Inspired by my post on the types of architects, Michael has blogged on architect behavior: the Purist vs. the Realist. I leaned heavily to the purist side earlier in my career, but I have evolved to be more middle-of-the-road between the two. (note the use of the word “more” implying that I have not yet reached the middle-of-the-road).

Michael implied that I care about title and function more than behavior. Of course, no one has “Realist Architect” on their business card. I guess I’m wondering: if we asked this question on a survey (Are you a total purist, mostly purist, slightly purist, middle of the road, slightly realist, etc?) would anyone answer it?

At least one person was interested in an OPML of MSFT .NEAT and AE bloggers. So I hacked them out of my full blog roll and posted it on my site. I will be keeping it up to date, so check back every once in a while. I added a link to it in my nav bar so it is always available.

I love dasBlog. I was able to make one small change to the web.config file and now the OPML file is addressable while still being easily managed via dasBlog’s blogroll editor. Sweet.

Don pointed out to Goran that the Indigo definition of “a service is simply a program that one interacts with via message exchanges.” Goran pointed out that that definition “really doesn’t highlight how it’ll help a customer”. I think part of the reason they are both right is that they are talking about different things. I would say Don is talking about Service Oriented Programming where Goran is talking about Service Oriented Architecture. This gets back to the levels of architecture that I blogged about. Platform tools like Indigo are components used in systems. I’m guessing the customer’s Goran mentioned are at the system-of-system level for whom the messaging plumbing is below the abstraction level they care about. 
 
 Of course, SO* buzzwords are thrown about with such frequency these days it’s hard to keep track of the difference.

Noah Horton, former teammate who has gone on to become PM in the Peer Networking Group, has started a blog. Of course, with the new aggregated feed of MSDN bloggers, you probably already knew that. However, I am compelled to blog this as Noah is a friend, works in the next building over from me and I’ve got a special interest in P2P. I’m looking forward to his promised tips and tricks. Subscribed.

Say hello (and subscribe) to John deVadoss, the latest .NEAT team member to start a blog. John’s the Lead Solutions Architect for .NEAT, which means he’s technical plus he manages people. He’s got his “Hello World” post out of the way where he lists his interests. I spend a lot of time hounding talking with John, so I’m looking forward to his future posts.

I think my extended team (.NET Enterprise Architecture Team plus the Field Architect Evangelists) are really starting to get into this blogging thing. Besides John and myself, we’ve got David explaining “what makes a Smart Client so smart?”, Ram on SOA and OO, Mike on modelling and Simon on interop and Outlook programmability. Maybe I should start a .NEAT / AE blogroll? The blogrolls on my weblog are woefully out of date anyway, might be time for an overhaul.