it was announced today that Microsoft and folks from Structure Map, Ninject, Spring, and Windsor have gotten together and come up with a shared interface for their containers.  You can now build applications using this interface an not be tied a particular IoC implementation.  The project and source code is available at www.codeplex.com/commonservicelocator.  You can also find more info about this effort here:

· http://www.tavaresstudios.com/Blog/post/Announcing-The-IServiceLocator-interface.aspx

· http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2008/10/02/iservicelocator-a-step-toward-ioc-container-service-locator-detente.aspx

Tim Barcz posted today about how he and his team will be transitioning from an ASP.NET 1.1 app to ASP.NET MVC.  Tim plans on posting how it goes, problems, tips, etc.  I'm really excited about the opportunity to "watch over his shoulder" as Tim gets to work on the transition.  There hasn't been much said out there about actually making this kind of transition.  Quite a bit about why you might want to make the transition (and Tim covers some of that in his post) but not much about real world "how I got here from there" information.  I'll keep my fingers crossed that Tim will have the time to post often and in detail about how things are going.

Shall we play a game???  Immortal words for those of us that grew up in the 80s.  This installment of Spaghetti Code is all about developing games with XNA and guest, Chris Williams.  Chris is a Microsoft MVP, head of the Twin Cities XNA User Group, and developer of the classic game Heroic Adventure.  Chris and I sit down and talk about game development with XNA, getting started, technical stuff, and game development in general.

While getting a podcast scheduled with Kris Nyreen to talk about some of the cool stuff he has been doing with Silverlight, he called this to my attention - Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint.  I will steal his feature list and repost it here, and an impressive list it is:

Very cool - check it out at http://www.codeplex.com/pks

On Thursday, June 26^th, from 1:30pm to 3:30pm, Microsoft MVP, Plurasight guru, and book author Matt Milner will be presenting on how to build connected systems using the .NET platform.

Matt brings a ton of real-world experience helping customers build connected systems on the Microsoft platform.  After Matt and I completed our podcast a while back, it seemed like a natural extension for Matt to dive deeper into his area of expertise and do a sessions open to developers and architects interested in connected systems.  Here is the abstract for the event:

Applications today are invariably connected across process and network boundaries.  Building connected systems comes with challenges from the classic: scalability, reliability, state management, and security; to new challenges of supporting the latest technologies such as ATOM, RSS, REST, JSON, and always being able to provide business value.  Developers need a platform that is robust enough to build systems today, and flexible enough to handle the challenges and changes to come.  In this seminar we will focus on two technologies in the .NET framework that provide the foundation for building connected systems: Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation.  We will examine the design of each of these frameworks and discuss how you can use them to more easily build complex applications. 

Register Today!

Not a lot of detail that I have found outside of this twitter, but it looks like the naysayers that said a) Microsoft would never support Rails, and/or b) IronRuby will not be able to run Rails, may need to get a big plate of crow. Still hunting for more concrete info, but if true, this is a great day.  I am not a Ruby guy, nor a RoR guy, but I love the fact that Microsoft and the .NET Platform is showing some flexibility in supporting different technologies and more importantly, supporting developers that typically have about zero interest in the Microsoft platform. 

To give credit where credit is due, I scammed this bit of news from Javier.

Update: You can get more on this announcement from John's website - http://www.iunknown.com/2008/05/ironruby-and-rails.html