Morning Coffee 131

• On a recommendation from my mother-in-law, I've been watching Torchwood. Sort of Men in Black, the series and set in Cardiff. Since it's made in England, it'll be one of the few shows still running in the new year due to the WGA strike.
• A while back I pointed out that many DotNetKicks articles were submitted by their authors. I submitted a few of my own, just for kicks (har har), with mixed results. Today, I discovered that the parse buffer post from my Practical Parsing in F# series was submitted, picked up some kicks, and made it to the home page. That's pretty cool. I guess writing more dev-focused articles is the way to go to get attention on DNK.
• Amazon has rolled out a limited beta of SimpleDB, which appears to be S3 + query support. Cost is based on usage: 14¢/hour for machine utilization, 10¢/GB upload, 13-18¢/GB download and $1.50/GB storage/month. I'd love to see SimpleDB software that I could download and install, rather than hosted only. Even if I was going to use the hosted service, I'd like to develop against a non-hosted instance.
• Research for sale! I was checking out the MS Research download feed and discovered a link to the Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL) library. This was previously called GLEE (Graph Layout Execution Engine) and was "free for non-commercial use". Now, you can buy it for $295 from Windows Marketplace (though the previous free version is still available). The idea of directly commercializing research like this strikes me as pretty unusual. It must be a really good library.
• Scott Guthrie shows off the new Dynamic Data Support that will ship as part of the ASP.NET Extensions. I'm like, whatever. Scaffolding wasn't that that interesting to me in RoR, so it's no surprise that it's not that interesting in ASP.NET.
• Jeff "Party With" Palermo blogs about the IoC support in the new MVC Contrib project. Also looks like they're porting RoR's simply_restful. (via Scott Guthrie) 
• I need to try out some of Tomas Respro's VS color schemes (also via Scott Guthrie)

The DevHawk 2007 World Tour

After spending almost all of fiscal year 07 (July '06 thru June '07) not traveling and not presenting, I'm going to be doing a few public talks to finish out the year. If you, dear reader, are going to one of these please drop me a line. Invariably, it's the side meetings and discussions that are the most valuable at these conferences.

IT Architect Regional Conference 2007
October 15th - 16th, San Diego, CA

I'm a huge fan of IASA, so I'm thrilled to be doing their west regional conference. I've presented to a packed house for the local chapter before, so I think these folks will put on a good conference. They sure have a good selection of topics and speakers.

My session is called "Moving Beyond Industrial Software". Here's the abstract:

Computers have been instrumental in ushering in the post-industrial age. Yet, most enterprises today are run with an industrial mindset and the IT department is organized like a factory. This creates a tension between the forces of industrialization that define the organization and the forces of post-industrialization that define today’s marketplace. For example, our post-industrial world is becoming more decentralized by the day. Yet many organizations believe the key to a successful service oriented architecture – a very decentralized system design – is to have a central service repository.

In this session, Harry Pierson will examine this tension, get you thinking outside the industrial mindset and help you think about software development in a post-industrial way.

I'm very excited about this talk.

MS SOA & Business Process Conference
October 29th - November 2nd, Redmond, WA

I'm not presenting at MSSOABPC (that's a mouthful) but looks like most of my team is going. So if you're going and want to hang out with the guys who are doing this stuff in the trenches @ MSIT, let me know. Also, I put out the call for anyone interested in a geek dinner. From the agenda, looks like they're keeping us busy until 8pm every night Mon-Wed, so we can either a) have geek dinner Thursday or Friday or b) have geek beers after one of the receptions in the early part of the week.

patterns & practices Summit USA West
November 5th - 9th, Redmond, WA

I did the p&p Summit back in 2005, a very successful debut of my Developer 2.0 talk. (I'm doing that talk at a different conference this year, details below.) This year, I'm not 100% sure what I'm going to talk about yet. I'm currently slated to talk about the Rome project that I'm doing in MSIT, but given our current slow progress on that project, I'm probably going to talk about something else. I'm thinking either the "Moving Beyond Industrial Software" talk described above or the "Facing the Fallacies of Distributed Computing" talk described below. Any other suggestions?

DevTeach Vancouver 2007
November 26th - 30th, Vancouver, BC

This is a brand new experience for me. Frankly, I'd never heard of DevTeach before my friend Mario Cardnial suggested I submit a couple of sessions. Since it's only a few hours drive away, I'm bringing the family along. We'll see how that goes. And when I'm not doing my sessions or hanging out with the family, I might take in a session or two in the XNA track.

Here are the sessions I'm doing:

Developer 2.0
Finding Your Way in the Future of Software Development
The one constant in software development is change. Software development in 2007 is dramatically different than it was in 2000, which was in turn dramatically different than in 1993. You can be guaranteed that the platforms, languages, and tools will continue to evolve. Learn how Harry Pierson, Architect in Microsoft IT, believes software development is going to evolve in the next five years and what you must do today to remain competitive.

Facing the Fallacies of Distributed Computing
Sun Fellow Peter Deutsch is credited with authoring "The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing". These are near-universal assumptions about distributed systems that “All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.” In this session, we will examine these fallacies in depth and learn how to avoid them on the Windows platform by leveraging Web Services, WCF and SQL Service Broker.

Morning Coffee 97

• For the first six months of 2007, I posted 158 times in 181 days. I'm obviously off the pace I set in January of averaging a post a day, but I am averaging just under nine tenth of a post per day. Not bad. At this rate, I'll post almost as much this year as I did the last two years combined.
• It was a great family weekend. Saturday, three of my friends helped me move an upright piano that we got used for a great price. Luckily, one of said friends is also a physics teacher, otherwise I don't think we could have gotten that heavy thing in the truck. To say thanks, we BBQed for them Saturday evening. Then yesterday we took the kids to see a Sesame Street Live show. Both days were beautiful, which my wife greatly appreciated.
• The Caps hit the free agent market running yesterday, picking up Tom Poti (four years, $14 million) and Victor Kozlov (two years, $5 million). They weren't the A-list free agents, but they both seem like solid pickups. According to Japer's Rink, the Caps were about $6.5 million under the new cap minimum. These two signings just about close that gap, but it doesn't sound like they're done. That's good news for Caps fans.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on LINQ to SQL. While I've seen most of this before, the cool thing Scott shows is hovering over the LINQ to SQL result and bringing up the exact SQL statement in a debugger window. That's pretty cool.
• Nick Malik is now "Mr. SOA" inside MSIT. As you might imagine, I'll be working with him fairly closely. Actually, he's late to a meeting with me as I type this.
• John Shewchuk announces a new version of BizTalk Services coming soon. The big new feature is access control for services exposed via the BizTalk Services. If you can't wait, you can try out the new stuff in their pre-production environment right now, before it's live. Is this a beta of a beta?
• Soma announces the MSDN Small Business Developer Center. I took a quick look thru the site. Strangely enough, it doesn't cover Dynamics - Microsoft's business software primarily targeting small and medium size businesses.
• Ted Neward called object/relational mapping the "Vietnam of Computer Science". David Chappell gives us our next war / technology analogy, declaring that the REST vs. WS-* war is over, ending in a truce like the Korean war rather than "crushing victory for one side".
• Like Jeff Atwood, I didn't realize About Face has been updated, twice. I am a huge fan of the first edition, but Jeff calls About Face 3 "the best edition of this classic yet". I just ordered a copy for myself.
• David McGhee transcribed a fantastic session with Dr. Don Ferguson at the Australian Architecture Forum on SOA/ESB integration in the real world. Go read the whole thing. Udi Dahan pulls out the quote "there is no such thing as a centralized ESB." Amen to that. My other favorite quotes from this discussion is "The temptation is often to get everything in a repository, but often you cannot rely on people to put everything in the registry" and "there is sometimes the “Highlander” philosophy of there can be only one service". If you're design depends on centralization and/or significant change in human behavior, it's doomed from the start. Frankly, it's amazing how often that happens.
• In response to my What is the Rails Question post, Hartmut Wilms wonders why "the .NET community (for the most part) ignores Open Source Projects". I wonder the same thing, though I don't think you can lump the whole .NET community together on this. While some parts of the community ignore anything they can't download from MSDN, other parts strongly embrace open source projects.

Morning Coffee 24

• Congrats to the Colts on winning the ugliest Super Bowl ever. Pouring rain, eight turnovers, missed PAT and field goal and the opening kickoff TD return. Ugly, but fun to watch.
• Now that we've had our first poor-weather Super Bowl, I think it's time to start rotating through cities that have never gotten it due to expected weather conditions. Obviously, I'd like to see a Super Bowl at Qwest Field. But most of all, I would love to see the Super Bowl played in Green Bay on the "frozen tundra" of Lambeau Field.
• Was it just me, or did the Super Bowl ads suck this year?
• There's a sweet looking pinball game coming to XBLA. I love pinball, so unless it completely stinks I'll be buying it.
• I commented on the Windows Live SDK last week, but I missed the Windows Live ID Client SDK alpha release. It looks like you can use this SDK to build desktop applications that use Windows Live ID for authentication. Fairly cool, but does it work with non WL services? (via Dare Obasanjo)
• I saw this post on the home page of DotNetKicks today. It claims that locating the ASP.NET App_Data directory by calling AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetData("DataDirectory") is a "dirty hack". I left a comment on the original post, but I wonder if the correct information will ever make it's way back to DNK? 
• Architecture Comix? Yep, on Skyscrapr, an architect community site run by my old team. Sorta funny, but I'm guessing Scott Adams isn't worried about the competition yet.

Morning Coffee 21

• With this post, I will have posted 31 times in January. I doubt I will average a post a day for the rest of the year, but I've averaged less than half a post for a day for the past two years.
• LINQ to whatever is the new hotness. The ADO.NET team blogged about LINQ to DataSet last week. Of course, there's also LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, LINQ to Entities and LINQ to XSD. Am I missing any other LINQ's? (Would that be the missing LINQ? har har har)
• Joe McKendrick writes on "rogue" systems in the enterprise. In typical pundit fashion, he doesn't bother to take a stand on the subject, going so far in this case of having a reader poll rather than offering up his own opinion (wouldn't want to be wrong, would we?). However, I thought it was interesting that the three poll answers were "No rogue services", "Sometimes rogue services are OK" and "Why fight it?". Where's "Yes, let's directly empower the users" in that list?
• I finally got around to installing PowerShell on both my laptop and workstation. I love the concept, but so far I just haven't had the time to dig into it or found a good problem to solve with it.
• Windows Live now has it's own SDK. According to the Windows Live Dev News, the new and updated areas of the unified SDK include Search, Alerts and adCenter. (via DotNetKicks)
• Speaking of DotNetKicks, is it just me or are a lot of the links submitted by their original authors? Steven Cohn on Service Layer Transparency, Keyvan Nayyeri on How to Write Validators for Custom WF Activities, Mads Kristensen on Universal Data Type Checker just to name three of the top four articles currently on the DNK home page. Seems fishy to blow your own horn like that, but since SNK shares advertising revenue with story submitters, it sorta makes sense.

