2007 I've posted some 30 entries on my blog. That's what some of the "Whoa, listen to me, I am so awesome!" blogging crowd of today typically does in a day or two. 2008 promises to be so interesting that it would be a shame not to be blogging, and hence I do. There'll be lots of things going on in tech and in the world. 

Over the past year I've been very deeply involved in the still rather stealthy project 'Oslo' about which we'll talk about in MUCH more detail throughout this year than we have at the recent conferences. When you are in a project with tight disclosure constraints there's really nothing of any substance to talk or blog about. Hence I didn't.

However, since Wednesday I have a new job. I'm now getting my hands dirty by writing code for our Internet Service Bus infrastructure that's currently code-named 'BizTalk Services'. Here, the rules of the game are very different. We're actually building most of the stuff out in the open and are inviting people to play with it. That's really more in the spirit of how I've been working with the community in the past and therefore I'm looking forward to the fun that's to be had in this new team.

Beware; since I gather that I've lost about 95% of my readership of my main at http://vasters.com/clemensv blog due to my inactivity I will use the opportunity to adjust the agenda and make it a "everything that I find interesting" place. Expect political opinion. My MSDN blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/clemensv will get mirrored copies of the tech topics as I've done that since I work here at MSFT. If you just care about the tech stuff read the MSDN mirror. 

As Scott says, work on DasBlog is still happening and the project is getting ready for the very last ASP.NET 1.1 release before moving on to the ASP.NET 2.0 model and being fully compatible with the 2.0 runtime. You can run it on 2.0 today without any problems, but since the project has been committed to 1.1 compatibility so far, there were quite a bit of things that weren't possible to change.

Once the project switches over to be "native" on the CLR/BCL 2.0 (we're discussing the actual target framework version), I'll rejoin the effort and I already have several truckloads of new features or changes in the wait loop. You'll be surprised what that little engine will learn to do over the next several months.... ;)

As announced, if you are subscribed to my blog at friends.newtelligence.net or staff.newtelligence.net or have the site address in your favorites, now is the time to update those links. The old addresses permanently redirect to the new site and the associated webserver might in fact go away within a few weeks. 

http://vasters.com/clemensv is the new place. Thanks, Richard.

  I must have lived under a rock for the past several months so that I didn't see this service. Anyways, if this works as advertised, subscribing to Live Alerts using the button in this post (and the one under the blog calendar) will have Live alert you whenever my feed gets updated.

Changes come little by little. My blog is moving. It's still sitting on the same server in Germany, but in order to take all of you with me to the new home I've flipped the switch on the domain name already. So if you are subscribed to staff.newtelligence.net/com or friends.newtelligence.net/com, this is a good time to edit that entry. Either point to http://vasters.com/clemensv/rss.ashx or directly subscribe to the Feedburner mirror at http://feeds.feedburner.com/clemensv where the first URL redirects to.

Mary Jo,

I don't really want to disagree with you in public, but in this instance I really think I have to. In your latest blog post you equate "community" to "everything open-source" and I don't think that makes sense. Is there a "Microsoft Community?". Sure, there is. There are active user groups with tens of thousands of members across the world focusing on all kind of aspects around Microsoft products that exist in independence or under the umbrella of INETA, Culminis or Mindshare. There are fantastic developer community sites out there like CodeProject, DotNetJunkies or ASPAlliance, we have a whole network of Microsoft-driven community sites with a lot of community engagement in forums and community samples (ASP.NET, IIS.NET, etc.) and CodePlex is actually quite impressive for hosting open source projects. The code for this blog engine is on SourceForge along with hundreds and hundreds of Win32 and .NET based other projects. 

