Brian H. Prince

That is one name for it. For a while these services were going by 'BizTalk Services', or something like that. There were two that were up on the labs site, for the public to use, but they weren't publicized very well. We got to see the other services that are in the works at the MVP Conference a few weeks ago. Enterprise Service Buses (or ESBs) are great things. They let us create services in our enterprise, and loosely couple our systems together, while doing it in a discoverable, manageable, governable, reliable fashion. When you put this infrastructure in place, you can start tying in services from more than just your enterprise. While you will typically have home grown services, and a mix of services from your commercial off the shelf line of business applications, it gets real interesting when you start tying into services available on the Internet. Of course you have to do this in a way that is reliable and useful to your business. This become a huge new way to leve

Yipee! Back on April 1st (the most amusing award date possible), I was notified that I was re-awarded the MVP - Solutions Architect award. It is great being an MVP, and I appreciate the recognition. Hopefully this year will be as great as 2006. Thank you Microsoft for supporting the community. I really appreciate it.

I have finally caught a break in my schedule, and have spent the week digging out, and planning for the next few big months. We have so much going on, sometimes I think the windows are going to burst! We are: - ramping up several new projects - ramping up several new people (which is the real work priority) - because of those two, space is becoming a rarity, and we have few options when it comes to getting more - much travel/speaking/demos/POCs/Perf Labs - we are trying to get a new offering off of the ground - a ton of side projects that I wish I could focus on more - Spinning up the last of our hardware plan for the year (TRON, our new virtual server server) - Reading four books, and and writing their reviews (I was asked by Wrox, and it sounded fun) - trying to keep some game time in (COD3, Supreme Commander, C&C3. Still waiting for HDTV to finish Oblivion) - the full soccer schedule kicking off with the family - CodeMash v2 planning is starting up   What do I have

At the MVP Global Summit a few weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about how bad a decision it was to not include the Expression products in MSDN. Somasegar has just announced this morning that Expression Blend and Expression Web will now be included in MSDN Premium. If you have MSDN Team Suite, the entire Expression family will be included. This is awesome news, and shows how Microsoft really listens to the community. Doing this will allow us to use these tools as we do development, as well as help drive adoption amongst our designer friends. I have been using them in one form or another since January on side projects, and I really like them. I was doing the XAML design in Expression Blend, and then hop over to VSTS to do the code. We usually leverage visual designers a lot on our projects, and this will really help everyone work together. Please read the whole announcement at Somasegar's blog .