It's not quite the end of January, but there's already alot of "new" in my new year. There's a new car, some new gadgets, and on the work front a new project and a new team.
As you may have heard, Charles Fitzgerald, left Microsoft to head to a startup. Charles was the GM that my old team, platform incubation, reported into. Charles set the mission for that team, and was the major stakeholder for Tafiti and several other internal facing projects that I worked on. Charles was a great GM, and while this is a loss for MS, I'm confident we haven't heard the last of him.
With Charles' departure, Scott and I will be moving to different roles in the company. I am happy to report that I am now officially part of Simon Guest's team.
One of the few negatives about my last role in incubation was that it was inherently secretive, as parts of the work could be patented. As a result, after delivering my book on CardSpace I mostly dropped off the public scene, save for promoting Tafiti. With Simon's team having a key focus on talking about architecture with the broader community, this is something that will change, and you'll see me engaging more publicly on architecture related subjects. Simon's team has a big focus on Software+Services, which if you've read the blog for awhile know is something I've been looking at for some time in and outside of Microsoft. Expect to see me blogging more, podcasting/screencasting more, and writing the odd article or two. (No more books for awhile, though. Having written or co-written 3 books in 2 years, I've committed to my wife not to start another one until 2009)
I also mentioned there's a new project. I'll be carrying over a project with me from incubation to Simon's team as well. Nothing I can share at the moment, other than it will be public focused and it's going to be a key focus for me for a good portion of 2008.
While this project is big, there's another project I'll be working on that's even bigger. This is a longer term project, estimated to last decades with a budget estimated to be in the seven figures. Oh, and it has nothing to do with software. My wife and I are expected our first child, a son, to literally arrive any day now. While there's alot of great 'new's in 2008 already, this will surely be the best.
Here's hoping your 2008 is going well, and I look forward to engaging with the community more broadly once again. If there's anything you'd like to see me engage on - be it in blog, article, or podcast, let me know. As always, I can be reached at mmercuri@microsoft.com
RSS. Really Simple Syndication. Great for identifying your available content, great for sharing content that can be consumed by aggregators and readers.
What it's not great at is providing a monetization model. Sure you can use ads on your website, but I think there's a better way.
I put together a screen cast that talks about syndication and the opportunity to leverage information cards and CardSpace to monetize RSS and OPML.
Watch it by clicking on the link below.
http://www.marcmercuri.com/downloads/MonetizingRssWithInformationCards.wmv 
In case you missed it, Microsoft just released some great new downloads, specifically new versions of VS 2008, Silverlight, and Expression Blend.
As someone who started writing what are now called AJAX apps since 2000, I *really* appreciate how Silverlight and Blend make RIAs much easier to develop.
Links to all the bits-
Just about a year or so ago, I was down in Tulsa working with the good folks at Dollar Thrifty Auto Group, who were doing some great stuff with WF and WCF. If it sounds familiar, I chatted about what they were doing in an ARCast wit Ron Jacobs, and Ron also did an interview with them from Tulsa. (both recordings are available over on http://channel9.msdn.com or http://www.skyscrapr.net.)
Earlier in the week I was talking to Jim Arrowood, a friend and architect at Dollar, and he asked how I'd like a free trip to Tulsa. A s I told him, there are no free lunches in life, and I'm sure no free trips to Tulsa. It turns out there's a CodeCamp event coming up (http://www.tulsacodecamp.com) and was curious if I might be interested in speaking.
A couple hours later I had a ticket to Tulsa and was slotted in for two sessions, an hour in the afternoon and the closing keynote.
I'm looking forward to it, as codecamp is focused much more on code. Last year ,when I was speaking at events, I had to spend a good amount of my sessions doing intro stuff. With the framework having been released for awhile now, I'll be able to dive right in and show some cool stuff I've been working on. If you've seen my previous sessions, expect all new content for this.
The timing of the event is literally days before the release of the updated WCF: Unleashed and I should be wrapping up the Understanding CardSpace and Information Cards book.
If you're going to be in Tulsa and there are particular aspects you're interested in, let me know and we'll see if we can squeeze it into the sessions.
Going through my email this morning, I received my official Mix07 confirmation. Last year, I had a number of customer commitments so was really not in the loop on Mix, this year, though, I've had some overlap with some of the things I've been working on and have had a chance to get involved in various aspects of the event.
Earlier this year I went to another web conference(which shall remain nameless), and was so dissapointed I left the conference (and Vegas) a day early. (Me, leaving Vegas early? unheard of, I know).
Mix, though, is a different story. From what I've seen of the sessions, this is actually an event I'd pay out of pocket to go to. It's got a good mix of folks from MS, as well as from third parties. I may or may not be delivering a session, that's something that'll get decided in the next month or so, but will be onsite either working in certain areas of the event, or attending sessions.
One of the great things about conferences is that I get a chance to meet up with former colleagues and people I've chatted with via email and blogs. If you're going to be in Vegas the 29th - 2nd and want to chat about WCF, CardSpace, Mashups, or whatever - shoot me an email and we'll make some plans to sync up.
Between some exciting day job work, updating WCF content for the WCF Unleashed book, and writing 15 chapters for the CardSpace book (this time as a sole author) things have been pretty hectic. Mix in the storm that flooded the first floor of the house, and it got even crazier.