TechEd Iron Architect Contest

For a change, I'm not involved with TechEd at ALL this year. It's all Simon and Marty. Looks like they've got some cool stuff cooking, particularly the Iron Architect contest. Almost makes me wish I was going this year.

Atlas Transparency

I went to a brownbag today on Atlas, though since it was at 10am there was no one eating lunch or any brownbags to be seen. As cool as the Atlas project is, the coolest thing is that when I asked where their internal web site was, Johnathan said they didn't have one - just the public http://atlas.asp.net/ site. How about that for transparency! More of that, please!

Developer 2.0 at VSLive!

FYI, for those going to VSLive! in San Francisco, I'm a last minute addition to the schedule. I'm presenting a talk titled Developer 2.0: Finding Your Way in the Future of Software Development. I wrote and delivered this presentation originally for the patterns & practices Summit back in December. It was the second-highest rated talk of the summit (after Anders' LINQ keynote) so I'm excited to be delivering it again. I'm hoping to get a high-quality recording so I can publish it (I recorded the p&p summit version with my laptop. You can hear it but I wouldn't say it's "high quality"). The session is at 5:45pm on Tuesday. I've been told it's in room 2016/2018, but you should double check when you get there if you're interested in going.

There's a solid showing from the Architecture Strategy Team at the VSLive! Software Architecture Summit this year. In addition to my last minute addition:

• John deVadoss's day two keynote on Software Architecture on the Edge: Moving Beyond SOA.
• Ron Jacobs on Integration, Service Orientation and Pattern Driven Design .
• John Evdemon on Workflow Enabled Services.
• Mauro Regio on Collaboration Software Factory.

See you in San Fran!

Outlook Integration Sample

For the past few months, I've been heavily involved in a project but I wasn't allowed to blog about it. Last week, it went live on MSDN so finally the gag is off.

About a year ago, word started to surface about something called Project Elixir which aimed to integrate back end CRM systems with Microsoft Outlook. Part of that effort resulted in the addition of Outlook Managed Add-ins to Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office. However, the VSTO team's primary deliverable was an add-in loader that enforced security, enabled shutdown unloading and provided a better startup/shutdown developer experience that IDTExtensibility2. (Check out the VSTO Outlook Architecture document for more details.) While those are important fundamentals that needed to be gotten right, VSTO Outlook doesn't provide much in the way of tools or guidance for building Outlook add-ins that leverage managed forms and controls or integrate with your back end systems. That's where the CRM Integration for Outlook sample comes in.

What we've built is a sample application that surfaces CRM style data inside of Outlook. Outlook is the natural home for your calendar and your personal contacts. Why not make it the natural home for your customer contacts, activities and opportunities as well? As part of the demo project we've implemented:

• Using Windows Forms for editing custom items. Check out this screenshot. The Activity form is a standard managed Windows Forms form, not an Outlook custom form.
• Using a Windows Forms user control as a folder home page. Here's a screenshot of the "CRM Today" page. Again, that's a standard managed Windows Forms user control.
• A framework for adding menu items and toolbars. In Outlook, the developer has to manage adding the custom toolbars and menu to each explorer and inspector window themselves. With our sample, we built a framework to handle that for you.
• Using SQL Express as a local cache of CRM data. It turns out that for many scenarios, storing a copy of all the back-end data directly in Outlook is a bad idea. First, it increases the size of the users mailbox, requiring more storage on the Exchange server. Furthermore, any custom data in Outlook has to be synced twice - once from the back end system to Outlook on the desktop, then from Outlook back to Exchange. By minimizing the amount of back-end data stored in Outlook proper, we reduce the mailbox size and sync bandwidth needs. In both the above screenshots, the displayed data is coming out of the local SQL Express instance, not Outlook.
• Having two separate storage locations (Outlook & SQL Express) means having to sync between them. We've built a local sync engine that can sync both individual items between Outlook and SQL Express as well as a collection of items between SQL Express and a given Outlook folder.
• Finally, there are some utility classes to make it easier to deal with Outlook folders and items. Of primary note is the ItemAdapter class which provides a pseudo base class for Outlook items (appointments, emails, tasks, etc). Those items all have a set of similar properties and methods, but don't have a common base class so they can't be treated polymorphicaly. ItemAdapter uses runtime reflection to implement those common operations without needing to cast to the concrete Outlook item type.

Check out the Architecture Design Guide, as well as the Outlook Customization Guide and the Local Sync Engine Guide up on the Solution Architecture Center. You can also pick up the source code. Also, I spun up a GDN Workspace so we can have a discussion forum and to track bugs and requests.

Going forward, I'm going to be focusing on the remote data sync story for this scenario. Among other responsibilities, I "own" the Data pillar of our Connected Systems model so this dovetails nicely. You'll note above that while we have a local sync engine in the sample, we don't have any way to move the data back and forth between the local copy in SQL Express and the remote copy in the CRM back-end. We are working on some guidance around this right now, but we didn't want to hold up publishing the rest of the sample.

Frankly, it's been nice to be involved with something so technical after spending time on the marketing team. I'm pretty proud of the project and I look forward to your feedback.

Update: Removed the link to the running demo as it's been taken off the download site for reasons I am not aware of. If you want the binary and you don't know how to compile it, drop me a mail.

My New Boss is Blogging

Gianpaolo took over the Solution Architecture team a few months ago and he rebooted his blog a couple of weeks ago. And he's active on the afore mentioned Architecture Forums. Subscribed.

Architecture Forums

Simon just emailed a bunch of internal architects about the new Architecture Forums on Microsoft.com. So far there's a general architecture forum as well as one for modeling and tools, with more to come I would guess.

What other forums do you think we need?

Ted on C# 3.0

I just discovered Ted Neward's blog has moved. In catching up, I found this great post on the new features of C# 3.0. Even though I had read thru the C# 3.0 spec, Ted's explanation was much easier to read.

FYI, speaking of Ted, I'll be speaking at his No Fluff Just Stuff .NET software symposium. Still working w/ Ted on the abstracts, but basically I'm basically talking about patterns, GAT and DSLs.

MVP Summit Wrap Up Thoughts

It's hard to believe it October already. The last three weeks have been jam packed, starting with PDC 05, then a variety of meetings culminating with the company meeting the following week, then the 2005 MVP Global Summit last week. This was the first MVP Summit to include Architect MVPs so it was pretty stressful. Of course, there were things we could have done better, but all-in-all I was happy with the event. A year ago, we had just awarded our first 14 Architect MVPs. Now we're 100 strong between our solution and infrastructure Architect MVPs and we had better than half of them in Redmond for the summit. I swear, it will take us the rest of the fiscal year to implement even half of their suggestions.

I'm sure each of the various groups that have MVPs think that their MVPs are the best, so I guess I'm no different in that regard. Our Architect MVPs are an amazing group and I am already looking forward to the next opportunity to get a bunch of them in a room together again.

TinyCLR and Invisible Computing

When I was at PDC, I saw the Phidgets folks in the Coding4Fun booth. Is it just me, or is this stuff dying to get merged with MSR's Invisible Computing project? Haven't heard of Invisible Computing? Here's the description:

This site has the source code and documentation for Microsoft Invisible Computing. It is a research prototype for making small devices part of the seamless computing world. This site contains the source code and is available free of charge for research and educational use under the Microsoft Shared Source License.

Microsoft Invisible Computing consists of compact middleware for constructing embedded web services applications and a small component based Real-Time Operating System with TCP/IP networking to make middleware run straight on the metal on several embedded processors.

The goal is to make it easy to build custom smart devices and consumer electronics, especially battery operated; and to support research in invisible computing, operating systems, networking, ubiquitous computing, sensor nets, distributed systems, object-oriented design, and wireless communication.

FYI, I discovered the Invisible Computing project by searching the web for TinyCLR. TinyCLR is what powers the MSN Direct watch. From what I can tell (i.e. this is based on publicly discovered info) is that Invisible Computing is a shared source version of TinyCLR that works with a variety of hardware platforms. Sort of like a Rotor for embedded devices.

Check out a presentation and the code.

Max Enhancements Needed

So I had a little time to play on a recently reimaged partition so I decided to install Max to play with. Very cool stuff. Sort of PhotoStory-esque. For someone with little kids and tons of pictures, it's a great tool. However, I see two immediate issues that need to be rectified.

• No Save or Export Capability. I've got Max running on a clean image, but I know I'll want to reimage it again soon when there's a later drop of WinFX or VS or LINQ that I want to play with. However, Max doesn't have any way to save a picture list to the hard drive. Everything (and I mean everything) is stored in an XML file in the C:\Documents and Settings\<userName>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft Codename Max directory. Spelunking the code with Reflector, I see a locally defined namespace called System.Storage. I'm guessing this is a stub WinFS library with the intention of migrating to the real deal at some point in the future. But since it's just a stub, there's no simple way to get stuff in and out of that file. I tried cutting and pasting of the XML, but Max told me the store was corrupted and I had to rebuild my photo list. Please add some way to save photo lists outside of Max!
• No Downlevel experience. I showed my wife the photo list I built and her first response was "can you send me that?" Sadly, no I can't. I realize that Max is supposed to be an example of the new-fangled WinFX stuff, but my wife, her best friend, my mother, my mother-in-law, etc. are NOT going to install the Sept. CTP of WinFX in order to run Max. Most of the cool Avalon stuff is in the authoring experience. Couldn't you export a photo list to DHTML or something?

PDC Quick Hits

I'm sure lots of people are blogging a ton about PDC stuff, but I wanted to call out two things quickly.

First is Microsoft Max. I have a friend on this team, so I've heard a bunch about this. Given the number of pictures I have taken of my kids, I can't wait to play with this in earnest.

Second is LINQ or Language Integrated Query and it's use in C# 3.0 and VB 9.0. I started to write a language a few years ago called Dart (named after my dog) that had SQL-esque commands that were strongly typed. So I'm really impressed with what they've acomplished in LINQ. Not only is it doing strongly typed queries in the lanugage, they even can do joins across stores! In the keynote demo, they joined a query of running processes with data from a database. So now any C# or VB developer has their - or should I say will have their - own query processor around at the ready!

PDC05 Architecture Symposium Buzzcast

Michael cornered me on Tuesday to record a PDC05 Buzzcast with Mike Burner about the Architecture Symposium. At PDC03, the Architecture Symposium was one of the more popular and successful aspects of the overall confernece (though it was marred by a major room change issue that caused literally hundreds of attendees to be forced to watch from the hallway outside as the room was literally overflowing) and we're looking to do something engaging again this year.

