Talk about transparency: Pretty much everyone involved in the DSL toolkit is blogging. Keith, Jack, Steve, Stuart, Gareth, Alan and Jochen. Plus, I bug these guys on email alot and they always have answers. A couple of recent items from these folks:

• Steve was interviewed by DNJ Online about Software Factories. I didn’t get to read this until yesterday afternoon, but I had to present the Microsoft Technology Roadmap at the Executive Briefing Center yesterday morning. We started talking about factories and one of the things that came up was the massive value of partial classes. Steve hit on this in his interview as well. As cool as yield, anonmous delegates and especially generics are, I now consider partial classes the most important new langugage feature in .NET 2.0. Funny, as it was probably the easiest to build.
• Gareth blogged about a very strange bug in the March CTP release involving the letter ‘A’ and a slightly hacky technique for dealing with blank files. He also talks about the model serialization format. Sounds like they’ll be fixing both down the road a bit.
• Stuart confirmed that there will be a version of the DSL Toolkit for Beta 2 of VS05 “a small number of weeks” after it ships. He’s also talks about some of the features in the next drop: better code generation and better support for containment hierarchies (i.e. classes contain fields and methods).
• Keith blogged a software factories elevator pitch and then refined the definition of a software factory into a single sentence.

As I have written several times on this blog, I am using Napster 2 Go with my Creative Nomad Zen Micro. Unfortunately, the N2G compatible firmware from Creative is still in beta. Everyone in a while…not sure what the repro steps are…the Zen Micro would lose all the N2G music licenses. They’ve released new firmware (2.11.02) that is supposed to solve this problem.

However, while the new firmware will eliminate this from happening in the future, it doesn’t help you with songs that have lost their license. So you have to delete them off the device and reload them. Simple enough to do w/ WMP10. However, the music you download from N2G has a set of license restrictions, including a limit for the number of times you can transfer it to a portable device per month. I think the limit is three. I’ve reset my device a few times experimenting with it, so about half my N2G songs had reached their limit. Major bummer.

However, I dropped a quick email to the folks at Napster and the next time I synced my device, suddenly all the songs had their transfer count reset. So I was able to resync even the songs that didn’t work before. I had figured I wouldn’t get those songs back until next month, so I decided to download some other stuff to tide me over. Having the older songs transfer was a very pleasant surprise.

Bravo Napster Support!

“Architecture is about how you decide not what you decide”

Thanks for the kind words Paul.

Doug wanted to know if the new DSL toolkit runs on the December CTP of VSTS. In a word, no. The March DSL Toolkit requires Beta 1 of VS05 Beta 1 or Beta 1 refresh. However, at some point, there will be a version of the DSL Toolkit that runs on VS05 Beta 2. (“At some point” meaning not on the day that VS05 Beta 2 ships but some short period of time after that.)

This is why I use Virtual PC. I can install the CTP build in one VPC and the Beta 1 build w/ DSL toolkit in another.

Back in college, I used to DJ for KSCR, USC’s student run radio station. I’ve got a bunch of old cassette of my “work”. Now, with the PlusDeck, I could actually install a tape deck in a free 5.25″ drive bay of my home computer. But for $150, I think I’d rather just plug my old tape deck from the garage into the sound card.