I could get used to this rolling out of bed into my office thing

BizTalk Server

• The highly anticipated R2 release (the one with WCF Adapters) of BizTalk Server 2006 is coming real soon! Worldwide launches take place in September and October.
• My very good friend, Tomas, has released Version 1.1 of my PipelineTesting library for BizTalk Server 2006

WCF/WF/CSD/Connected Systems/Orcas

• Dr, Nick announces the WCF/WF/Cardspace Beta 2 samples, again, this time not pointing to the Beta 1 samples :)
• Dr. Nick also on Faking Poison Message Handling
• Excellent, excellent piece from Master Vasters (hey that rhymes!), Sin, Sin, Sin: How to do Simple, Webby, and Completely Insecure ASP.NET Membership Authentication and Role Authorization with WCF. WCF is dealing strongly with the cleartext password issue inherent in many Authentication and Role Authorization Providers. This is extremely important
• Clemens has also implemented XML RPC with WCF
• Michele has given the community an excellent series, writing a series of posts describing the changes to the WCF templates for Orcas Beta 2

Sharepoint/MOSS

• Just Published: Major Update to the MOSS and WSS Downloadable SDKs
• Sahil has started an excellent series on Sharepoint 2007 Workflows with Setting Up Your Environment, Writing an Ultra Basic WF,

CLR

• My friend Lutz updates the #1 tool in the .NET world, Reflector, for Orcas Beta 2! Stop what you're doing and get it!
• Along with that, one of the best add-ins, Reflector.Emit has been updated
• Another mastereful post from Joe Duffy: Thread interrupts are (almost) as evil as thread aborts

SOA/BPM/BI

• Bobby Woolfe comments on a recent  "Companies still seeking ROI from SOA" (Computerworld) article and reaches the conclusion, "I think this article makes the case for SOA governance." I agree. SOA without governance is just a bunch of uncontrolled and disjointed services lying around and not an SOA. Another reason some folks are not seeing ROI from SOA is that the focus is NOT on business process. SOA is about business process, period, not technology, not doing "SOA for the sake of doing SOA." I plan on doing a multi-part series on this - essentially translating my SOA with WCF series I have been doing for INETA the last 2+ years. Look for it soon!
• John Evdemon also comments on the ROI article and calls it the SOA Zen Moment of the Day, that every company measures ROI differently
• Nick Mallik, easily one of the most important voices in SOA and EA today, is the latest to voice that SOA and BI suppport the same goals. We've also realized this at Neudesic and that is why our Connected Systems Practice works closely with our BI one
• The Repository Factory is a new guidance package from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team. It replaces the Data Access Guidance Package, which has been integrated into the Web Service Software Factory (WSSF).