Like last time, the Architecture Symposium will be held the last day of the conference, Friday from 8:30 until noon (with breaks of course). After lunch, we'll have a panel discussion featuring Gregor Hohpe, David Ing, Tony Redmond, Steve Swartz.

Here's the full symposium abstract:

You've had a tantalizing week of cool technology, but now you need to transition back to your real job: making all of the pieces work together. The PDC Architecture Symposium will zoom you through the solutions lifecycle - from requirements to modeling to requirements to iterative development to requirements to operational feedback (which you might look at as another set of requirements) - showing you how traditional best practices and recent innovations can be used together to build robust solutions that accelerate business value creation.

Topics include:
The Architecture of Connected Systems
In the beginning there are the models - from the thing you scrawl on a napkin at lunch to that enormously complex diagram that your network architect carries around in a cardboard tube. What models are worth creating, and how do they relate to each other? Who are the key stakeholders for each, and how can you help them talk to each other? This session explores how to decompose value chains into your key models - your process and work flows, the information at the heart of your processes, and the access, deployment, and other operational models that you need to stay trustworthy and compliant. We will then map these models into a collection of services, orchestrations, and policies that define a highly integrated solution.

Building Connected Systems
With so much complexity and so many stakeholders, how do you build the right thing on time? This session explores the techniques to iterate agilely through a connected system project, including the patterns and practices for building solutions that combine messaging, workflow, structured information, and human interaction across platforms and across organizational boundaries. How can we give the right access to everyone in the value chain, respecting the very real boundaries around information and process control? How do we keep our models current, and use them to communicate with all of the stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle?

Managing the Connected Systems Lifecycle
As each iteration of your connected system is deployed and used, new requirements and system refinements emerge. How do we design in the operational hooks that give us the insight to learn from our deployed solutions? How do we re-factor and version our services and orchestrations to improve service reuse, scalability and operational efficiency? The key theme is driving collaboration between development and operations groups from the earliest design phase through the ongoing maintenance of the system.

As Michael said on the buzzcast, you just can't miss the Architecture Symposium. See you there.

TechEd 05 - Day Zero

The calm before the storm, as they say...

Things have been quiet around here between new baby & final TechEd prep. I think we're in pretty good shape, though we'll see how we look tomorrow. One good piece of news is that Dick Carlson, who manages the Hands-on Labs, sent out a list of labs either not received or that have blocking bugs. No ARC track labs on either list. That's a good sign...

Last night was the track owner dinner at Sea World. Funny, we had a track owner dinner at Sea World last year in San Diego. Is this a trend? It was fun to hang out with the other track owners and drink rather than have to sit around a table and plan. Didn't get to see Shamu up-close-and-personal like last year, but we did go ride the Kraken roller-coaster. Pretty cool, though reminiscent of Batman at Six Flags in SoCal. One slight bummer - some of us waited extra to ride in the front, but I was to big for those seats! And it wasn't a weight problem (though I could certainly use some work on that front), it was a barrel chest problem.

Today, my pal Chris is driving up from Hobe Sound and we're going to hang out this afternoon. I used to see Chris all the time, but then we both switched jobs and he doesn't have much chance to come out to the left coast. Last time I saw him was at an architect forum last spring in Orlando, when again he drove up to see me. However, I hear there may be a helicopter ride in the cards today, so I'll try and keep the "when are you coming to see me for a change?" grief to a minimum.

I've even gotten a chance to write up some thoughts on two new projects and to play around with the new DSL Toolkit CTP. Of course, having an extended battery for the plane ride was the reason I could do all that.

See you in the cabana on Monday...

TechEd Utility Player

So we're one week out on TechEd. This time next week, the final prep will be done and we'll be ready to let this thing fly. Some of the core team goes down this week, though as a track owner, I'm not really needed on site until Sunday.

What a difference a year makes. Last year, I was freaking out - it was my first TechEd. Now I feel like the old hand at this. Of course, I wouldn't have made it through last year with out the assistance of a few key individuals. Among others was Esther, who just started blogging for this year's TechEd. She's got a long post about the track cabanas. Last year, they were a big hit, but there were a few glitches. Esther writes about some of the changes they made this year to address those issues.

If you're going to TechEd, make sure to stop by the ARC cabana and say hi.

Introducing the Architecture Resource Center

Shortly after joining the Architecture Strategy Team, we worked with MSDN to re-launch the .NET Architecture Center. While we've had good success with that site, we realized after running it for several months that we needed a new approach in order to engage architects of all kinds. While Solution Architects are a key audience of ours that is well served by our MSDN site, there are also enterprise and infrastructure architects that we want to be able to engage with via the website. For these audiences, the MSDN site is not really the optimal channel. So today we've launched a new site - the Architecture Resource Center on microsoft.com. We've also re-launched the MSDN site, now called the MSDN Solution Architecture Center.

One of the key differences you'll notice about the sites is that we have a new way of categorizing our content. Previously, we used a topic based approach with categories such as service oriented architecture and application architecture. Now, we have a taxonomy with categories for think ahead, learn more, solve now and share ideas. This gives us a new way of differentiating content such as Metropolis, which really is about the future of architecture, from content such as the Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide, which really is about solving a specific design problems today. Over time, as we add both more content as well as more personalization features, we think this approach will make it much easier for our customers to find the content they are looking for.

Of course, as "community guy", I'm most excited about the Share Ideas section. In addition to a site wide RSS feed, we also have an aggregate architecture blog (and RSS feed)  featuring both Microsoft architects like myself and Simon Guest as well as and 3rd party architects such as Architect MVP's Jimmy Nilsson and Barry Gervin as well as Architecture Advisory Board members David Ing and Martin Fowler. There's info on the new architecture certification, upcoming events and webcasts as well as profiles of my coworkers on the Architecture Strategy Team.

Finally, I'm very excited to announce that JOURNAL is becoming The Architecture Journal and that you can sign up for a free print subscription to this great quarterly publication. We saw a huge traffic spike when JOURNAL was introduced on Architecture Center last spring, so I'm thrilled that that great content will now be available in print format delivered right to your home or office! Watch for print copies of the Best of the Journal issue at TechEd.

Of course, with any new venture, there will be tweaks, hiccups and improvements. Please leave a comment or email me with your thoughts, opinions and suggestions on how we can continue to improve this site to meet the needs of all kinds of architects.

Puget Sound IASA Meeting Tomorrow

FYI, I'm presenting at the monthly meeting of the International Association of Software Architects Puget Sound chapter Wed night (4/27). I'll be talking about DSLs and Software Factories, including a hands-on look at the tool. If you're in the Redmond area, the meeting is on the Microsoft campus in Building 43, Room 1560 - the Jefferson Room.

KoolAid Drinker

I love this. Except Scott, didn't you mean to say "I'm an architect MVP"?

TechEd Bloggers

I guess we're still three months out, but TechEd Bloggers is just getting ramped up. Not to many registered bloggers yet. So far, I'm the only registered blogger in the staff category. Last year, I was staff and speaker (the only track owner also presenting I might point out) but this year I'm in marketing so they didn't let me speak! :) Actually, I picked all the ARC track sessions and speakers, so I have no one to blame for myself. Yep, no one to blame but myself for significantly easing my own workload to only worrying about organizing the track, hanging out in the ARC cabana and hearding speakers (note to self, get Ted's mobile number before the event starts) without the added worry of having to present.

Who else is going to Orlando?

Community Site

I'm trying to set up a community site for some old friends from high school. Got the domain name, got the hosting space, just need to figure out what to run on the site.

I started by looking the old IBuySpy portal. It's been a while - it's now called the ASP.NET Portal Starter Kit. Looks as good as it did when it first came out. However, there's a slight security issue. My hoster doesn't allow unauthenticated write access to the file system. Most of the ASP.NET Portal data is stored in the database, however the actual site layout is stored in an on-disk XML file. I could work around this by setting up a portal on my local machine, building out the site, and then uploading the relevant xml file, but I want to have my good friend back east help manage the site, so that workaround does't work too well.

Next choice was DotNetNuke. They're about to release their 3.0 version (3.0.11 is supposed to be the final beta). Looks really nice and installed very easily on my local testbed. However, my hoster also doesn't give my DB account owner rights - I get reader, writer, DDL and security admin but not owner. DNN installs a series of stored procedures (which works on my machine due to having DDL permissions) but doesn't give EXEC permissions to those procs to anyone except DBO. Woops. I wrote a small utility app that extracts a list of all user stored procs and calls "GRANT EXEC ON <<SPNAME>> TO PUBLIC" on each one. Seems to work fine, but given the size of the DNN codebase, I'm not sure I'm comfortable that there isn't something else out there that's expecting DBO permissions.

Assuming I don't go with ASP.NET Portal or DNN, what other choices do I have? I've got pretty stringint security requirements, plus it has to use ASP.NET (go figure). I'm still looking at:

• Rainbow Portal - similar to DNN in that it started from the original ASP.NET Portal source code
• ASP.NET Community Starter Kit (CSK) - A baseline starter kit for building a community oriented site. Sounds promising.
• GotCommunityNet - derivative of the community starter kit. They bill themselves as CSK 1.1. Sounds even more promising.

Any other suggestions?

RSS Bandit "Wolverine" - Thumbs Up!

Even though I'm a happy NewsGator customer, I decided to try out the new beta version of RSS Bandit. Wow, I really like the newspaper view. I wish I had this in Outlook.

I recently hopped on the GTD bandwagon and among other changes I deleted all my mail rules and started over. Previously, I was routing my email to different folders based on if I was on the To: line, the CC: line, it came to one of the team aliases or none of the above. I discovered that I pretty much only keep good track of my main inbox with the stuff that came directly to me. Other stuff just languished, unprocessed. Now, I route mail to folders based on the mailing list it comes from. Some mailing lists have lower priority than others. This newspaper view would be perfect for quickly scanning these low priority mail folders, esp. with the feature to mark all as read when leaving the folder.

PatternShare

About fourteen months ago, David Trowbridge of patterns & practices introduced me to a guy working in their testing group named Larry Brader. David is one of the primary authors of p&p's Enterprise Solution Patterns and Integration Patterns books. I wanted to talk to David about building a pattern repository and he handed me off to Larry. Little did I know that Larry is an information theorist and was one of the key authors of Testing Software Patterns. Frankly, when Larry gets rolling on info theory, I only understood a fraction of what he's saying. But the parts I do understand about how patterns relate to each other blows my mind.

