(Side note: The Metra is all screwed up this morning. I'm told trains are running 20 mins late then the 7:51 pulls up going from Chicago on the to Chicago tracks. Sigh....)
One of things I've been trying to put together in my spare time is a home media center. I got an XBOX 360 and using that as my Media Center Extender my goal is to stream backups of my DVDs that I ripped to my PC that is running Windows Media Center. Unfortunately I haven't been able to come up with a solution that I find acceptable. I attempted to use Transcode360 to stream VIDEO_TS but it doesn't appear to even see the files on my machine. I then converted my VIDEO_TS files to WMV and while I can stream that, losing FF/RW is unacceptable. (Side note: Maybe FF/RW works with WMV but trying to use the XBOX controller as a remote is painful. I should probably pickup a real remote for it. That will go on my list of things to buy.)
Something that has running on a background thread for awhile is "How do we implement pub/sub messaging?". One of the cons to having very silo-ed systems is how do you handle the cross-system reporting? For instance: When you want to get a list of all the customers that have more than 10 licenses and have more than 20 open tickets (totally contrived but you get the idea). That query spans 2 different domains: Billing and Support. Support knows how many tickets somebody has and Billing knows how many licenses a customer has but it's not like you can "join across systems" to get that information.
When I left the LA Convention Center on Thursday I was saddened. I had so much fun at PDC that I didn't want it to end. I wanted to stay there forever and learn all about all the new and interesting things coming out of MSFT and MS Research. As soon as I got back to my hotel, however, I was eager to get home. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my brain was full and it was time to head back to home and bother my coworkers. Tell them all about the grand and wonderful things I learned. (Really, I'll just speak the wonders of Pex and C# 4.0 and M and Oslo and Azure and there I go again getting all excited!)
(Lisle to Union is going to be a recurring series. I'm going to attemptto write daily my thoughts on what I'm currently working on. As to the name "Lisle to Union"? That's the train I take to get into work every morning. :))
Agenda
(This is going to be cool. I'm totally geeked out about Oslo and I want me some Textual DSL goodness)
(Holy long session name Batman!)
Taking a quick break to install Vista SP1. I'm prepping my machine to install Win7 and VS2010 because I'm apparently certifiably insane (so says Ray and Richard).
Contract based development