It goes further. How about JorDev in Jordan? How about Developers.ie in Ireland? CodeZone.de in Germany? NNUG in Norway? SDN in The Netherlands? GotDotNet.RU in Russia? I could continue this list for several pages. And a lot of these groups speak and publish in their local language so their activities don't pop-up on the New York, Redmond, or Silicon Valley radar screens. In the last 4 years before joining the firm I've spoken at some 250 events in over 40 countries and I can tell you, the community you say is missing is there and very much alive. We even seem to have rabid fanboys like Apple, if someone were to believe this unbiased complaint 

But to the heart of your story. You write "When the vendor whose technology you are using doesn't require your participation to create/advance its products, you tend to feel less personally vested in that vendor." The reality looks different. We require that participation and that participation happens. In fact, customer-defined requirements and quality gates are part of our release criteria these days. We broadly engage in technical discussions in blogs, we invite and solicit opinion from industry luminaries, we listen very closely to what people have to say in the forums (and file bugs and design change requests as the result of it), we speak to customers on on-site visits, we run small and big Software Design Reviews previewing and discussing very early bits or just raw ideas (my division ran such an event right after MIX on the 1st floor of the Venetian Convention Center), and there's a a lot of email (and IM discussions) going back and forth with individuals on a daily basis that helps us doing the right thing. And we're not shy changing plans if we're being told that we're not doing the right thing.

The only thing that we don't do is allowing everyone coming along to check out files from our source code depot and start coding along. If people really want to do work on the internals of the .NET Framework, we'll figure out their skills (as even open source projects eventually end up doing as they succeed and grow), see what parts of the code they can best work on for design, code or test, and hire them if it's a fit.

Lastly, to your question "Could/should Microsoft try to make Visual Studio running on Windows more appealing to Linux developers and deployers? Port Microsoft Office or SQL Server to Linux?". Should we? Not mine to decide. This point isn't about "community", at all, I believe. There's a huge, world-wide community that focuses on Windows and the .NET Framework. A significant part of the open source community build software that runs on Windows - and in very many instances even exclusively on Windows. Isn't that the community we should care about in the first place?

As much as folks with vested interest want to play the story that way, the open source community isn't all about Linux (let alone Java). I don't think anyone at Microsoft needs to have "Slashdot envy" as Scoble once put it. Our community does fantastic work and does a lot of it. It'd be nice if you'd recognize them for it.

And you write "Even though Microsoft and its products have helped a number of resellers, software vendors, peripheral makers, consultants and programmers carve out a living for themselves, most of these folks seem to consider Microsoft a job, not an adventure."  The adventure made me move from Germany to Redmond and work for the firm. The adventure has made me lots of friends all across the world. I love this stuff. So do my friends. It'd be nice if you'd recognize that as well.

Have a great day!
Clemens 

PS: I'm not cross-posting this to the MSDN blog as I usually do these days. This is my personal opinion and one motivated by me feeling to be very much a member of the community that you say doesn't exist.

One of the neat features of dasBlog is that the statistics pages filter out search terms so that I get to see all the search terms that lead into my blog. Some are quite naughty, some are very funny (especially the dozen-or-so daily search terms for "alien" that land here), some have a surprising search rank, and some are like this: forgot password windows server 2003. I'm really sorry for that fellow ...

Tim O'Reilly's "code of conduct" is a "we need more laws" overreaction to the fact that real world making its way into blogland. Yes, as much as there may be a sense in some people that there's a "we" amongst bloggers and "we" need to stay together or some folks still think that bloggers are some kind of an elite: "Blogger" is a mainstream occupation and hobby now. That means: you'll find that some folks are assholes. Get over it. It's not that we hadn't had those along for the ride all the way from the beginning...

So, no, thank you very much.

I see an increasing number of research efforts going on to get people’s heads around the blogosphere and how to figure out what's relevant and what's not. 4-5 years back it was quite easy to do so, because there were so few of “us bloggers” and you could read pretty much all blogs that mattered in your area of interest withion an hour of your day, but now all of that has grown so much out of proportion that noise and signal blur into a “wodge of stuff” that’s hard to get through or judge. So now people start resorting to bots and lots of statistics to do analysis and my intuition tells me that while that may yield interesting data, a bot can’t really capture the signal amplitude. With that I mean relevance and authority.

