When web servers were first built, there was a one-to-one mapping between virtual files (i.e. addressable via http) and the physical files (the ones in the file system). Over time, two important capabilities were added. First, the contents of a given file became dynamic. So while you the reader always come back to default.aspx (or rss.aspx as the case may be) the content changes everytime I post something new. Secondly, the physical file dependency was removed. It’s not used much in dasBlog, but in .TEXT this is very prevelant. My last post on blogs.msdn.com is located at http://blogs.msdn.com/devhawk/archive/2005/02/01/364380.aspx. Obviously, there is no actual file named 364380.aspx, .TEXT uses the filename as a key into the DB to find the actual entry content. This technique is used extensively in the new MSDN2 (if you haven’t already, check out Tim Ewald’s MSDN Magazine article about URL design for MSDN2).

So now for the funky idea part – why couldn’t we generate dynamic local files the same way? I’m not sure I’ve got a great use for this yet – most of the apps I use are programmable to some extent, so dynamic content can be generated at the app level rather than at the file system level. But I’m thinking there may be some scenarios where it would make sense to do this at the file system. For example, in the new Winter Fun Pack there’s a new version of the WMP blogging plugin that autoupdates the Outlook and Outlook Express signature files whenever the song being played changes (a la Duncan’s Coding4Fun article). But with virtual files in the file system, you could generate these files when they are accessed instead of writing new ones everytime the song changes, even if Outlook open.

Of course, our local file system typically has more writing activity than the web, so I’m thinking this isn’t that great an idea. But I figured I’d share in case someone else could think of some good uses. Or maybe this already exists and I just don’t know about it.

Even though I’m a happy NewsGator customer, I decided to try out the new beta version of RSS Bandit. Wow, I really like the newspaper view. I wish I had this in Outlook.

I recently hopped on the GTD bandwagon and among other changes I deleted all my mail rules and started over. Previously, I was routing my email to different folders based on if I was on the To: line, the CC: line, it came to one of the team aliases or none of the above. I discovered that I pretty much only keep good track of my main inbox with the stuff that came directly to me. Other stuff just languished, unprocessed. Now, I route mail to folders based on the mailing list it comes from. Some mailing lists have lower priority than others. This newspaper view would be perfect for quickly scanning these low priority mail folders, esp. with the feature to mark all as read when leaving the folder.

Recently, I learned that a friend of mine from high school took his own life. I hadn’t spoke to him in nearly a decade, but it was still a shock and very saddening.

There’s a memorial for him this weekend in Northern Virginia, but there’s no way I can make time to go back east for it. There will be a large number of old friends there, many of whom I haven’t seen or spoken to much since high school. It further adds to my sadness that it took the death of a friend for me to both realize the need and have the opportunity to reconnect with so many old friends.

About fourteen months ago, David Trowbridge of patterns & practices introduced me to a guy working in their testing group named Larry Brader. David is one of the primary authors of p&p’s Enterprise Solution Patterns and Integration Patterns books. I wanted to talk to David about building a pattern repository and he handed me off to Larry. Little did I know that Larry is an information theorist and was one of the key authors of Testing Software Patterns. Frankly, when Larry gets rolling on info theory, I only understood a fraction of what he’s saying. But the parts I do understand about how patterns relate to each other blows my mind.

Then p&p hired this guy…what’s his name?…Oh yeah, Ward Cunningham. I hear he knows a bit about pattern repositories. 😄

Anyway, around this time last year I was having regular meetings with Larry and Ward to talk about this repository stuff. Then stuff got crazy on my end – primarily being the acting marketing director for my team as well as the ARC track owner for last years TechEd. The regular meetings became more irregular and then stopped altogether. That is to say, my involvement stopped – Ward, Larry et.al. kept forging ahead. I heard about how things were going from time to time, but that was the extent of my involvement.

Last summer, Larry, Ward and David (plus others I’ve never met) published an article called Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space. (They also did a webcast on the topic.) In it, they laid out a way of thinking about how patterns relate to each other and they introduced the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table (EASOT for short). That was just the first step. PatternShare is next one.

PatternShare is a community site that brings together the patterns from popular authors – Fowler, Evans, Hohpe & Wolfe, GoF, POSA and p&p - into a single repository. Furthermore, it provides a dynamically generated EASOT showing all the patterns in the repository and how they relate to each other. Finally, it provides a way to add new patterns to the repository so that they show up in the EASOT.

Major congrats to Ward, Larry, David and the rest of the p&p folks for pulling this off. I can’t wait to see where the site goes from here.

I recently had to repave my main machine. Among other things I installed MSN Premium which I use to manage my hotmail and DevHawk emails. However, this time I installed the Outlook Connector for MSN, which enables you to use Outlook 2002 or later to manage your hotmail account. Calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, everything. Very very cool. Now, there’s no need to install the MSN Premium client at all…or is there?

The coolest feature of the Outlook Connector is that it delivers all of my personal hotmail to a totally different top level folder inside Outlook. Does anyone know how to do that for POP3 mailboxes? I tried using Outlook to manage my DevHawk email, but then all that mail gets mingled together with my work email. I want the exact same experience for my DevHawk email inside Outlook as I get for my hotmail. However, it appears that while you can have multiple PSTs, you have to designate one as the new mail delivery location default for all accounts. I.e. it doesn’t appear that you can configure this on a per-account basis. I’m guessing the Outlook Connector is overriding this for my hotmail.

Anyone have any ideas on how to deliver email from two different accounts to two different locations? (Other than the obvious “use rules” – I had issues with that approach.)