Then p&p hired this guy...what's his name?...Oh yeah, Ward Cunningham. I hear he knows a bit about pattern repositories. :)

Anyway, around this time last year I was having regular meetings with Larry and Ward to talk about this repository stuff. Then stuff got crazy on my end - primarily being the acting marketing director for my team as well as the ARC track owner for last years TechEd. The regular meetings became more irregular and then stopped altogether. That is to say, my involvement stopped - Ward, Larry et.al. kept forging ahead. I heard about how things were going from time to time, but that was the extent of my involvement.

Last summer, Larry, Ward and David (plus others I've never met) published an article called Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space. (They also did a webcast on the topic.) In it, they laid out a way of thinking about how patterns relate to each other and they introduced the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table (EASOT for short). That was just the first step. PatternShare is next one.

PatternShare is a community site that brings together the patterns from popular authors - Fowler, Evans, Hohpe & Wolfe, GoF, POSA and p&p - into a single repository. Furthermore, it provides a dynamically generated EASOT showing all the patterns in the repository and how they relate to each other. Finally, it provides a way to add new patterns to the repository so that they show up in the EASOT.

Major congrats to Ward, Larry, David and the rest of the p&p folks for pulling this off. I can't wait to see where the site goes from here.

TechEd Session Triage

One of the reasons blogging has been a little light around here recently is because I was prepping for the TechEd Session Triage. Basically, all the track owners figure out what sessions they want on their own then come together for an entire afternoon to present their sessions to each other. Turns out there is often overlap with other sessions in other tracks that need to be worked out, suggesting changes to titles and abstracts and other wise cutting up. For example. I'm sitting next to Becky who owns the Connected Systems Infrastructure track. We had several sessions in both the CSI and ARC tracks that have caused changes and cuts. We actually got the ARC, CSI and DEV tracks got together earlier this week for a "pre-iage" which means today went pretty smooth for the ARC track. Not that it felt like things were going to go smooth running around this morning. Typically, the last 24 hours before triage are a flurry of emails with last minute suggestions. This year - no exception. But now, at least it's done.

The Pharonic Architect is Blogging

Speaking of DSL Tools, Software Factories co-author Jack Greenfield just started blogging. He has jumped into the running debate between IBM's Grady Booch and a variety of MS folks including Steve, Alan and myself. He does a good job summarizing the argument including pointing out where he and Booch agree:

In particular, we share the conviction that packaging knowledge for reuse in patterns, languages, frameworks, tools and other form factors is “the right next stage in cutting the Gordian knot of software”.

Jack rightly points out that while we all agree on these mechanisms for packaging knowledge that the devil is in the details. I look forward to seeing more on these details from Jack in the future.

Be There or Be Square

PDC 2005. 'nuff said.

TechEd 2005 Call for Papers

BTW, speaking of TechEd 2005, we're currently inviting potential presenters to submit proposals to speak. Norman is taking over ownership of the Architecture track, but I'm still responsible for technical content and community for the track. If you're interested in presenting at TechEd on any topic, head over to the TechEd 2005 Call For Papers website. Proposals are due by the end of December.

Building DSLs in VS

Last night, after the Turing Lecture, we hosted a FlashBoF on "DSL's in Visual Studio". Stuart answered a bunch of questions and gave a much more detailed demonstration of the new DSL Toolkit than we could show during the keynote. Here's what I learned from the session:

• Models are stored in XML files. The language designer outputs an object model and will eventually also output an XSD. For example, here's a screenshot of the language designer from the DSL Toolkit we're releasing. Inside the designer, I've got a sample UIP DSL (I hacked this up on my own, this is not exactly the same one we demoed yesterday). As you can see, there's a PageCollection concept which contains Page concepts that have Name and Kind values. Page concepts also has a collection of Transfer concepts, which in turn have Label values. Generating an object model makes it easier to write tools that manipulate models. Typically, I'm anti-XML-Serialization but in this case - where we have a relative simple XSD - it works fine. I could also manipulate the model by accessing the underlying XML if I want to.
• Code generation uses templates and looks a lot like CodeSmith or old-school ASP. You interleave the static elements of the generated code with blocks of code that access the model (via the object model described above) and generate the dynamic model-specific elements of the code. So I'm guessing that people using the codegen tools like CodeSmith will feel right at home with this toolkit.
• In the current builds (which is to say later than the build that we're releasing first - the first build doesn't include any of the code generation support) we're generating a single code file from a model. Eventually we'll be able to manipulate multiple files from a single model. This is similar to how the Class Diagram works - add a new class onto the diagram and a new file gets added to the project, delete the class from the diagram and the file gets removed from the solution.
• Not all models are used to generate code. For example, in VSTS the Logical Data Center and Virtual Deployment models don't generate code. They are useful  because I can use them to validate the Distributed System Model which does generate code.
• Someone asked about the implications of code coverage, profiling and test-driven development on a DSL-based process. Frankly, I don't know but it certainly got me thinking. The general consensus was that we're still in the bootstrap phase of making DSL-based development a reality and these are issues we'll have to deal with as we move forward.

OOPSLA Welcome Reception

I called it an early night yesterday (which explains why I'm blogging this today instead of last night) but I did go to the OOPSLA welcome reception. Ran into Martin again who pointed me in Gregor's direction. Gregor presented at TechEd last year and was one of the top five speakers in the architecture track so we chatted about doing it again at next year's TechEd. (I also got a chance to meet EIP's co-author Bobby Woolf). Then Martin introduced several other attendees:

• Joshua Kerievsky, author of Refactoring to Patterns
• Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• Gerard Meszaros, who runs XUnitPatterns.com
• Mark Striebeck, Director of SourceForge Engineering

We all stood around chatting for a good while. I learned quite a bit and now have to add a few books to my very long reading list. I hadn't realized that SourceForge is a product in addition to being an OSS code repository. Actually, their aren't exactly the same - for example SF.net is built on PHP/Perl/Python while SF Enterprise Edition is built on J2EE. As we all started to drift off, Mark mentioned that he appreciated talking with me since didn't always talk in "glowing terms" about MSFT. Hey, we do a lot right, but that means there's always areas we can improve on and I always err on the side of honesty and transparency.

OOPSLA Day 0

Day 0 is almost done. Like yesterday, it's been quiet, but the foot traffic by the booth is improving. I missed the afternoon of the DSL Tutorial tracking down a shipment of JOURNALs that we are handing out at the conference. Martin Fowler stopped by to say hi and we chatted a while about the Architecture Advisory Board. He missed the meeting a couple weeks ago because of a communication screwup (i.e. I didn't call him) but he's looking forward to working with us going forward. Some one ribbed him for sitting in the Microsoft booth, so he pulled out his PowerBook (or maybe it was an iBook). I told him that since he like UNIX so much, we should install Services for UNIX on his Windows laptop. :)

This is a very different crowd from TechEd - not better or worse, just different. Very heavy academic presence. I got a very interesting code visualization demo from an MIT grad student. Flipping thru the conference program, the vast majority of the speakers are from universities. The majority of the remaining speakers are from IBM and to a lesser extent Sun. There's a small Microsoft presence among the speakers - primarily related to Software Factories. It's interesting, however, that three of the six of the invited speakers this year are from Microsoft.

OOPSLA Day -1

When I blogged TechEd, I started on Day Zero, the day before TechEd officially opened. At TechEd, that day is used for preconfernce sessions as well as other meetings. At OOPSLA, there are two days of preconfernces - I arrived today but the conference doesn't officially open until Tuesday with Rick Rashid's keynote. I guess that makes today "-1". So far, it's very quiet around here. I've got booth duty until 5pm, but I doubt I'll spend much time with attendees. There's only about 15 attendees in the exhibit hall right now. All the booth staff are chit-chatting with each other or are working on their computers. I'm sitting with Ajay, a product manager from VSTS emailing, chatting and deailing with some last minute shipping issues. (My group has just had really bad luck sending stuff recently). Of course, I'm guessing most people are in their precon sessions. I stuck my head in Jack's session on Generative Software Development and it was full. Tomorrow is the DSL Tutorial that Keith blogged about. By then, I'm thinking things will be in full swing.

Two Down, One To Go

It's been quiet around here as the last three weeks of October are insane for me this year. Two weeks ago was Strategic Architect Forum as well as the second face-to-face meeting of the Microsoft Architecture Advisory Board this year (the first was reported in the February Architecture Center Update newsletter). I'll have much more to say on the MAAB later, but having SAF and MAAB the same week is tough - I worked seven days in a row including four 12+ hour days.

This past week, I was in leadership training with a bunch of teammates and p&p folks. Spent quite a bit of time “in the circle“ with Ed, Ward and Jim from p&p plus David, Chris and Javed from my team (note to self - lean on Javed to get a blog). The sessions were intense and I learned quite a bit. I agree with Norman (who was also in the training but not in my group) that we're very fortunate to work for a company willing to invest so much in it's employees. However, it was two more 12+ hour days and a total of six over nine days. That's now I've started re-reading Software for Your Head, which seems to share many of the same learnings from the leadership training course. Maybe we can start using SFYH in practice in my team - last time I read it I was part of a distributed team working more as a collections of lone wolves.

Next week, of course, is OOPSLA in Vancouver. I'm driving up Sunday morning and working the booth in the afternoon. I'll be there all week and in the MSFT booth off and on during the conference, so stop by and say hi. I hear you can get flu shots in Canada, so I'm worried traffic going across the border will stink. It'll be a long week, but at least I get next Friday off. 

More Architect Bloggers

Two new architect bloggers to note. Jim Clark is a business architect on the Architecture Strategy Team. Jim spends a lot of time with what he calls "Red River" - identification and definition of business architectures, ontologies and environments that promote trusted business solutions. His first post is about Familiarity and Trust. Steve Cook is a contributor to Software Factories and works for Keith. Steve is looking forward to OOPSLA. So am I.

Architect MVPs

In addition to event activities, we also take advantage of SAF to have side meetings with customers. Yesterday, I spent an hour discussing software factories and high-performance computing with Simon Cox from the University of Southampton. Simon is one of our inaugural group of Architect MVPs. We have fourteen architect MVPs across two categories: Visual Developer - Solutions Architect and Windows Server System - Infrastructure Architect. We'll be growing this group significantly over the rest of the fiscal year, but there are already some influential names in this group, including Roger Sessions, Paul Preiss (founder of IASA), Ingo Rammer and Clemens Vasters. Congrats to all the new Architect MVPs!

Good IASA Meeting

Last night's IASA meeting went very well. I always take it as a good sign when community get-togethers end because building security kicks you out 45 minutes after you were supposed to be done. About 25 people showed up and were treated to food, free materials and factories. Steven did a good job presenting Software Factories, and he was even nice enough to let me chime in on a regular basis with my $0.02. BTW, the next meeting is on Oct 27th (last Wed of the month) and I'm going to miss it because of OOPSLA. Watch the IASA website for more details.