The blog has been fairly dark for awhile, but that's about to change. In a few weeks, the CardSpace book will be handed in, and I can start focusing on other activities. In addition to weekly updates here, I'm also going to be starting a sister blog to this one, more details on that in the weeks to come.
So what's coming? Lots of stuff.
Like what?
I talked with the good folks at APress (my publisher for the CardSpace book), and I'm going to be able to release some of my code from the CardSpace book early, and put it into CodePlex. This will include ASP.NET controls that integrate with membership. This will also include Windows Workflow Foundation activities and some utilities for creating managed cards. These will hopefully be in CodePlex, which will include source, so you'll be able to get source and enhance them as you need to. I need to stress that these are from my book written as my 'night job', these are not official controls from Microsoft and should not be viewed as such.
I've actually been pretty busy on some other stuff during the day, and we're looking at what we can release of that (unrelated to CardSpace) to CodePlex as well.
Plus.. I've written about 6 labs in the past couple of days for an internal event. I'm looking to release those as well, likely with the launch of the sister blog to this one.
Oh, and some InfoCenter Controls may just find there way into CodePlex as well (and if not, I'll release them as binaries from my blog). And I might just include a reference app that shows how to snag podcasts for your Zune 
On the heels of writing that last article, I found a copy of Amazon.com Mashups in the post. The book was written by a friend of mine, Francis Shanahan, and the book also has a great chapter that covers the S3 service mentioned in my previous post. From defining objects and buckets to building out working prototypes that interact with the S3 service, this chapter helps you get up and running with S3 in an hour, well worth the price of the book for that chapter alone (<$20 on Amazon).
Beyond S3, the book provides a good introduction to the concept of mashups, as well as hands on introductions to mashing up services from Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, and others. It also showcases some of Francis' mashup creations, which are cool in their own right (i.e. Zollage, Zuggest, RoboCast, etc.).
I'd recommend checking out the book and his mashups.
The book can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Mashups-Francis-Shanahan/dp/0470097779/sr=8-1/qid=1167221205/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-4399996-7228729?ie=UTF8&s=books
His site (and related mashups) here:
http://www.francisshanahan.com
I've been on the web services bandwagon, since... well, I think before there was officially a bandwagon, actually. When I was VP of development at Gazelle Systems, we had the challenge of providing our software (POS integrated CRM for hospitality, which included loyalty, couponing, gift cards, etc.) such that it readily integrated with point of sale systems. For those unfamiliar, the POS market is fairly diverse as the solutions (at that time) ran on a multitude of platforms (windows, unix, qnix, dos, proprietary) and also in a number of location configurations (1 self-contained terminal, multiple terminals on a store specific lan, multiple stores on a wan, and remotely hosted POS by an Application Service Provider). We needed a location agnostic, platform agnostic approach to integration. Around this time, I'd heard about Don Box and SOAP, and we built out our own SOAP server and built out our loyalty and other functions as services, and defining XML (pre-XSD XSD) that would represent our messages for loyalty et al.
At that time, I saw that services represented a bright future for the development of software, but I also saw them as the end of an era. Specifically, for the 'little guy'. In the early days of development on the Windows platform, particularly for the VB community, there was a great ecosystem of third party control vendors that offered up .VBXs and eventually .OCXs to incorporate canned functionality inside of your Visual Basic and Visual Studio applications. The beauty of it was that anyone could do this, the fabled 'two guys in a garage' could put together some innovative controls and offer them up. For me, this was immortalized in folks like the company Mabry. They were always advertising in Visual Basic programmers journal, putting out things like an SMTP control, and I can't imagine they were a large operation. For those unfamiliar, scan the newsgroups archives and you'll find multiple references.
In a web services world, however, it rapidly becomes more difficult for Mabry and the category now known as the Micro-ISV. Why? Infrastructure. In the days of .VBXs and .OCXs, you were shipping compiled code that typically ran on the desktop. Moving into the services space is a much different animal - you need servers, bandwidth, memory, disaster recovery scenarios, multi-tenant geo-clustered databases, storage, real-time/near-time support in a global setting, and enforceable service level agreements. The upfront investment in infrastructure is a major barrier to entry, and really limits innovation in the ability for Micro-ISVs to deliver services.
This is starting to change, with vendors such as Amazon offering what are being called utility services. Utility here having a similiar meaning to the water/power/natural gas utilities you have for your home. Like your home utilities, utility services provide a pay-for-what-you-use model, providing the ability to scale. Like with standard utilities, these services require a metering infrastructure - with that meter being found in the cloud vs. the side of your home.
Amazon offers something in this space focused on storage, a service called S3. Effectively, if you need storage, they can provide it to you on a metered basis for a very reasonable cost. If you wanted to build your own Flickr, YouTube/SoapBox, or any other service that requires storage, you can do it and do it in a fashion that will scale with your business. It's services like these that lower the barriers to entry to the Micro-ISV, allowing them to innovate without the upfront costs. These sorts of services free up the ability to innovate in a services world, and the 'two guys in the garage' are back in business.
With utility services coming onto the scene and standards for both identity federation and secure web services established, I'm hopeful and eager to see the next generation of Mabry's innovate around the platform.
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