I think I’m observing several types of blogs that deserve different attention and weight. Interestingly enough, that isn’t necessarily captured by discoverable metadata such as inbound links or trackbacks or pingbacks. The types I can come up with are the following and it’d be great if you could give me your opinion on whether that resonates with you and whether you have good examples for the individual types. I am giving some examples realizing that some blogs have N+1 of these characteristics. The crosscutting concern here are comments. I am not sure how to think about those yet. Also, this list is not at all scientific; it’s just a (my) perspective. 

“The Authority”
The blog has been around forever and the author has built up so much credibility and following that “everyone interested” is subscribed to the feed. Since that’s so, people are at most giving “Look at that” links and there is no widespread debate because the blog entries are undisputably good and accurate data; most people just consume the feed.

“The Troublemaker”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has build up enough credibility for people to care. The author intentionally takes extreme positions to spark debate and that works and people are linking and voicing opinion. Lots of people are lurking, lots of links if the position is particularly outrageous.

“The Collaborator”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has build up enough credibility for people to care. The author has a reputation to be interested in broad collaboration, raises interesting challenges and ask broad questions that spark constructive debate.

“The Linkblogger”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has built a reputation for being a good observer for what’s going on in blogland. Lots of people are relying on the editorial skill to cut through the noise and are mostly consuming. Inbound links becoming rare over time, because the blog eventually becomes a utility.

“The Magazine”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has built a reputation for being good at figuring out what’s going on in the industry and is essentially a news outlet. Lots of incoming links due to novelty factor.

“The Blip in the Noise”
The blog is sitting on one of the big blog properties (such as weblog.asp.net) and shows up on people’s radar mostly through the consolidated feed. Inbound links may flare up on an interesting post, but otherwise the main blog is just a lonely place. If there are enough blips, people may end up subscribing to the actual blog feed.

“The Googleable Answer”
This is the blog who is #1 to #5 with the answer to something that thousands are having a problem with. Google for 0x800123123 or some HRESULT and you find this person. The author is proud of this post because (s)he "is the answer", not support.microsoft.com.   (look for "dllhost.exe.config" ...)

 “The Shooting Star”
The blog is relatively new or has been ignored but the author has done an astonishing stunt that ended up on Slashdot or digg (etc). Tons of links. Server tanks. People subscribe and lurk for a while and if the author can follow through the blog will end up on somewhere in one of the categories above or otherwise on the category below.

“I want to blog”
The blog has no general relevance whatsoever. Nobody is particularly interested. Sadly, that's the majority.

Another observation that I have is that the blog volume doesn’t directly correlate to relevance. Someone can be silent for 3 months and have huge amplitude and some blogs on people who post every day may not matter at all in the big picture.

(Thanks to Scott Hanselman for the "Googleable Answer" contribution) 

Apparently there's a little blog tag game spreading that Gerald from Sun Microsystems desperately wants to pull me into. Ok. I'm game.

My 5 things:

1. The most CDs I have from a single artist or band are by Prince (& the Revolution, & the New Power Generation). I skipped most of the trash he put out while he was trying to get out of his Warner contract, but unfortunately not the horrid album Come for which I still want my money back. My favorite album is Sign of the Times, followed by 1999. The new 3121 isn't too shabby either.

2. The first game I ever programmed all by myself on my ZX81 (in 1KB!) and not by just typing in a listing from one of the difficult-to-acquire computer magazines (that's how things were back in the day) I wrote in 1984. It was a PacMan knockoff. I lost all work at least five times because the Sinclair's way of saving programs to the cassette tape was not very reliable, to put it nicely. Space Invaders was next.

3. The F. in Clemens F. Vasters stands for Friedrich. My grandmother (father's side) insisted me having that name in honor of my grandfather who fell in France in 1944. By what is known, he was a motor courier and got shot by the French Resistance. He's buried at the German War Cemetary outside of Andilly (near Nancy), France.