One of the key questions asked was if MS was going to "break tradition" with factories and embrace open systems. I guess we still have a long way to go to change that perception, even though we standardized CLI & C# and continue to be a major driver of the ongoing web services standardization effort. Regardless of perception, I agreed - I think it's important to enable Software Factories to be embraced by the industry at large. The Architecture Strategy team has several members who are heavily involved in standards bodies, and they had similar feedback. Of course, we have nothing to embrace beyond the book so far, but we have hinted at tooling to come. As promised, I sent last nights feedback to Keith, Jack and the other folks involved and I hope we'll see that incorporated into their long term plans.

I asked the hard-core folks who stayed late last night what they thought was the best approach for MS to take for getting Software Factories embraced by the industry. Obviously, any tooling around Software Factories would be built on a set of specifications. We could standardize these specifications as we have for CLI, C# and web services. Alternatively, we could simply publish the specifications with an open and royalty-free license (similar to the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas). Given recent comments by Grady Booch and Simon Johnston (both from IBM) disparaging domain-specific languages and software factories, I'm not sure how well a standardization process around DSLs would proceed. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much industry buy-in there would be for specifications that weren't collaboratively developed. Leave your opinion, and I'll make sure it gets to Jack, Keith, et. al. just like the feedback from last night did.

Architect User Group Meeting Tonight

It's late notice, but tonight is the inaugural meeting of the Puget Sound chapter of the International Association of Software Architects. Steven Houglum, MS architect evangelist for the Pacific NW, is presenting on SOA and Software Factories. The meeting is on the MS campus from 6:30-8:30 and you can get all the details from the IASA site. As I wrote yesterday, I'm interested to see the general response to software factories, so I'm going to be there.

IASA is a relatively new organization with seven chapters in the US as well as one in Australia. It started as an architect user group in Austin - their first meeting was almost a year ago. The overarching IASA organization started about six months ago, according to the IASA weblog. I've spoken to the founder and director Paul Preiss on several occasions and hung out with the Twin Cities chapter president Alex Rupp at TechEd. I think they are doing a great job build a technology agnostic user group community and it's great to see our local field architects supporting it.

As I said, the first meeting is tonight and that's pretty late notice. If you're interested and can't make it tonight, there are two more meetings scheduled for the Puget Sound group in the next three months. Of course, the other chapters are on different schedules, so maybe you can find a meeting in a city near you. If there isn't a chapter near you, I'm sure IASA would be interested if you wanted to start one.

Sounds of Silence

I came back from the far east and got buried by email and meetings. Plus my stupid HP laptop is still stupid - now the both the built in wireless and the PCMCIA card slot are not working correctly so I can't get on wireless. Amazing how quickly the ability to get online from anywhere in my house has become routine to the point where if I can't get on wireless, I barely get online at all.

A couple of quick takes:

• Keith blogged about giving BillG the third copy of Software Factories that came off the presses. When he came to present Software Factories to my team, he gave me copy number four. He and Jack even signed it. Cool!
• Keith and Jack's Software Factories presentation was a huge hit with my team. Our architects want their own copies of the book now. Pat even stole borrowed my signed copy to read over the weekend. I can't wait to see the general response to this book.
• I got the scores back from TechEd Malaysia and Beijing. Metropolis was the top architecture session of TechEd Malaysia and Data in SOA was the top architecture session and in the top ten of all sessions at TechEd Beijing. Gurpreet's sessions also did very well. There are still a few worldwide TechEd's left, but I think it's safe to say that the new architecture track has been a big success. We're already in planning for next year, so look out for us to build on that success.
• I'm still pretty much at the "what good is this?" stage on WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration. I can possibly see using WS-Enum and/or WS-Xfer's Get action for retrieving reference data, though recent issues with RSS and bandwidth demonstrate the inefficiency of polling for changes. David Ing commented that WS-Xfer provides "semantic understanding" of actions. True, but at the cost of semantic understanding of the data. It's much easier to change the name of the action that to change the schema of the message, yet WS-Xfer and WS-Enum's operations are completely untyped. So I remain unconvinced of the value of these specifications.

Architecture Events

While I was in the far east last week, the Architecture and Design Events page of Architecture Center got updated. Thanks go to Lawrence, Richard and Mark - Architecture Center's own three amigos if you will. Looks like the Software Factories guys are going to very busy, most of the upcoming events feature some type of presentation on factories, models or domain specific languages.

What's cool about this list is that it features MS events like TechEd and PDC as well as non-MS events like OOPSLA, UML Conference and OOP. The only bad thing about this list is that I'd like it to be longer. Should there be more architecture-centric events or more architecture content at developer-centric events on this list?

Final Day of My Far East Trip

I said yesterday that the Metropolis session had gone very well. Got the score back - 7.71/9 speaker satisfaction and 7.83/9 content satisfaction. Not bad, esp. given that it was a translated session. Today, I presented Data in SOA, and I thought it well also. This time, I did it without the translator at the audience's request. We'll see how the scores come back. I thought it was encouraging that attendance at the architecture sessions steadily improved. Gurp's session yesterday afternoon had more people than my Metropolis session and today's session had more people still.

After the session, I spent some time answering questions. After Metropolis, there was one guy from China Mobile. This time, he was joined by two dozen other attendees. And again, Mr. China Mobile had some great questions that really made me think. He pointed out that often architecture is focused on the non-functional requirements of a system (perf, scale, reliability, etc) that are very technology platform dependent. As the platform evolves, the decisions made in implementing a system become obsolete, which makes it very hard to evolve a solution to take advantage of the improved platform. He's right. The reason he's right is that we don't a good mechanism to capture the design decisions made during the development of a system, just the outcome. Software Factories can really help out here.

After the presentation and Q&A with the attendees, several of the speakers and I were treated to a trip to the Great Wall of China. One of the other speakers was Stan Lippman, whom I had never met. As for the Wall, what can I say but wow. We climbed for about two hours - glad I put on my sneakers! We reached at least a local summit, where there is a quote from a Mao poem stating that you can't be a real man until you've climbed the Great Wall. Well, I guess that makes me a real man now. The wall is over 45 degrees in several places that we walked. I sure got a good workout today.

I'm exhausted, but I figure I can sleep on the 12 hours worth of plane ride I have tomorrow so I'm heading out (after a shower) to do a little shopping. I've had a great trip and met with some great people - both MSFT employees and customers alike - but I sure am looking forward to being home.

Leaving KL

I'm sitting in the Kuala Lumpur airport - my flight to Beijing leaves in about half an hour. I didn't get a chance to blog all day yesterday, so here's a quick recap:

• I've run into a bunch of people who I first met at TechEd Malaysia 2002. In particular, Adrian and Rathi who both wanted to see pictures of Patrick. The big bummer of only spending two days here is that I didn't get to do much more that the conference.
• After the sessions on Wednesday, I hung out with a bunch of the other speakers at dinner. Several of the RD's who spoke at TechEd US also came to our Architect Road Rally and had a great time. Always nice to be told you threw a great party.
• Thursday started  with Gurpreet's session on Architecture Vision & Direction. I didn't think this session did as well as the EA talk the day before. Part of that comes from the fact the EA talk set a high bar, but some of it comes from the fact that the V&D talk wasn't as polished. In contrast, I did much better with my Metropolis Thursday than the SOA Data talk on Wednesday. Maybe I just need one talk to get back in the groove - I usually think I do better in my second session.
• After our sessions, lunch, and hanging around in the cabana with some other attendees, Aaron (the local Architect Evangelist) drove Gurp and I around Putrajaya. Pat often points out when he presents Metropolis that you can't bulldoze Boston just because the roads aren't straight. However, you can build a new city about a half an hour away and move into it when it's finished. That's Putrajaya - the new administrative center of Malaysia.  It was stunning - huge and ultra modern. But it was also strange as it is completely underutilized, so far anyway. We also did a little shopping and I was able to find a few things for the family back home.
• Last night we had a regional architect dinner, where we got to hang out with a bunch of the local architects in the region. Lots of good discussion.

Next stop - China!

Another Team Blogger

Actually, I don't think he's “officially” part of the team 'til next week, but Josh Lee has already started a blog about his new job on the Architecture Strategy team. Josh is “The FinServ Guy”, and is a member of the IFX Forum Board of Directors. Nothing really meaty on his blog yet, just a Hello World post, but I hear great things about him.

Speaking of the Architecture Strategy team, I finally took 5 minutes to term serv into the machine that hosts DevHawk to update the theme. I keep mentioning the Architecture Strategy extended team OPML file, but I wanted to add a blogroll to the site theme. Now, I have a Team Blogroll on the left hand side of my website featuring all of my blogging teammates as well as all the blogging architect evangelists. Enjoy. 

More MSFT Architect Bloggers + a Standard Rant

We keep getting more and more field architects and architecture strategy team members blogging. Remember, I keep a list (I am becoming the Scoble of Microsoft Architecture). Anna Liu is a field architect evangelist who presented at TechEd Australia (but we didn't get a chance to hang out). Anna's also been thinking about software development as an engineering discipline.

In addition to Anna, two of my teammates are blogging: Chris Keyser and Dave Welsh. Chris is a solution architect who's doing some awesome next gen SOA work. He's been blogging about using WSE2 to manage Security Context Tokens. Chris, like John deVadoss (who has relapsed into silence), is very pragmatic so it's great to run radical ideas past him.

Earlier this year, our team "inherited" a group of awesome vertical architects - I've blogged about John Evdemon before who's from that group. Dave is also from that group. Like many of our vertical architects, Dave is heavily involved in standards bodies - in Dave's case it's UN/CEFACT. He's got an great article on how Standards Development Organizations traditionally work and another on how MSFT (and our specification partners) is improving on that process. He's shining a light on the dark corners of the standard process, which is a good thing since so many people act like standards are a silver bullet solution. I love Dave's description of the traditional standards process:

[L]aunch a committee, politically pick a chair, generate lots of hype and expectation on how this spec will solve world hunger, stack the new committee with people who may be able to contribute, host conference calls and arm wrestle the original idea down to some compromise that seems to make sense, then hope someone’s got a number of free weekends over to write up a draft of the new spec.

You want an example of the results of a traditional standards process? How about XSD? I think XSD is the ugliest widely-used spec around.  Don agrees, according to his comments from last years SellsCon:

Nothing illustrates [the cost of standardization] more than XML schema. XML schema is the quintessential example of what happens with a design by standards body specification. Rather than taking something that worked and something that was done and that there was experience with and effectively dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s you had two from every company off doing wanton innovation and invention without implementation experience. It was a train wreck in the making, especially when you consider the fact that you had people who vehemently disagreed about what they were building. Some people thought they were bringing object orientation to XML. Some people thought they were bringing database schema concepts to XML. Some people thought they were just, you know, reliving the SGML dream. So what do we get? We get a Frankenstein’s monster that is dumber than the dumbest person in the committee. No one person on that committee could have produced something this bad. It took an army of people to work hard day and night to build something that is not good. It’s not terrible – can we make it work? Yes. But it’s going to take a lot of work from a lot of plumbers and a lot of tool vendors to make XML schema palatable to the average developer.

