Saturday night I had the pleasure to meet Aaron Binns and chatted with him for some hours. 
He is working on an interesting project called archive.org. Trying to archive everything available on the internet and store for eternity. A good application is the WayBack machine. It shows how your web site looked several years ago. Let's see TeamNet in the time machine.

ScottGu is building it's case around the features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 1.0

Follow it's blog for news on these subjects. 

I conducted a survey about what to read in order to become e better business analyst.
Here are my results:

Templates and checklists: "UML for IT Business analyst" si http://www.opfro.org

I had a discussion recently with a colleague about how to assure your project team to cover the entire scope of the project with usecases. The example was associated with a rectangle as the scope of the projectand some small rectangle, covering each other, and trying to cover the entire scope.

Although the problem of defining a use case is difficult,now I want to talk about how to cover entirely some area, not with shape, bu twith method.

Rectangle are simple, so are some projects. Most projects are difficult and their scope reveal to the team as time passes by and as more experience is acquired. As a parallel to geometrical figures we can imagine a project as being complex irregular geometry figure, which in order to becovered require different shapes, and rectangles are in most cases a bad choice.

Let’s introduce some theory: “A fractal is generally "arough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of whichis (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole”

In order to generate a fractal figure you have to have a starting figure and a method, and by applying the same method, over and over, you get the final figure. The more you work on, the more detailed the fractal figure gets.

Another interesting fact about fractal figures is that theycan have factionary dimension. It is well known that points have no dimension,lines are one dimension and the surface has 2 dimensions, space 3, and so on.

Fractals figure can face 1.5 dimensions, meaning that it ismore than a line, but not a surface. There are also fractal figures which have dimension two. This means that they can be assimilated to a surface, they can cover a surface. xample the Dragon Curve

You have a starting figure and a method. Apply the same method over and over and you will cover a surface, any figure.

Now, back to our problem, we must cover with use cases aproblem scope. We must find two things: the shape of the starting point, the method to be applied over and over, and not least the starting point.

Now, where should be good starting point ? Inside the shape given by all the actors of the system.

Conclusion: wisdom for the figure, and perseverance in applying the method will get you to cover the entire scope.

As I am a fan of Biztalk I was surprised to find a clean and very powerfull implementation of the orchestration pattern inside a open source project for .NET

The concept is called "a saga" and can be found in NServiceBus.

It is described in Ayende's blog.

MassTransit is another service bus implementing the same pattern.

I really missed the link between the output of the MGrammar and the C# bits of code. Now it seems get some shape. Read here. The movie is inspiring also.

Microsoft seems to push for a more DSL oriented developer environment in the new release of Visual Studio code named Oslo. Don Box talks about this in his posts(1, and 2). There will be much to see after the PDC ends. More details about what is Oslo here: http://douglaspurdy.com/2008/09/06/what-is-oslo/.

I enjoyed waching Ron Jacob's ArCast and was quite disapointed when he stopped. It seems he is back with some good materials: WCF for beginners and WCF with REST.

Enjoy

The INPUT TYPE=FILE control is heavily used to push files of information into various applications. As the cloud computing emerges, the upload techniques will change.

The virtual disks available already in the cloud create an oportunity to abandon uploading and favorizes referencing. The place of the upload control will be taken by the select control, select from all my cloud-shared data sources. The applications will no more have files pushed to them, rather they will read the files when needed.

All of this, combined with GET which is cacheable, actually reduces traffic and elliminates the versioning problems: which file have I uploaded? Of course that this technique  needs to be based on a open identity standard in order to allow cloud-permissions, authentication, etc. But for sure there will be no more waiting for uploading your attachments to yahoo-mail, just select them from the cloud and send the mail. The system will automatically load them for you.

This is the future of specialisations in the cloud. Virtual disks such as SkyDrive and others will play the role of storage. Cloud applications do not need to reinvent the storage mechanisms, just to be able to connect to an external drive. Will REST do the rest ?

Maybe.