I need to start using more communication tools on the internet. Yesterday I researched Vonage and downloaded Skype. Given how much I use my mobile phone, I don’t think I need to spend so much on my home phone system. Vonage is much cheaper than my current phone provider – only $30 a month – which includes unlimited calling in the US. It’s got neat features like virtual numbers, so multiple numbers in different area codes all point to the same phone. And while it provides unlimited US calling, the phone doesn’t have to be in the US. So if my brother-in-law in Germany got it, he could call all his family in the US for free. A teammate has it, and said it works pretty well. Anyone else out there using it? If I got it, I’d like to use it with the existing phone wiring in the house. My cable box has to dial up to download program listings. I think it would be funny to use an analog model over the broadband connection.

As for Skype, lots of people have blogged that, so I won’t bother to here, except to point out that Skype 1.0 is now available (released today). Feel free to skype me, though it doesn’t appear to work through the corporate firewall.

Update: I should have realized, but there are other choices in the internet telephone business. Lingo caught my eye – only $20 a month for unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Western Europe (which includes Germany where my afore-mentioned brother-in-law lives). Anyone on Lingo? Also, I’m not sure why, but you can only call landlines in Europe as part of the unlimited calling plan. I also noticed that calling mobile phones in Europe on Vonage is more expensive. Why is that?

I finally updated my Architecture Strategy and Evangelist Blogs OPML file. For single updates, DasBlog’s web interface is fine, but for doing a slew of updates it blows. I guess that’s why my blogrolls are so out of date. What I really want is an InfoPath form so I can do all the updates locally and then upload the new file at once. InfoPath’s integration with SharePoint rocks, I wonder what it would take to get that kind of integration on an arbitrary web site? Or, alternatively, how to run your blog on SharePoint? I screwed around with SharePoint as a “personal content management system” a while back, but the difficulty in customizing it (as well as a lack of time on my part) doomed that.

Is it obvious that I’ve been rounding up bloggers on my extended team of architects and architect evangelists? Here’s another: Raj Wall blogged the first of what appears to be several posts about Patterns of Successful Software Projects. I like this as it really starts to expand the idea of what is a pattern. If you look at EASOT, you’ll notice a “Development Architecture Viewpoint” that has the following description:

The development architecture viewpoint is concerned with implementing the other architectures. Applications must be built and maintained in a systematic, efficient manner. The development architecture is composed of elements related to this effort, such as design and development tools, repositories, build master utilities, test suites, tracking tools, and other tools.

In my TheServerSide.net Tech Talk, I pointed out that Test Driven Development is a pattern. I know there are a lot more development architecture patterns. Raj’s post starts to define the terms in this area of the pattern space. Can’t wait to see what Raj has to say about project context – the more I work with patterns, the more important I realize context is.

A couple new MSFT architect bloggers to note. Maarten, author of the recent Dealing with Concurrency article, details his issues with CRUD. David “Lottery” White has restarted his blog and writes about the practical architect. Bill O'Brein blogs about presenting on patterns at TechEd Europe. Both Simon and Kevin have both been experimenting custom MQ transport providers for WSE2 - Simon using MQ Series and Kevin using MSMQ. Tim Ewald is back in blog on the PluralSight site, blogging about the differences between XSD and OO inheritance. And my old teammate Marley explains the game of Spoons. Not sure what that has to do with architecture, but it appears my old team had a very good time in Atlanta.

Cool thing about blogs – sometimes I learn about stuff happening inside the big house from outside in blogs. Case in point – Scottpointed out to the Lookout download. I also found out about the COmega site from Don (though honestly, I knew about that one before. That is before it changed names.)

Update: Lookout’s download site changed, back to a page on http://lookoutsoft.com instead of a page on http://download.microsoft.com. Strange, but true.