4. I currently have 180,000 hard-earned bonus miles with KLM/Air France and 110,000 with Lufthansa. I am qualified as Lufthansa Senator (Star Alliance Gold) through 2/2010, since Lufthansa stacks the 2 year award periods on top of each other when you qualify again in the first year of your award period. I am losing my Gold status with KLM/Air France this next April. No more lounge access in Schiphol and no more skipping the Economy check-in line. That sucks. In my job here at Microsoft I will unlikely requalify for either, because I'm not doing much of the crazy traveling anymore. I've been to 48 countries in the past 4 years.

5. I turned down an invitation to interview for a job with the Microsoft COM/OLE team in 1995. They had first approached me in 1994 and the PUM who was driving that at the time dropped the ball after the first contact. He came back with an apology for not being as thorough about the process as he should have been - some 8 months later. When that happened I was locked in a 2 year contract heading the NY office of the German company I worked for, so it ended up taking 11 years until I actually landed just at the division that can trace quite a few of its roots back to that team. I got the COM/OLE team's attention by fighting (and winning, if there is ever such a thing) a huge email flame-war on the Microsoft OLE CompuServe forum where the product manager of OpenDoc at Novell (who had just acquired WordPerfect at the time and got into OpenDoc that way) tried to convince everyone that he had the superior technology in hands. I wish someone had a backup of these forums. I am sure the conversation is horribly embarrasing from today's perspective.

So here are my 5 things. And the tag goes to ...  Udi, Daniel, Don, Nicholas, and Mr. Maine.

I just disabled Trackback and Pingback. We need security and a trust chain for these protocols. This is getting ridiculous.

I am sure that some want to fly under our radar, but I am also sure that a lot of people are very interested to have a bit fat green spot showing up on our radar screen when it comes to their blogs posts. Well, if you look here ... everyone who left a comment on that post is on my blogroll in RSS Bandit and I am making every interesting and original post/thought/article visible internally to make sure that your wishes/concerns/praise are heard and your contributions to the community are acknowledged.

PS: Did I mention that I am involved in the MVP approval process?
PS: Identity (InfoCard, Active Directory, MIIS), Workflow and BizTalk gurus are welcome too. I will get your feed addresses to the right folks.

In the upcoming week I will be cleaning up the categories on my blog. So if you've subscribed to any of the category feeds directly, some of them may stop working.

As of tomorrow, the "official" blog address will be http://friends.newtelligence.net/clemensv as I won't be part of the newtelligence "staff" any longer. However, all existing subscriptions to the main RSS and Atom feeds will continue to work, because this blog isn't really going anywhere. I will see what it takes to get a mirror blog on blogs.msdn.comand whether I can use the dasBlog cross-blogging feature to push select content there.

Eventually, and once I am done reshuffling, I will explain the new category structure and actually encourage you to subscribe to select categories, because my blogging habits will change quite a bit in my new role at Microsoft. For instance, you'll see a lot more German here (which you might want to tune out of if you are not interested), I'll start a link-blog category and I will introduce some other categories that are not at all about technology.

End of the hibernation mode. Here’s one of the reasons (besides a lot of “actual work”) why I’ve been hiding in the past few months. And it very much feels like the start of a project I started a while ago (7/17/03 was the day I switched) and which is now this:

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been throwing around some ideas to fix a personal “problem” that I have as a frequent business traveler: Access to “my” local cable television (football!) and the recorded content that I have on my home machine. As I blogged already, I bought a Windows Media Center PC along with SnapStream’s BeyondTV product as a personal video recorder and “live streaming” server and got myself a 3072/512 KBps DSL connection.