A great example of the opposite approach is RELAX NG. It is widely believed at this point in time that RELAX NG is a better schema language for XML than XML schema. Why? Because two guys who were really smart said why don’t we go do this and let’s get it working and let’s build it while we do it and let’s iterate it and see what works and what doesn’t work. And then when we’re done we will take it to the rubber stamp – I’m sorry, Oasis – where they will carefully vet every decision and bless it and give it UN status.

I'm with Don and Tim: I want RelaxNG. More importantly, I want standards that are built like WS-* and RelaxNG.

NZ Is Done, Off to Australia

My presentations at TechEd New Zealand went well. At TechEd US, I was more comfortable doing the Data in SOA talk and it got a slightly higher eval score. Of course, that was the talk that I was expecting to do and that I had spent some time writing new content for. Metropolis was a last minute add since Pat couldn't go. At TechEd NZ, I was more comfortable doing the Metropolis talk. Pat spent significant time working on Data in SOA for TechEd Europe and I just picked up his updates en masse. It's a great talk, but I wasn't as comfortable as I had been doing my version of the talk.

After my presentations, I attended an architect dinner with local architects. I had some fascinating discussions with some of the attendees, saw a presentation on EDRA (i.e. the project formerly known as "Shadowfax") and participated in a great panel discussion.

Yesterday, we flew to Sydney, met up with my mom, and took the train to Canberra for TechEd Australia. The train was nice because Patrick could get up and run around as much as he wanted, plus we got a great look at the country side - we saw several kangaroos. Canberra is very cold - though the sun is out now - and walking to find a place for dinner last night was quite chilly. The cab driver who picked us up at the train station was a hoot. We asked her what had been here before the capital moved here and she replied "What should be here now, a sheep paddock". I wish I had gotten her name so she could give us a ride back when head back to Sydney. The hotel is underwhelming (the perils of late registration) but the event hall is pretty cool. I spent a morning with a Meta analyst this morning, lunch with the local field architect and my Metropolis talk is about two hours.

The Nerd, the Suit and the Fortune Teller

Arvindra and Clemens both blogged “The Nerd, the Suit and the Fortune Teller”, a hilarious piece of theater performed at TechEd Amsterdam a few weeks ago. Clemens plays the nerd, Rafal Lukawiecki the suit and Pat Helland the fortune teller. We've got the video up on the web, you can access it from Pat's site. Between this and Mr. CIO Guy, sounds like TechEd Amsterdam was a blast. Mental note: next year, make it to Europe for TechEd!

New Architect Bloggers

A couple new MSFT architect bloggers to note. Maarten, author of the recent Dealing with Concurrency article, details his issues with CRUD. David “Lottery” White has restarted his blog and writes about the practical architect. Bill O'Brein blogs about presenting on patterns at TechEd Europe. Both Simon and Kevin have both been experimenting custom MQ transport providers for WSE2 - Simon using MQ Series and Kevin using MSMQ. Tim Ewald is back in blog on the PluralSight site, blogging about the differences between XSD and OO inheritance. And my old teammate Marley explains the game of Spoons. Not sure what that has to do with architecture, but it appears my old team had a very good time in Atlanta.

.NET Rocks is Rocking

.NET Rocks has had a slew of architecture related guests recently. Rocky, Tim and now Clemens. Carl and Rory, keep up the good work!

Flightmares

All it takes is one bad trip to remind me why I took a job that only requires a handful of trips a year. Pat mentioned that this is the week of our big annual internal training event in Atlanta. We had a two day pre-training event for all our field architects. (which explains the lack of posts around here.) We need to keep them in the know about the content and programs we are working on back at corporate, plus these are great bunch of people so it's always nice to hang out with them. Too bad the travel has been such a nightmare.

My flights into and out of Atlanta were each several hours late. Getting an elevator in the hotel took forever - once over 15 minutes! The 70-story Westin was booked to capacity, and I guess everyone wanted an elevator at 8am in the morning. But given that "booked to capacity" is a desirable state for any hotel, why didn't they design for that eventuality? I mean, it's not exactly an edge case scenario. Then, I left the pre-training early to visit a customer in Minneapolis. The customer meeting went great, but we had a miscommunication on the meeting time and I missed my flight home. So now I'm hanging around the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport hoping to get home flying standby.

It was pointed out to me that I'm not supposed to be visiting customers anymore, and after this trip I'm inclined to agree. However, you can't solve real world problems if you don't get out and experience real world customers and their real world problems from time to time. Usually, I meet with customers who come for executive briefings on campus. This meeting in Minneapolis grew out of one of those on-campus briefings. And since I was on the road anyway, I didn't think it would be a big. Next time, I think I'll opt to attend via Live Meeting.

EASOT?

We just published a white paper about the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table. Basically, this is a table for categorizing architectural artifacts such as patterns. It owes a great deal to Zachman, but really builds out the concepts of roles and viewpoints. In addition to the white paper, you can get a PDF of the table itself.

What's ultra-cool about this table is that it's what the p&p group uses internally. The white paper maps every pattern MSFT has published into the table. You can also see the EASOT viewpoints in action in the Project Notebook section of Integration Patterns. When I saw a print of the table hanging on the wall in p&p's building, I knew I wanted to see it published online. Love it or hate it, it's real.

What do you think? Obviously, we're planning on building on EASOT going forward. Is this useful? Valuable? 

Pat Sings To Mr. CIO Guy

In addition to being a history buff and architecture expert, Pat likes to sing - typically parody songs of his own creation. He's written many, but we actually broke down and got a license for Don McLean's classic "American Pie". Pat performed his version - a speculative retrospective titled "Mr. CIO Guy" - at the end of his TechEd Europe architecture track general session. You can watch a streaming version on Channel 9. Lyrics are posted on my MSDN Blog. Major thanks to Breakfast of Champions for getting it encoded so fast and to Jeff for getting it posted so fast. 

On a more serious note, we are recording all of Pat's TechEd sessions for the Architecture Strategy Series. Watch this space for details.

TechEd Sessions Online

Streaming producer presenations from TechEd US have been posted. However, the streaming presenation site has the same lack-of-url-addressability issue that TechEd Breakout session list had. Is it so hard to just post a simple HTML file with a list of all the sessions in a track? <sigh>

Anyway, here are links to the top 5 sessions from this year's architecture track. For those who could not make it to TechEd (or were there, but missed these sessions) enjoy!

1. Realizing SOA by John deVadoss & Ron Jacobs
2. Data in SOA by Harry Pierson (i.e. yours truly)
3. Patterns in the Enterprise by Gregor Hohpe
4. Improving Application Perf & Scale by Chris Kinsman
5. Building Apps with P&P App Blocks by Wojtek Kozaczynski

UPDATE - The streaming site has been taken down, so none of the links work anymore. Sorry about that. We will be updating the Architecture Strategy Series at some point in the future with at least the Realizing SOA and Data in SOA talks.

Pat and John Are Blogging Again

I keep bugging Greg about better folder hierarchy support in NewsGator. While I have some news feeds directly under my news folder (Don Box, Dilbert, my dad) I categorize most of my feeds into subfolders. One subfolder is for MSFT architects - my teammates, Michael, Keith & Kevin among others. That folder is where I typically start reading, esp. when I'm a week behind.

After a long absence, both Pat and John are blogging again. Pat's been busy working on his new talks that he will be presenting at TechEd Amsterdam. We will be taping them for inclusion in the Architecture Strategy Series. He's got a surprise planned for the end of his Metropolis overview talk (GNLARC) that I'm in charge of getting up on the web as soon as possible after it happens...watch this space...

John has written two pieces - on SOA and smart clients. John's amped about the SCAG and he blogs about his smart client thoughts. I liked his observation that building browser-based apps "is all about service provider ease of delivery" while smart clients are "all about service consumer ease of use". Today, ease of delivery wins out over ease of use, but I wonder how long that will last.

However interesting John's views on smart clients are, I typically have long conversations with him about the finer points of SOA. A conversation that starts with "Got a sec?" typically turns into an extended discussion with crowded whiteboards. What I've realized recently is that John and I tend to approach a topic very differently. John is very pragmatic, so he tends to disagree with my more radical opinions (such as the endangered middle tier) which aren't really feasible in the short term. I, on the other hand, start from a desired state and work backwards, trying to figure out what short term investments will lead to the long-term ideas. I used to think John and I disagreed about the desirable granularity of services. What it turns out is that we agree about what we want, but he focused on the fact we can't feasibly build fine-grained services in the short term while I glossed over that fact and thought about what we needed to make fine-grained services feasible in the long term. Neither viewpoint is right or wrong, in fact they are very complementary. John keeps me grounded in reality while I push the limits of his event horizon. Among the recent topics of debate:

• How fine grained should services be?
• Should customers be thinking about building domain specific languages?
• How will the role of the ISV's and SI's evolve?
• How much of a typical enterprise should be outsourced?
• Is a service-oriented architecture more data-centric or process-centric?
• What would a requirements modeling language look like?
• What is the most important criteria for evaluating software systems for the enterprise?

Keep it up, John.

DevHawk on TheServerSide.net

TSS.net just published a new Tech Talk, this time with yours truly. Tech Talks are interviews with “.NET luminaries” (their name). Previous talks on TSS.net include Pat and Simon from my team as well as others such as Don Box and Scott Guthrie. Nice company to be in!

The interview is pretty broad reaching - we spend thirty minutes about architecture (with a lower case a), community, patterns, aspects, messaging, service oriented way plus job advice for Ted's 10 year old son.

International Man of Architecture

My pal Tom - who hosts DevHawk for me - recently set up a traffic analyzer so I can get a better idea about who's visiting this site. I found it interesting that just under 52% of the visits are coming from the US. Rounding out the top ten DevHawk visitor countries are UK, Canada, Zimbabwe, Australia, Germany, Sweden, China, Netherlands and France. I really dig that almost half my traffic is from outside the US. Plus, it serves as a good reminder that getting good content up on Architecture Center in English means we're still missing large chunk of the audience.

New Blogger from the Team-Formerly-Known-As-NEAT

It's been a while - and a team name change - but another one of my teammates has made the leap into the blogosphere. John Evdemon is a member of our vertical industry architecture team focusing on near and long term web service solutions as well as regulatory compliance solutions. Furthermore, he's a co-chair of the OASIS BPEL TC. He blogged a presentation on BPEL he did at SD West. Subscribed and added to my list of Architecture Strategy and Evangelist Blogs

Actually, this isn't John's first foray into blogging - he's got a personal blog  <Well-Formed/>. There, he describes himself as "an XML hacker and standards geek for a large software vendor." Always nice to have a standards geek around...Plus, he's a big Hitchcock (his new blog is named "Vertigo"). Do I feel a Hitch movie marathon coming on?

