and you can get it by downloading a .zip file here or downloading the .msi here. " He has a screen shot here. I've switched over from XamlPad to do all my XAML editing. You need this if you are serious about Avalon.

• Inter Process Communication Between Applications and Vista Gadgets Using WCF (Part 1) and Part 2 from Karsten

Software Architecture

• New! Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #1.
• Business Architecture Anyone?
• Eric Newcomer talks about "that the "Web of Services" workshop has been announced. This workshop is open to W3C members and non-members. This workshop represents the next step in a somewhat lengthy discussion about the importance of Web services to enterprise software."
• I just discovered Nick Malik's Inside Architecture blog with SOA and Database Coupling, and declared, visible and open coupling

Windows Vista

• Cool! The New and Improved Windows Vista Team Blog with Jim himself. Congrats to Rob Howard on the Teligent crew on the partnership! 
• ISO Recorder V3 is out and compatible with Vista

PowerShell

• Scott Hanselman on PowerShell CMDLET Visual Studio 2005 Item Template
• Kzu with a pair: PowerShell: vastly improved tab expansion/completion (or do you still miss VS intellisense?) and PowerShell: how to unit test your cmdlet 
  

Agile/Software Design

• Faking interfaces with events or delegates using Rhino Mocks - level 300
• A Wrapper Class for Spring .NET's Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection Container and Framework

Technorati Tags:  SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, Windows Communication Foundation, Software Architecture,  Windows Workflow Foundation, Vista, Avalon, Windows Presentation Foundation,  PowerShell, Agile, Agile Development, Microsoft