It turned out that my concrete use case of wanting to access my home machine and content primarily from hotels and elsewhere on the road (and not so much from within my apartment) isn’t well covered by either Windows Media Center Edition or BeyondTV. Both products have options to stream content across the local network in some way. In addition to that BeyondTV has a small built-in web server that lets you access live TV and streams via a HTML interface so that you can actually get at it from anywhere. In fact, there are extensions for Media Center that let you do something similar. But somehow, none of that was really the solution I envisioned. What I wanted is a smart client that works online and offline and can replicate recorded content down to my notebook’s disk. I want to have the TV guide data (electronic program guide) cached on my notebook so I can schedule recordings locally (and replicate them down to the PVR as I get connected) and/or get alerts whenever a show is coming up that is of interest to me. I want a smart client that has a “10 feet” user interface and support for a remote control and the smart client shall look graphically appealing. And lastly, and possibly most importantly, I want a good excuse to stuff as many feature showcases for Indigo and Avalon (yeah, yeah: WCF/WPF, yadda, yadda) into the combined solution.

When I started thinking about how to approach this, I was thinking that the smart client was the thing to focus on. So by now I have acquired what I think is a rather scarily broad set of Avalon development skills (for a server guy, at least). Heck, I even taught myself how to tilt and turn a 3D plane with video on it without having to copy someone else’s XAML! The first UI prototype was sitting right on top of BeyondTV’s API, which is exposed as a set of Web Services, but somewhat feels like a COM API on a longer leash. Since using that API directly is a bit cumbersome, I wrote a wrapper around it to make it a bit more accessible and “service like”. And while that was all cute and started working, it somehow it still didn’t feel like the right thing to do.

What would I do about other sources? NASA TV provides a live web stream that I sometimes look at, not to mention various video webcasts for developers and the like. And what about podcasts? What about internet radio? Couldn’t blogs be integrated into all of that? Wait…. couldn’t my live TV and recording sources be like blogs?

Well, I can program and hence they can. I wrote and I am still writing an Indigo-powered server that wraps BeyondTV (and other sources) to become a “video blog” server. My Avalon-powered smart client for which I have some bits and pieces in place of course won’t be dependent on my video server, but will understand blogs, podcasts, video blogs and whatever else I can find and will integrate it all into a remote control navigable text/radio/video UI.

I’ll drill into and write about the things that I am doing to make it all work in the next few weeks and months and as I proceed. For now, I’ll just tease you a bit and show you a selection of three (incomplete in terms of content and features) XML snippets that the server generates. If you hit the server application root directory, you get an OPML with all the live TV channels that are available (the list below is shortened considerably):

< opml >
  < head >
    < title > TV </ title >
    < dateCreated > Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:27:04 GMT </ dateCreated >
  </ head >
  < body >
    < outline title = " MTV " xmlUrl = " http://tattoine:8100/TV/MTV " />
    < outline title = " TELE5 " xmlUrl = " http://tattoine:8100/TV/TELE5 " />
    < outline title = " BAYERN " xmlUrl = " http://tattoine:8100/TV/BAYERN " />
    < outline title = " NDR " xmlUrl = " http://tattoine:8100/TV/NDR " />
    < outline title = " TV nrw " xmlUrl = " http://tattoine:8100/TV/TV-nrw " />
    < outline title = " RTL " xmlUrl = " http://tattoine:8100/TV/RTL " />
    < outline title = " SAT.1 " xmlUrl = " http://tattoine:8100/TV/SAT.1 " />
    ...
  </ body >
</ opml >

If you were follow the MTV link in the OPML you’d get the MTV RSS, with the guide data much like what I am showing below. [I just left three shows in it here for demo purposes – typically every channel has about 7-10 days worth of guide data].  Note that the <pubDate> for every item is the date/time when that show is going to air. Future dates are perfectly legal in RSS. Each item has, of course, a <link> on its own, which get you to more details on the show, like a list of actors, the status of whether you want to record the show or want an alert when it starts, or some rich media preview (there something there now, but nothing I am willing to show, yet).  

