The Screening Room: In episode 5, Jon Udell continues his earlier discussion with Anders Hejlsberg. The first part, delivered as a podcast, constitutes the conversation, while the screencast is the demo portion of Anders giving a personal walkthrough of Microsoft’s LINQ. Topics include: the new join syntax, the DLINQ visual mapper, adaptation of stored procedures and user-defined functions to LINQ, an experimental approach to transforming XML into modifiable .NET code, and dynamic construction of expression trees. Watch it here. Test Center review: Imperva’s SecureSphere Database Security Gateway 4.2 holds the potential to bring database administrators in out of the cold, figuratively speaking of course. This appliance “equips DBAs with the firewall functionality they need to protect databases from unwanted activity, malicious or otherwise,” writes Sean McCown. “At its core, SecureSphere’s firewall capabilities defend against privilege abuse, which comes from inside as well as outside the network in many forms, such as injection attacks.” McCown rates the product ‘Very Good’ but points out that the company, while on the right track, still has some work to do in terms of the reporting capabilites. Podcasts: The latest Storage Sprawl looks at CAS for the masses — as in content addressable storage, a technology that could become as popular for data archival as NAS is for storing live files. After listening to Sprawl, uncork the nearest bottle of wine and join Oliver Rist as he takes on IBM’s and Oracle’s definitions of an SMB in Emerging Enterprise. And, Dave Linthicum, in SOA Podcast Show 39, discusses SOA WS-Too Much and SOA testing. Best of the blogs: Matt Asay offers some advice to new or aspiring open source vendors. “Don’t bother with RFPs. Bother even less with RFIs.” Why? Asay answers in the RFP time sink. “If the prospect hasn’t downloaded, installed, and evaluated your software, you can’t afford to submit a 35-page response to a would-be customer’s questions. You have better things to do. Like write software.” Software Development