• RX! Linq for real-time events!  Awesome!
• Background worker threads as you know them are dead?!  Look at the Parallel / Async Patterns put out by the patterns and practices team
• On the MVVM front, more confirmation that Commands are losing support.  The rumor has it more and more are starting to just bind to a method.  Makes sense doesn’t it?
• OData everywhere!  In the old 80/20 game, OData addresses 80% of the clients’ needs.  Just stand your data up.  Easy to consume.  Easy to provide.
• Keep an eye on REST.  With Glenn Block joining that effort, you can expect a bang up job to be done.

Hopefully, I’ll get some more time to put out some more morsels from this week long affair.

Things I was supposed to tell you:

• Test driven development is not a questionable practice.  The jury is long in on this.  Everyone benefits.
• More positives on the pair programming and agile front.

• Aspen Graphics – small Colorado company specializing in trading software moves to Silverlight
• Last week I was working on a white paper on the Quant Finance Industry and was scrambling to come up with a good section on Portfolio Attribution.  I was surprised to find ClariFI has some nice portfolio attribution functionality built in.
• Team Foundation Studio 2010 introduces User Stories as a basic work item in the Microsoft Agile 5.0 template!  Now, the pressure is on development teams to start from the scenarios and really work their way down to the individual features.  This page has a very literal, screen first, approach to the user story.

• After catching up with some colleagues who returned from WPC in Washington, D.C. last week, the story remains: Azure, WP7, Dallas, OData.  I was surprised there wasn’t more on the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse or Stream Insight.