kennyw.com

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A few months ago, the Wing Dome on Olive & Bellevue closed its doors, and I can’t say that I shed a tear. It was replaced with a more muted, sky blue trimmed restaurant (and bar) called The Saint.

Gio introduced Lauren and me to The Saint on election eve. Their tasty margaritas helped our anticipatory nerves. We ate tasty guacamole and chicken mole, all very reasonably priced.  Our camera was MIA that night, so dinner pictures will need to wait until next time.

Today we took Vidya to try out The Saint’s brunch. The top dish of the afternoon was Tacos y Heuvos — eggs, grilled vegetables, potatoes, beans, and warm corn tortillas.

We also enjoyed hotcakes con crema batida. Three medium density pancakes served with strawberry tequila sauce, almonds, and agave nectar whipped cream. These guys know how to use their tequila!

The other dish we had was chilaquiles, which is a tortilla chip casserole with salsa and pork, chicken, or eggs. It was intriguing, and tasty enough for a few bites, but I now know that tortilla chip casserole isn’t really my thing

Overall, the food is good, the drinks are great, the interior is cozy, and the staff are very friendly.  The Saint is a great addition to Capitol Hill.

The Saint
1416 E Olive Way
Seattle, WA 98104
206-323-9922

Daily: 5:00PM-2:00AM (Dinner)
Sat-Sun: 10:00AM-2:30PM (Brunch)

Happy Hour daily from 5PM-7PM and midnight-2AM

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Today was an absolutely beautiful day in Seattle. Sunny, clear, with a light breeze. It felt like September!

Lauren and I spent this afternoon supporting equal rights on a march through Seattle.  After the march, we headed to a late lunch at the Pink Door.  The Pink Door is located in Pike’s Place Market, down Post Alley (across from Kell’s) behind an inconspicuous salmon-colored door.

Within is a large indoor area, but the highlight (especially on a day like today) is the large outdoor deck.  We were seated outside, with panoramic views of the Market and Puget Sound. We started with a cheese board plate. Each cheese was paired with a complementary item (walnuts for the tellagio, chocolate for the bleu, oranges for the sheep’s milk, and a fig jam for the pecorino).  All were good pairings, though the first two were stand-outs. A great and generously sized start to the meal.

Lauren ordered the paglia e fieno “straw and hay”. This was a mix of white & green fresh fettuccine with wild mushrooms and fresh herbs tossed in a light cream sauce. This is the perfect season for mushrooms, and it was my favorite of the dishes I tried.

I had the "strozapreti di zucca" - pasta with leeks, pumpkin, and pecorino cheese.  I liked the pumpkin and cheese, but overall the dish was lacking when compared to the straw and hay.

Our friends ordered the chicken pannini, lasagna, and pappardelle with meat sauce which all looked good.

It’s hard to beat the Pink Door’s location, and as a bonus they also have tasty, fairly priced food and friendly staff. What more could you ask for?

The Pink Door
1919 Post Alley
Seattle, WA 98101
206-443-3241

Mon-Thu: 11:30AM-10:00PM (Lunch and Dinner)
Fri-Sat: 11:30AM-11:00PM (Lunch and Dinner)
Sun: 4:00PM-11:00PM (Dinner)

I’m sitting in one of the coolest talks at PDC. ChrisAn & GioDL are showing how you can use the nascent "Oslo" language technologies to write your own textual language. MGrammar has been described as yacc on crack.

You should check it out (probably starting tomorrow) at: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL31/

UPDATE: You can download the SDK here and start playing with writing your own custom language. Fun stuff!

Slides should be available soon on Channel9. Until then, I’ve made them available here.

On Monday afternoon I unveiled WF 4.0 at PDC 2008. With this public disclosure you will start seeing a lot more details of the WF system here.

For those of you that were able to attend my session in person, please fill out the evaluation form (we’re currently at about 5% participation).

For those that couldn’t join me in person, the session was videotaped and is available at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL17/. Enjoy!

That was Lauren’s first reaction to stepping onto our first Virgin America plane. The personal TVs are great and first class looked amazing (closer to int’l business class seats). 

Last night I had a very strange dream….

I was in a large room doing a dry run for a PDC talk where I was code monkey-ing for Barack Obama. The organizers were expressing concern about low turnout since Barack had never given a PDC talk and they were considering swapping roles to have me headline with Barack code monkey-ing in order to increase turnout.

Wonder what’s been on my mind this month?

Distributed applications are tricky. The internet is a fickle beast that will lost data at will and run counter to many intuitions. Getting distributed applications to run smoothly and performant at scale is particularly difficult.  There isn’t a single "go fast" silver bullet, rather it’s more of an art. At PDC this year you’ll have a great opportunity to learn about the Zen of WCF Performance and Scale at Nicholas Allen’s lunch session. Enjoy!

Matt posted a great description of the WCF (and WF) talks we’re giving at PDC.

In particular there are two sessions that I’d like to call out.

The first is Ed Pinto’s session, where you’ll find out about the significant investments we’ve made to improve the WCF authoring experience:

WCF 4.0: Building WCF Services with WF in Microsoft .NET 4.0.

Eliminate the tradeoff between ease of service authoring and performant, scalable services. Hear about significant enhancements in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 4.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 to deal with the ever increasing complexity of communication. Learn how to use WCF to correlate messages to service instances using transport, context, and application payloads. See how the new WF messaging activities enable the modeling of rich protocols. Learn how WCF provides a default host for workflows exposing features such as distributed compensation and discovery. See how service definition in XAML completes the union of WF and WCF with a unified authoring experience that simplifies configuration and is fully integrated with IIS activation and deployment.

Once you’ve built your services, you will need to deploy, host, and manage them.  Windows Server "Dublin" handles this complexity, and Dan Eshner will unveil the details here:

Hosting Workflows and Services

Hear about extensions being made to Windows Server to provide a feature-rich middle-tier execution and deployment environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications. Learn about the architecture of this new extension, how it works, how to take advantage of it, and the features it provides that simplify deployment, management, and troubleshooting of workflows and services.

I’ve gone dark on the technical side of this blog for two main reasons:

1. Most of what I’m working on hasn’t been publicly disclosed
2. I’m prepping for PDC 2008 where I can finally discuss the past 2 years of my life without an NDA

If you want to see the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies that we’ve been cooking up, register now, and then mark your schedule for my talk:

Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0: A First Look

Programs coordinate work. The code for coordination and state management often obscures a program’s purpose. Learn how programming with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 provides clarity of intent while preserving the functional richness of the .NET framework. See how easy it is to build workflows with the new Visual Studio workflow designer. Learn about text-based authoring options for WF. Hear how WF integrates well with other Microsoft technologies (WCF, WPF, ASP.NET). If you’ve looked at WF before, come and see the changes to data flow, composition, and new control flow styles. Significant improvements to usability, composability, and performance make Workflow a great fit for a broad range of solutions on both the client and the server.

Other great (and related) talks include Doug Purdy’s Lap Around Oslo, Matt’s Building WF Activities session, and Ed’s chocolate & peanut butter talk on WCF+WF.

41 days and counting…