Tech·Ed 2005 Already?

I updated my theme to reflect the brand-spanking-new Tech·Ed 2005 logo, which looks suspiciously like the now-obsolete Tech·Ed 2004 logo with different text. Luckily, there are palm trees in Orlando and San Diego.

Kidding aside, I will be at Tech·Ed next year, again deeply involved in the Architecture Track.

Tech·Ed Wrap-Up

It's been days, but I'm finally getting around to posting my Tech·Ed wrap-up. I had a great time as a speaker, track owner and attendee. My Data in SOA talk ended up with an 8.0 score and our track overall scored a 7.5. Not bad for our first time out!

My boss's immediate reaction was to raise the bar for Tech·Ed 2005, which is fine by me as I have got some specific plans for an even better Architecture track next year. I learned a lot swimming in the deep end of the pool, such as:

• We could have been much better integrated with the other tracks, esp. the Dev track. Being involved in the planning from the start (Tech·Ed 05 content planning starts in earnest in the fall) should help out a bunch here, as will knowing the other track owners from this year's event.
• We could have managed our track better. But hey, it was my first time! Things like speaker meetings, more content reviews and ensuring speakers go to training all help out here. Also, I'd like a little less churn on the management side next year. I took over co-track ownership duties when one of my teammates moved onto another team.
• I mentioned that several people commented that there should be "more code" in the track. Techie types like sessions that are heavy on the hands-on practical and code is about as hands-on practical as it gets. However, while I am on record as being an architect with a lower case "a", I don't think architects are just senior developers. It's a different skill - one that I want to see broad knowledge of, but still different. Architects work primarily in models, patterns and process, not code. So for the Architecture track next year, I want to see "more models, patterns and process", not "more code". Watch for a focus on VS2005 Team System for Architects, Whitehorse and MSF.

What do you think should be in next year's Architecture Track?

Tech·Ed Day 4

My session yesterday went very well. Current score is 7.95 which makes it the second highest session from the track so far - John's Realizing SOA session currently scores an 8.17 and there are several other sessions in the high 7's. It's very interesting to watch the scores change. For example, the score for the Metropolis Discussion has gone from 6.8 to 7.08 since yesterday.

After the session, I had a full cabaña session that felt like it could have gone on for hours if I hadn't cut it short in order to make it to SeaWorld for the attendee party. The party was fun. I spent the early part of the evening hanging out with the overall owner of this year's Tech·Ed, next year's Tech·Ed, the content owner for Tech·Ed and several of the other track owners. Then, a la PDC, I hung out with Peter and started conversations with whoever walked by. Not as many spontaneous conversations as PDC since the audience at Tech·Ed is only half developers, but still very interesting. Also, having the event in San Diego drew lots of families. Attendees could buy tickets to bring their family members to the SeaWorld party, and it looked like many people took advantage of that opportunity. (Something to keep in mind for next year.)

It's amazing how much work goes into this event. Planning for Tech·Ed 2005 (Orlando, FL) & 2006 (Boston, MA) is well underway and they are just getting started on Tech·Ed 2007. Thankfully, content planning hasn't started yet. There's a big internal MSFT conference in July and many of the Tech·Ed track content owners also own content for the internal conference, so I think content planning won't start until at least August or September. I was a late addition to the Tech·Ed 2004 virtual team - I'm looking forward to being involved much earlier with next year's Tech·Ed. I learned a ton this year both by thrown-in-the-deep-end experience as well as observing my fellow track owners who have done this many times. I'm very happy with this year's track, but I know next year will be even better for the Architecture Track!

Today should be a easy day hanging out in the cabaña, avoiding mail and having low-key conversations with customers. I fly out tonight - I get in late, but I just found out I'm got upgraded to first class so at least I'll be comfy. The big question is whether I will watch a movie or start hacking around with the May VS2005 preview. Given my exhaustion level, I'm guessing I'll go for a movie, but I'm setting up a new VPC for VS2005 just in case.

TechEd Days 2 & 3

After the first two days left me in a daze, I've been taking it as easy as I can. Most of my time during the day has been spent in the cabaña where the couches are very comfy. Of course, time in the cabaña isn't exactly "taking it easy" - we may have less traffic than the Dev and Office cabañas on either side, but there are still lots of attendees to sit down and chat about architecture with. I've had several fascinating discussions about SOAP-enabling building control systems (HVAC, Access control, lighting, etc) with the chair of the Open Building Information Exchange (oBIX) OASIS Technical Committee.

Tuesday night was laid back - dinner @ the hotel pub and a relatively early night. Last night I went to the Office party @ the Hard Rock Cafe. There were a bunch of guys who had come to the Road Rally on Sunday so we hung out for quite a while drinking and talking architecture. Tonight is the big attendee party @ Sea World. I assume it will be much like the attendee party @ PDC - mostly drinking beer and talking w/ other attendees.

My final presentation is in 45 minutes as I type this - Data in Service Oriented Architecture. So far, my scores for the sessions I did Monday are pretty good. The Metropolis overview scored ~7.6 out of 9 and the Metropolis Discussion a ~6.8. These keep changing since the eval systems stay open until the end of the conference. Given the craziness with the last-minute speaker change, I'm OK with those scores. They give us access to all the anonymous raw scores and comments which is great for improving my performance in later sessions. For example, apparently I spoke too fast on Monday (hey, I was nervous!) so I'll be specifically working on that today.

Of course, you can't keep everyone happy all the time. A few members commented that they didn't like the Metropolis analogy. Apparently, someone who didn't like the Metropolis Overview also showed up for the Metropolis Discussion, still didn't like it and commented we should "get off" the analogy. Why you would show up for the discussion if you didn't like the overview? I've also seen several comments that the Architecture track has no code. Not sure how to address that since the lack of code is by design! Of course, such growing pains are to be expected for our first time at TechEd.

Apparently, Nagging Works

My father, who I've written about and who has commented here several times, finally started his own blog called Hal 9000 . He's using Google's new service, which I guess means there is no RSS feed. I can't find a link to any syndication feed on the site. Of course, since it took him a week to email me the address, maybe he's looking to duck my criticism? :)

Seriously, my Dad has been a *HUGE* influence on my career (though he always thought I switched jobs too often - I say I was just looking for the right place which I finally found @ MSFT). He's been around UNIX and C since the start. From Dad's first post:

I've been around computing for a long time! My first job after getting my doctorate was at Bell Labs. In the Spring 1971 I installed my first Unix system - with Ken Thompson help. Because my thesis delt with compiler theory I was interested in C from the beginning - static routines was my suggestion.

Over the years I've worked on air traffice controls systems, case and office tools, handwriting recognition algorithms, to name a few. I am one of the authors of the Systems Engineering CMM.

Currently, I teach OO Programming, and OO Analysis & Design at Johns Hopkins University (part-time engineering school)

My current interests include Security & Enterprise Architectures for a large gov't agency; designing Service Orient Architectures; and software development tools.

Just yesterday, I ran into a TechEd attendee who worked at Bell Labs back in the day who recognized my last name. A friend of mine who's an architect evangelist for MSFT also recognized my name from his days at Bell Labs. Sure is a small world.

Dad has also commented on Clemens lightweight transactions post and discussed modeling. I can't wait to see his reaction to Visual Studio 2005 Architect Edition's modeling tools.

I added a link to Hal 9000 in my navigation links section. At this rate, will I need a family blog roll?

TechEd Days 0 & 1

I wasn't kidding about the calm before TechEd - I've been slammed for the last 36 hours - hence the lack of posts. Between 11,000+ attendees, our Road Rally and having to fill in for Pat, I'm only just now getting a chance to blog, 36 hours after TechEd started.

I had some free time during the day Sunday, but there wasn't anything going on yet, so there wasn't much to post. Then, Sunday night, we had our Architect Road Rally, which I think was a success. There were some issues - registration was a real problem in the beginning. The first three buses brought 50 people each, most of whom we had to register on site so it created a reg backlog. Even though we made some changes on site - primarily not printing event-specific badges for on-site registered attendees - I realize that registration really stunk for about 30-45 minutes after the event started. I think that, once we got past that issue, most people had a good time. Our event staff found a great venue and hired a great company to provide entertainment in the form of RC racing. John introduced me to the Rallisport Challenge 2 people, so we had Xboxes featuring RSC2. The raffles were very popular as were the event shirts - I saw around a dozen people wearing the event shirts today. So, other than the reg issues, I'd say the event worked out as well as I had hoped. TechEd 2004 is our team's first large scale event to be formally involved in - our events typically run 250 attendees total. To compare, we drew almost 300 for the Road Rally. Marketing an event like this is really tough. The venue could support 300-400 people,  but there are 11,000+ TechEd attendees. Even if we only invited architects, there are still somewhere around 1500 attendees who consider themselves architects @ TechEd this year. In the end, while we could have done much better on registration, I really enjoyed the party and think most attendees did too. We certainly had a large number of people on the last couple of busses back to the convention center.

Today started with SteveB's keynote and the announcements of WSE2 availability, the Information Bridge Framework, and the VS Team System. Becky demoed WSE2 + IBF and Prashant demoed VS Team System. The website was live before the keynote started, a fact I pointed out to Peter who blogged it as Steve was announcing it. Lots of people have been waiting for WSE2 RTM, but I'm really excited to see the response to Team System. I'm working with p&p on some community efforts that will plug into the Architect edition of Team System - watch for that in the coming months.

After the keynote, I delivered ARC300 and 302 - Pat's sessions. They both went well, though I was pretty nervous during the ARC300 - the Metropolis Overview. Funny, since I've delivered that session many times before. Of course, I hadn't ever delivered it to this large an audience (300 or so - standing room only) or on tape. ARC 302 wasn't well attended, but those who showed got a preview of Pat's drilldown on the parallels between the evolution of buildings and applications as well as a good half hour discussion about the metaphor. Maybe since I didn't have high hopes for that session, I was less nervous. Once Pat finished those new sessions, we'll tape him presenting them and get them up on the Architecture Strategy Series site as soon as we can. 

After the day finished, I ran around getting some track-owner stuff done for tomorrow and then had a HUGE margarita with my team. Now, I need sleep very badly! :)

The Calm Before The TechEd

Sorry it's been so quiet around here. And I just had a meeting with a few days ago with Sara Williams where we talked, among many other things, about the need to blog regularly...