< rss xmlns:wsa = " http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing " xmlns:ctv = " http://schemas.vasters.com/2005/08/clemensTV/channels " version = " 2.0 " >
   < channel ctv:mediaChannel = " true " >
      < title > MTV </ title >
      < link > http://tattoine:8100/TV/MTV/media </ link >
      < description > MTV </ description >
      < image >
         < url > http://www.tvtoday.de/tv/programm/bilder/senderlogos/mtv.gif </ url >
         < title > MTV </ title >
         < link > http://mtv.de </ link >
      </ image >
      < copyright > (c)2005 MTV </ copyright >
      < lastBuildDate > Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:26:09 GMT </ lastBuildDate >
      < generator > ClemensTV </ generator >
      < ttl > 60 </ ttl >
      < item >
         < title > Viva La Bam </ title >
         < guid > EP:0001000000055045:127744056000000000 </ guid >
         < link > http://tattoine:8100/TV/MTV/item/EP:0001000000055045:127744056000000000 </ link >
         < pubDate > Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:00:00 GMT </ pubDate >
         < description > Show mit Bam Margera, USA </ description >
         < ctv:Duration > PT30M </ ctv:Duration >
      </ item >
      < item >
         < title > Masters </ title >
         < guid > EP:0001000000055045:127744020000000000 </ guid >
         < link > http://tattoine:8100/TV/MTV/item/EP:0001000000055045:127744020000000000 </ link >
         < pubDate > Fri, 21 Oct 2005 23:00:00 GMT </ pubDate >
         < description > Depeche Mode </ description >
         < ctv:Duration > PT1H </ ctv:Duration >
      </ item >
      < item >
         < title > Pimp My Whatever </ title >
         < guid > EP:0001000000055045:127744002000000000 </ guid >
         < link > http://tattoine:8100/TV/MTV/item/EP:0001000000055045:127744002000000000 </ link >
         < pubDate > Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:30:00 GMT </ pubDate >
         < description > Day * Neue Reihe </ description >
         < category > Reihe </ category >
         < ctv:Duration > PT30M </ ctv:Duration >
      </ item >
      ... 
   </ channel >
</ rss >

Now up to here that’s pretty logical; if you follow the <link> for the <channel> (here: http://tattoine:8100/TV/MTV/media), you will get something like the following XML bit with the content type ‘video/x-ms-asf’:

< ASX Version = " 3.0 " >
   < entry >
      < ref href = " http://tattoine:8080 " />
   </ entry >
</ ASX >

Since that’s apparently a Windows Media Player ASX file my server generates, Media Player will open if you navigate to the URL using IE or Firefox (on Windows). Who said that the <link> in RSS must resolve to HTML? Guess what Media Player will play? MTV Germany of course. Live. As I generate the ASX stream, I instruct the backend video server to switch to that respective tuner channel. Also, since I am creating an indirection point here, I could also scale this over multiple stream servers and tuners.

One of the technically noteworthy aspects of this application is that I am using Indigo for all communication aspects, but this application spits out pure XML, even with varying content-types. In fact, the entire server will likely not put a single plain-text, XML 1.0 encoded SOAP envelope onto the wire, but will be rather REST’ish and POX’ish. The only exception from that is the chunking download protocol, which I am implementing with a TCP-duplex channel (which uses binary encoding and is strictly a Indigo-to-Indigo communication path for my smart client).

Stay tuned.

Within the next 48 hours, you will find auctions on eBay. You can buy an hour of consulting time of the wonderful individuals listed below for a minimum bid of US$100. All money will go to IDEP (see below) to aid the Tsunami victims in the Aceh area. I think this is a sensational effort and I am honored that I was asked to participate. Julie Lerman and Stephen Forte have been pulling this off. Once the auctions are up, I'll post links and i assume the other folks will do the same. Go and bid.

