From the feature well: SOA has been in existence long enough now that the lessons learned are both solid and bountiful. “An SOA has so many moving parts, it’s often difficult to step back and isolate the guiding principles that can keep an initiative heading toward success,” David Linthicum writes in Five surefire ways to make your SOA a success. The beginning: understand the pain. Podcasts: While I’m at it, Linthicum’s latest SOA Report poses the question where will the money be spent in 2007 considering service oriented architecture? “There was a significant surge in 2006, and this is going to continue in 2007. There’s some danger here: lack of foresight and insight will spur many enterprises to divert too many dollars to areas that will prove less fruitful in the long-term. In other words, they’ll buy the house before they know where they’re going to put it.” Best of the blogs: Not a fan of the Hollywood happy ending, I can appreciate a tale with hope. And Martin Heller has one. Better news about Visual Studio 2005 SP1. “The short story is that my installation of Visual Studio 2005 now starts up normally. The longer and more interesting story is how we fixed it, and how you could fix your own installation at need,” he writes. The news beat: Cognos buys Celequest for its business-intelligence dashboard technology. Adobe issues a version of its Flash Player 9 for Linux, thus enabling developers to reach Web surfers with the open source OS on their desktops. And Second Life boosts its voice and search capabilities. Technology Industry