Extensible compiler framework from Microsoft

I've heard a few times about Phoenix project and I decided to check it out just to see how it works. And it looks promising because it's arichtecture is extensible. It seems that if you have the grammar of a language in a notation that yacc and lex accept then you don't have to write any single line of code in order to get fully blown compiler because the output of yacc&lex is a valid input data for Phoenix that offers optimization and native code generation modules out of the box. What is more we can plug in every step of the compilation process to do some specific processing. I wish I could use it in my professional life.

Interesting videos on channel 9

First one explains what ADO.NET entity framework is and it is really good because Charles asked a few hard/interesting questions. Second one is about CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) where Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos present the new incarnation of the runtime. They haven't changed the internals of it they've just improved public API. Well they think they've done it. I still think that they are far from perfect. If the main class that is used in nearly every statement is a static one then something is wrong.

Launch your applications in completly new way

Over to Scott who prepared a small comparision of tools that make our life way much easier. My favourite one is Launchy .

Mono 1.1.16.1 as a VMWare image

Great news. Folks from Mono project decided to make our life much easier and they've released Suse with preinstalled Mono, MonoDevelop, ASP.NET and WinForms samples as a VMWare image. Now I don't even have to reboot my machine in order to check it out. Sweet :).

Quite neat ESB definition

I very like the approach Ron Ten-Hove has taken. At first he tries to define ESB using only a sentence then a paragraph and then a bullet list. Choose what you like :).

Services, services and services.

Over to Paul Fallon who wrote about Amazon's Simple Queue Service . In the near future we will buying our favourite newspaper using Amazon's Simple Newsagent Service :).

Scoble's exit interview

It’s really worth watching the last channel 9 video with Scoble. It’s full of advices and smart thoughts/observations. I really like two of them which I agree with.

Something about people in general: "Fear factor is higher then hope factor"

His definition of perfect boss: "Your boss should go ahead of you, break ice, get things out of your way in order to help you do your job"