Michelle Leroux Bustamante, Jonathan Goodyear, Andrew Brust, Richard Campbell, Adam Cogan, Malek Kemmou, Jackie Goldstein, Ted Neward, Kathleen Dollard, Hector M Obregon, Patrick Hynds, Fernando Guerrero, Kate Gregory, Joel Semeniuk, Scott Hanselman, Barry Gervin, Clemens Vasters, Jorge Oblitas, Stephen Forte, Jeffery Richter, John Robbins, Jeff Prosise

Since my time will be auctioned, too, I can already promise that I will employ a rather liberal interpretation of "hour" if we get enough money in.

Who this auction is to benefit?

In the long run, the auction is to benefit the people of Aceh Province, Sumatra, who have had their island destroyed and lost nearly 100,000 of their people. The waves may be gone, but the devastation continues and the fear of many more dying from disease continues.

We are trying to help, by assisting Aceh Aid at IDEP, an organization that is local and doing amazing work.

There is an area on their website devoted to this work: http://www.idepfoundation.org/aceh_aid.html. (www.AcehAid.org will take you right to this page). I recommend that if you are interested in knowing who you are doing this for, you go peruse that website, read the updates, read about the volunteer search, etc.

WHAT IS IDEP?

IDEP is a small, Indonesian NGO, based in Ubud, Bali. Completed projects over the years have included community based development, sustainable living initiatives, permaculture training, waste management, organic gardens, recycling, etc. The focus is on helping people to help themselves. IDEP's founding director, Petra Schneider is a US-born, Indonesian citizen. The demonstrated and reproducible success of IDEP's small projects in local communities has earned the team an excellent reputation.

IDEP AND DISASTER RESPONSE/RELIEF/RECOVERY

At the time of the Bali bomb, about two years ago, IDEP was an important element of the network of local NGOs and other supporters that quickly responded to the tragedy, in various ways, not only immediately after the bomb, but during the recovery process for the various communities involved. Following shortly thereafter, IDEP received funding from USAid to create a comprehensive set of disaster management materials for Indonesian communities, aimed at children, families, and local leaders (official and unofficial). The materials are in the Indonesian language and suitable for use in rural and urban settings. These materials, including a booklet for children about Tsunami preparedness, were finished just weeks ago, but had not yet been disseminated to communities. Then the tsunami struck.

WHAT IS ACEH AID AT IDEP

Only hours after the news of the tsunami reached Bali, the same network of NGOs and individuals in Bali who had been involved in the relief efforts for the Bali bomb, reanimated and went into action. We started something called the "Aceh Aid Bucket Brigade" (see website), creating and deploying one-family-one-bucket multi-material aid packages from the hands of donors in Bali to the field in Sumatra. We began sending highly skilled volunteers, well-matched to the task within two days of the tsunami (Sam Schultz, Lee Downey, Oded Carmi and others). Our relief, and later, recovery programs in response to the Tsunami are now focused on two fronts. One is direct aid from Medan by road to areas around Banda Aceh. The other is this remarkable joint effort (nothing short of heroic), to the islands off the west coast of Sumatra, which as of yet, have not been receiving aid from any other channels that we know of.

Omar is announcing (like Scott) the new newtelligence dasBlog "Community Edition" 1.7. It's so fresh that I am not even running it myself, yet.

What's important is that this is not an XCOPY upgrade and that you must follow the instructions in the dasBlog Upgrader download if you want to upgrade from 1.6 or earlier. Scott and Omar had to change the structure of the content store XML files to improve performance and add new features.

Here is the SourceForge home for the new version, make sure you get the download for the Upgrader if you want to upgrade and -- as always -- make a backup of your old version in case stuff doesn't work.

I haven't really looked around what other people's ideas (or implementations) are on referrer spam, but I think these idiots who want to use our blogs as a way to boost their Google rank are setting themselves up for trouble, because we are not really stupid. For the time being, I am simply letting it all run to collect evidence. There are wonderful things we can do with all these spam URLs. Distributed denial of service attacks come to mind   Or just redirect them to themselves.

