This is a big day for Miguel de Icaza and the Mono team with the announcement of the release of Mono Tools for Visual Studio. This release has features for deploying to Linux from Visual Studio, remotely debugging code on Linux from Visual Studio, a tool called for evaluating your code for migration issues moving between .NET and Mono, and moving from shipping applications to shipping appliances — complete virtual machines with the application already installed and ready to go. More details and links…

Other coolness from Mono. If you happened to miss the September 2009 announcement, MonoTouch is now available as a commercial product that lets you create iPhone and iPod Touch applications written in C# and .NET. Scott Hansleman discussed MonoTouch, among other things, with Mono project manager Joseph Hill on Hanselminutes podcast #181, well worth checking out.

Doug Purdy has blogged that Microsoft’s “Oslo” project has been realigned and unveiled as SQL Server Modeling at VSConnections this week. There will be additional announcements and a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) released at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2009 (PDC09) next week, so stay tuned.

Doug’s post provides a brief recap of the jigs and jogs that have been the history of the “Oslo” codename, starting with the announcement at the 2007 Microsoft SOA and BP conference where it was the term applied to a broad multiple product initiative for modeling. I was fortunate to be in attendance for the initial announcement, and have followed the winding path of Oslo, so I am keenly interested in the Oslo-related keynotes and sessions at PDC to which Doug posted some handy links earlier. And, of course, I can’t wait to get my hands on the next set of bits.

As I see it, modeling and DSLs have been underrated by most of the software development community, and that is largely due to the lack of first-class mainstream support in the form of great technologies and equally great tools. Sure, there have been some great strides, like the Domain-Specific Language Tools in Visual Studio, but you can hardly characterize their use as widespread. And, no doubt, Martin Fowler’s upcoming book on DSLs (which you can read as a work-in-progress) will help raise the level of discussion and general awareness of the concept. And there are many other efforts in the world as well. But there is much left to do.

Why is modeling so important? Because as an industry we work too hard for too long to create applications, using general purpose languages and low-level technologies, essentially from scratch each time. It is high time to evolve past that approach and dramatically reduce the cost and time-to-market for broad classes of applications that businesses need today. That is why I am excited about SQL Server Modeling (née Oslo) and that’s why I want it to be a truly great modeling platform.

A number of years back, Jeffrey Palermo had an idea for people arriving early in town for a Microsoft conference to meet up in a hotel bar the evening before the conference. The idea is to have a beer, catch up with old friends, make new ones, and generally get psyched for the conference to come. From that humble origin, Party with Palermo was born.

If you’re headed to Los Angeles next week for PDC09 and you’re going to be there Monday night, November 16, then head over to http://pdc09.partywithpalermo.com/ and RSVP for this free party. The PDC09 edition will be at The Mayan, 1038 South Hill St., Los Angeles, CA 90015, from 7 to 10 PM. I will see you there!

Josh Phillips from Microsoft’s Parallel Programming with .NET team has posted titles and abstracts for four parallelism talks at PDC09. Exciting stuff: patterns of parallel programming, PLINQ, the state of parallel programming, and F# for parallel and asynchronous programming. Richard Orr wondered if they are all going to happen at the same time. Nice.

I have a lot of books on my shelves that I have come to depend on from both Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media, so I was interested to learn that these two publishers have announced that they will be partners starting November 30, 2009. In the partnership, O’Reilly will become the distributor for Microsoft Press in North America, and both Microsoft and O’Reilly will develop titles for Microsoft Press.

In another aspect of this partnership, O’Reilly is launching a new ebook initiative, an area where they are already active. Quoting their statement (emphasis added):

"There are more than 40 million people walking around the world with a mobile phone or digital device which essentially gives them a bookstore in their pocket. That's an enormous opportunity for publishers today," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly and an influential leader in the Open Source and Web 2.0 communities who has over one million Twitter followers. "We are no longer a print publisher that happens to sell digital books too. We're a digital publisher that also sells print books. All publishing is now digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the web. Books must behave like the web they're now a part of."

"We will apply the lessons we've learned and the knowledge we've gained about digital publishing," added O'Reilly. "And we will remain true to our own values. All the derivative content from each Microsoft Press title--whether it's an ebook, app, webcast or an interactive video--will be issued DRM-free, because that's what we believe in doing."

Their joint press release makes a good case for the strengths that each partner brings to the deal and I wish the partnership great success. I met Tim O’Reilly when he spoke at the Portland Area .NET User Group several years ago, and back then my conversation with him at the get together afterwards was about the challenges of an information age that is rooted in print and struggling to adapt to fickle forces of the digital, online world of consumers.

I am concerned about the decline of print media in general that we’ve been witnessing for a few years. As organizations like newspapers and publishers scale back their organizations, there will be types of activities, like maintaining foreign bureaus in the case of news industry, that fundamentally can’t be supported by smaller organizations. It takes an enormous amount of work to amass, assimilate, organize, and present a book’s worth of technical material. The publisher plays several crucial roles that allow that to occur. As publishers find tough challenges in the digital information age and a poor economy, it is the audience, we the readers, who stand to lose a lot if they don’t meet those challenges. I have read and heard Tim O’Reilly over many years, seen where he comes from, what he stands for, and what he makes happen in the professional community. I can’t think of a better person to get it right for the authors, the editors, the technology developers, and the reading public.

You can meet Tim yourself in the short collection of his writings titled, naturally enough, Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell.

The Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) team for PDC09 has had a flurry of proposals for sessions on Agile methodologies. Too many for us to select them all. So we’re seeking your comments on what areas you’d like to discuss over on the PDC BOF blog.

[Disclaimer: Geek content = 0. Fun content = 100. This is a really great show that I produce once a year. -Stuart]

The Portland Juggling & Vaudeville Extravaganza is the annual show of the Portland Juggling Festival, featuring the festival’s special guests, and it is always an amazing evening of talent, laughs and entertainment. This year’s show is going to be INCREDIBLE, so please tell all your friends, family, colleagues, everyone to come to the show. We depend on your word of mouth to get the message out and people to the show, so please spread the word!

Juggling & Vaudeville Extravaganza
7:00 PM, Saturday, September 26, 2009
Benson Auditorium, 546 NE 12th Ave, Portland, OR

$16 General, $10 Student with ID, $8 Child (12 & under) and Senior

Tickets available at:
Brown Paper Tickets: 800-838-3006 or click here.
And at the door, day of the show (cash or check only)

Facebook Friends! If you are on Facebook, it is easy to tell your friends about the show. Simply follow this link to the event page, add yourself to the event, and click on “Invite People to Come” under the logo. It is quick, it is easy, and it will make a big difference to the success of our show!

Okay, what about those performers? I’m glad you asked!

This year we are extremely excited to have Sean Blue from New York City headlining the show. Sean is an artist, juggler and teacher, a creative force whom the famed Bill Irwin called a “master juggler.” Sean received the Award of Innovation from the International Jugglers’ Association in 2007. His versatile and technical juggling skills will astound you.

We are fortunate to have not one, but two of the world’s leading women unicyclists in the show. First, Kaori Matsuzawa, Japanese Women’s Unicycle Champion, returns to the Extravaganza this year. She was a huge hit at last year’s festival and show, and we just had to have her back! Last year she brilliantly transformed unicycling into modern dance on our stage, performing in a long flowing dress. Yes, you read that correctly, unicycling in a dress. Kaori has an all-new routine for us this year!

Second, Becky Banning is the reigning North American Women’s Freestyle Champion, having successfully defended her title from last year, and won 5 gold medals in artistic unicycling in the process. At 17 years old, she has competed in seven North American Championships and two International Championships, and is the leader of the Panther Pride Unicycle Team in North Bend, Washington. We are honored to have two highly talented unicyclists on the same stage, showing two wonderfully different approaches to riding on a single wheel.

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Beth Clarke to Portland. Beth is a rope walker (or funambulist if you’d like a fancy word to impress your friends) who will perform a slack rope act like none you’ve ever seen. Well, I suppose that is unless you’ve seen Beth perform as a member of the highly acclaimed Sweet Can Circus from San Francisco. She has studied and performed all over the world, and I bet the end of her performance will surprise you!

There are many more acts in the show, including Poetic Motion Machine (2009 IJA Team medalists), Stanford Juggling Research Institute (2004 IJA Team medalists), Circus Conspiracy, and local favorites including Rhys Thomas, Charlie Brown, Curt Carlyle, and more!

You can see that this is going to be one incredible evening of live entertainment without equal anywhere! It only happens once a year, so plan to join us and bring all of your friends!

The world is filled with the beautiful, elegant offspring that come out of the marriage of different disciplines. Often the person creating such a work is called a genius, although to him or her it may seem a straightforward matter of applying a solution from one part of their life to another. I want to work with people who have rich and diverse experiences in their lives: the odds are just so much better that something incredible might happen.

And so it’s a mystery to me why it is exceedingly rare for a developer to know anything about being a consumer of the software she or he creates. When it comes to user interface, graphical design, human interaction or any other element of the user experience, the majority of professional developers I meet have not taken the time to learn what these disciplines are about and what they have to offer. It remains such an enigma to me because so many of these same professionals do have varied backgrounds and draw on other perspectives to inform and guide their software. Like the woman who started out in chemistry, worked in a lab, was appointed to analyze the results using a computer, found she liked computers more than chemistry, and decided to change her career. There are things she learned, for example about the scientific method, that make her an excellent developer. But it is hard to find many developers whose paths have crossed disciplines like graphic arts and design, or studied how normal human beings interact with objects or software applications.

Ian Voyce has a wonderful short exposé-cum-confessional, The 7 signs your UI was created by a programmer. Read and wince: been there, done that, billed the client.

Do you suspect a programmer may have put together the terrible user interface on that “enterprise” software you’re forced to use every day? There are some give-away indicators. Look out for them in your software, hunt down the developer and force them to read a book about user interface design. If you’re suitably senior, force them to a) improve it, or even better b) get someone with real UI experience to fix it. More…

I would prefer both options a and b: have the developer learn what UI design is about and work with a real UI designer.

One place such a developer could start is Bill Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences. If you’re not familiar with Bill Buxton, do yourself a favor an watch the first few minutes of his keynote address at MIX09.

The Portland Silverlight User Group has launched with the unveiling of their website www.portlandsilverlight.net. The group is a special interest group of the Portland Area .NET User Group (PADNUG) and shares the PADNUG mailing list — a good choice IMHO.

The meetings will be on the second Tuesday each month, starting on Tuesday, 8 December 2009. Keep an eye on the website for details.

Erik Mork (consultant, trainer, and Microsoft MVP on Silverlight) and Kelly White (web technologist and self-styled part-time Silverlight zealot) are the masterminds behind this user group.

There’s never been a better time for Portlanders to get started or be excited about Silverlight, so mark your calendar now and plan to attend the kickoff meeting.