dudenumber4

I too remember the buzz about "software factories".  Nobody outside of MS really knows what the heck Oslo is, but it sure sounds similar. 
I'm sure it's good stuff, but it comes close on the heels of WCF which (it seems to me) has an extraordinarily low adoption rate...

Way too much detail about building one of these thingies.  I need a detailed example of the use of one.  I don't quite get the big picture. 

What's the crossover between this and Workflow Foundation?

Yes, of course; new members would have good defaults, but this is still an object reference.  I'm just wondering if this is the type of coupling that Steve is advocating against.

In the interview, Steve mentions that it's basic to loosely coupled services that object references not be passed around.
I am developing a web service that takes as it's only input param an object (just a structure, really).  That way I can add new parameters to the service by adding properties to that object w/o breaking existing clients.

Am I violating this loosely coupled rule?

Jason spoke about slow startup times due to JIT compilation and how this is a big target for optimization..  I thought this compilation was done only the first time a new assembly was loaded...?  It seems to me to be a negligible issue.