Seriously, I am thinking of having word filtering and a manual negative list in the blog engine and to expose that list as a separate RSS as well as to allow import of such RSS lists into my blog engine. My exported list might also reference all my trusted negative lists that I import, so that this forms a mesh where folks can report those idiots and the engines will pick it up and throw out the crap. 

I feel like I have been "out of business" for a really long time and like I really got nothing done in the past 3 months, even though that's objectively not true. I guess that's "conference & travel withdrawal", because I had tone and tons of bigger events in the first half of the year and 3 smaller events since TechEd Amsterdam in July. On the upside, I am pretty relaxed and have certainly reduced my stress-related health risks 

So with winter and its short days coming up, the other half of my life living a 1/3 around the planet until next spring, I can and am going to spend some serious time on a bunch of things:

On the new programming stuff front:
     Catch up on what has been going on in Indigo in recent months, dig deeper into "everything Whidbey", figure out the CLR aspects of SQL 2005 and familiarize myself with VS Team System.

On the existing programming stuff front:
      Consolidate my "e:\development\*"  directory on my harddrive and pull together all my samples and utilities for Enterprise Services, ASP.NET Web Services and other enterprise-development technologies and create a production-quality library from of them for us and our customers to use. Also, because the Indigo team is doing quite a bit of COM/COM+ replumbing recently in order to have that prohgraming model ride on Indigo, I have some hope that I can now file bugs/wishes against COM+ that might have a chance of being addressed. If that happens and a particular showstopper is getting out of the way, I will reopen this project here and will, at the very least, release it as a toy.

On the architectural stuff front:
         Refine our SOA Workshop material, do quite a bit of additional work on the FABRIQ, evolve the Proseware architecture model, and get some pending projects done. In addition to our own SOA workshops (the next English-language workshop is held December 1-3, 2004 in Düsseldorf), there will be a series of invite-only Microsoft events on Service Orientation throughout Europe this fall/winter, and I am very happy that I will be speaking -- mostly on architecture topics -- at the Microsoft Eastern Mediterranean Developer Conference in Amman/Jordan in November and several other locations in the Middle East early next year. 

And even though I hate the effort around writing books, I am seriously considering to write a book about "Services" in the next months. There's a lot of stuff here on the blog that should really be consolidated into a coherent story and there are lots and lots of considerations and motiviations for decisons I made for FABRIQ and Proseware and other services-related work that I should probably write down in one place. One goal of the book would be to write a pragmatic guide on how to design and build services using currently shipping (!) technologies that does focus on how to get stuff done and not on how to craft new, exotic SOAP headers, how to do WSDL trickery, or do other "cool" but not necessarily practical things. So don't expect a 1200 page monster. 

In addition to the "how to" part, I would also like to incorporate and consolidate other architect's good (and bad) practical design and implementation experiences, and write about adoption accelerators and barriers, and some other aspects that are important to get the service idea past the CFO. That's a great pain point for many people thinking about services today. If you would be interested in contributing experiences (named or unnamed), I certainly would like to know about it.

And I also think about a German-to-English translation and a significant (English) update to my German-language Enterprise Services book.....

[And to preempt the question: No, I don't have a publisher for either project, yet.]

News is what is made news.

Point in case: This sentence on my blog here: "There's apparently a related project Boa (another serpent name along the family line of Viper that was the original codename for MTS), including the business markup language BML (pronounced "Bimmel") that he's involved in and he talked a bit about that, but of course I'd be killed if I gave out more details." now prompts, directly or indirectly, this here on Microsoft Watch and this on eWeek.

Nobody said that the project was software in product development. Nobody said it was about stuff that would eventually ship. Nobody really said anything that would be in any way relevant to technical or business decision makers today. What this shows is that there's a bit too much appetite for the next big thing while we're all still working on making the current big thing happen. Do you seriously think I am someone who'd casually leak Microsoft trade secrets on his blog?

And.... seriously.... go back and read the first six sentences on that entry with your brain switched into "active mode".