I've been heads down on final TechEd prep. I'm fairly certain that I'm the only track owner who is also presenting. I know I'm the only track owner who is also doing a track general session. If you keep a close eye on the list of breakouts, you'll notice that I'm not only presenting ARC 402 (Data in SOA) but I'm now also presenting ARC 300 (Metropolis). Unfortunately, Pat had to cancel his trip to TechEd at the last minute for personal reasons. So, in addition to all the normal last-minute billion details that a track owner has to deal with (most of which would have slipped thru the cracks with out the help of my trusty cabana cohorts Ed and Richard - thanks guys!), I'm also putting the finishing touches on my own session and having to prepare to do Pat's. I've presented Metropolis many times before, most recently last week at the P&P Summit, so presenting ARC 300 isn't a huge deal. However, we did have to cancel ARC 303 and are still figuring out if we can cover ARC 302. I'm bummed about that, but we're going to try and get that material recorded at TechEd Europe next month for inclusion in the Architecture Strategy Series.

Even without ARC 302 & 303, we still have a great track. One thing we really tried to do is cover all categories of architecture. Most of our track covers application / solution architecture, but we also have several sessions on infrastructure architecture. I'm really looking forward to ARC 404 - Managing SOA Using Existing Platforms. We had a bit of a crisis on this session a few weeks ago, but we took care of it and the session looks great. I'm guessing lots of people will be interested in "how Microsoft is internally managing Services using current Microsoft technologies". ARC 304 (Bridging the Gap) and ARC 403 (Defense in Depth) also cover infrastructure architecture and should be really good. We're also have a session on Business Architecture. ARC 301 (Service Oriented Business Architecture). It's really interesting to think about how SOA is going to affect the business as well as the application architecture.

See you in San Diego!

Update - for ARC 302, we're going to have a Metropolis Discussion where we can talk about the Metropolis overview as well as drill down on how applications learn and how data interoperates (i.e. the combined contents of the original ARC 302 & 303 talks). I'll be moderating and several members of my team will be on hand, but we're hoping to listen as much as if not more than we talk.

Road Rally Reminder

TechEd is almost upon us - just over one week to go. We had our last track owner meeting yesterday. I'm chasing down speakers for slides (I actually have some already!) and figuring out what seems like a million final details for our track cabana. In addition to the great sessions, we've got some cool stuff happening at TechEd this year. Some I can't quite talk about yet (watch this space) but I did want to remind all TechEd attendees about the Architect Road Rally happening Sunday night, after the precons. Space is limited and subject to first come, first served registration, so register right away!

Architect Road Rally @ TechEd

Among my other duties, I am co-ower of the architecture track at this year's TechEd. We've got a great track lined up, including two new sessions from Pat Helland in his Metropolis series. You can see an earlier version of the original Metropolis session as part of the Architecture Strategy Series or read an article about Metropolis in the latest JOURNAL. I'm presenting a session on information architecture (guess I gotta get the slides done soon!). Plus there are 15 other great sessions to see on architecture. We're also running two precon's on architecture : One on patterns and practices (run by Keith Pleas, my recent partner-in-crime on .NET Rocks) and one on identity management.

After the precons on Sunday night, we're having a party - the Architect Road Rally @ the San Diego Auto Museum. Party goers get a close up look at the history of Porshe, race RC cars and play the new Rallisport Challenge 2 on Xbox. We're also giving away some RC cars as well as copies of RSC2. Plus, food & beer all evening (i.e. this is not an hor'dourves party). So please register and come have a good time.

Finally, we're also planning on running focus groups @ TechEd - your chance to help us help you better with architecture. Also, people chosen to participate in the focus groups get something Cool. Register for the focus groups when you register for the road rally.

See you in San Diego!

Update - this post actually hasn't been updated, I just deleted the original and crossposted from my main blog.

It's all a Platform

I used to say that everything we build should be a platform except for games. What's interesting is that games are becoming platforms in their own right. Dungeon Siege has the freely downloadable Siege Editor which allows you to "rework nearly every aspect of the gaming world, making Dungeon Siege not only a game, but also a platform for those who wish to create their own spells, dungeons, and even entire worlds." There are several projects that do just that. And Dungeon Siege II is coming later this year, which looks amazing (all trailer graphics were rendered with the game engine). If RTS is more your speed, Relic - developers of Impossible Creatures - has their developer network which provides both a companion tool for enhancing Impossible Creatures as well as the Impossible Creatures SDK "which includes source code from the IC engine that can be used to create Total Conversion Mods for IC" (Relic Developer Network requires registration). Of course, there's also the Allegiance source code which was released a few months ago.

I guess the new viewpoint is that everything we build should be a platform, including games.

MVP Summit

I know a bunch of people are on campus today for the MVP summit. I'm going to try and hang out as much as I can, but you can also come see me. I'm in Building 22 (close to 40/41 and 42/43/44 where a lot of the developer division is). Send me email, call me at (425)705-6045 or just stop by my office 22/2061.

Looking for SPSynd Volunteers

I had eight people waiting to be admitted to the SharePoint Syndication GDN Workspace. Sorry for the delay folks - my workspace was maxed out on users and I had to get upgraded by GDN. Anyway, I've been given more membership slots, so the people who've been waiting - some since January - are now in.

There has been a lot of interest in this project and others like it. Jonathan Malek has his SpsRssGen project. Sig Weber has an RSS Generator for SPS. All in all, there is quite a bit of interest in this developing for SharePoint in general and creating syndication feeds in particular. Too bad I can't get more involved. With my new job, I just don't have the time to work on this project anymore. :(

Since I can't keep the project up, I'm wondering if someone else would like to take up the reins. I posted all the code to the workspace, but so far there's been little traffic other than people wanting to join. I was hoping for more participation, but then I haven't done anything to foster that so I really can't complain. So let me ask explicitly: If you're interested in being an admin on this project, please send me email. Once I get an admin (or two) and a core group of interested developers, I'll start hosting chats / email lists / live meetings / conference calls / smoke signals / whatever to discuss the project direction. Personally, my #1 feature is an admin interface for creating the syndication feeds integrated directly into the existing SharePoint admin interface. Not sure how doable that is, but let's find out. After that, I'm open to suggestions as to project direction.

Learning in the Hell of Content Repurposing

I spent yesterday in content repurposing hell. As part of my community role, I'm pushing for making as much content available in as many different channels as possible. However, right now, repurposing content for the different channels is handled with an expensive and time consuming manual process. Want a new publishing channel, we need a new manual processes to repurpose the content for it.

Of course, one of the reasons for this is that the data formats used by these programs are proprietary. Even in places where there is a standard, the files don't all follow it exactly. For example, I'm having issues converting a bunch of EPS files to JPG. According to Ghostscript, the files have several structuring errors which is making it difficult to open in other programs. Plus, much of this content was authored on a Mac, so trying to bring things like fonts over to PC is a major pain. It doesn't look like any of the XML or web services standardization work has crossed over into content production or graphic design.

However, there is a more fundamental reason that all these processes are manual - they weren't designed any other way! Automatic process doesn't happen by accident, it needs to be explicitly designed. So while having open data formats would make it easier to go in after the fact, it's no substitute for designing the process from the start. 

Going forward, I'm going to explicitly design a multi-channel publishing process for my different content types. The analogy to enterprise software is obvious - explicitly design your process for automation and extensibility. It won't happen any other way.

Strategy Series on Longhorn Dev Center

Chris Sells is featuring the Architecture Strategy Series as the headline on the Longhorn Dev Center. Thanks Chris!

New .NET Architecture Center

Steve and Keith beat me too it (I was in a meeting), but let me blog the news anyway: We've relaunched the MSDN .NET Architecture Center. In addition to the much-improved look and feel, it improves our ability to get new content on the site. For example, we just posted the February edition of Architecture Update featuing an article on smart clients by David Hill and a new community article by yours truly (plus a new yet still horrific picture). We also have two webcasts this week (actually, we have webcasts every week).

Let me know what you think of the new design plus what other content you'd like to see up there.

BTW, I'm aware that there is no RSS feed for the new Architecture Center yet. We're working on that...

TechEd Architecture Track

For those who read my site in a news reader, I added a TechEd 2004 flair to my site. The TechEd site recently posted the sessions names for the Architecture Track as well as the abstract for the Architecture PreConference Session. Get more info @ the TechEd home page.

Allegiance Source

Again, I'm late to the story but I think it's ultra-cool that MS Research released the source code to Allegiance . At 511 MB, it's almost thirty times bigger than Rotor + Gyro, which is a significant code release in itself, though honestly, only about 5% of the Allegiance archive is code, the 95% is in the "Artwork" subdirectory. That still leaves about 25MB of compressed code.

I'd love to see a port to MC++, a la Quake II.NET. Is anyone working on it?

.NEAT and AE Bloggers

At least one person was interested in an OPML of MSFT .NEAT and AE bloggers. So I hacked them out of my full blog roll and posted it on my site. I will be keeping it up to date, so check back every once in a while. I added a link to it in my nav bar so it is always available.

I love dasBlog. I was able to make one small change to the web.config file and now the OPML file is addressable while still being easily managed via dasBlog's blogroll editor. Sweet.

New MSFT Architect Blogger

Michael Platt, Field Architect in the UK, has started a blog. I know Mike and so I'm looking forward to reading his thoughts on the topics he lists in his first post. Subscribed.

Project Niobe

My teammate Simon has posted details of his managed SDK for Outlook codenamed Niobe. He's also created a GDN workspace for it. Coolness.

TheServerSide .NET

The Middleware Company has launched TheServerSide .NET, a community for enterprise .NET development. Of course, it's a complement to their existing enterprise Java site simply called TheServerSide. Generally, the reaction on TheServerSide to the new .NET site is positive – only one negative comment as I blog this.

Various teams at Microsoft are contributing content. There’s a smart client case study from a project my by team. Patterns and Practices have a public book review. And there are tech talks from Don Box and Scott Guthrie. Look for more in the future.

Other great content on the site includes an article on unit testing, a tech talk from a Borland engineer and an article on autonomous services.

Major congrats to Floyd Marinescu (GM of Server Side Communities) and Ted Neward (Editor in Chief of TSS.NET). Looks like it’s going to be a great site - though the sign up process seems to have a few bugs in it this morning.

Architects @ TechEd

My team owns the architect track for TechEd 2004. We're hoping to build on the very successful Architecture Symposium from PDC. As part of that effort, I own that community efforts for the architect track. I'm working on the plan now. Obviously, we'll have "the usual" events: Ask the Experts, Birds of a Feather, Speaker Lounge, Attendee Party, etc. Any other suggestions? Please email me or leave a comment. 

Focusing on the Now

Michael Earls is pleading with MS bloggers to focus on released bits instead of all the cool future stuff we previewed @ PDC. He is especially frustrated with my response to Scoble's post about how syndication will look in the Longhorn timeframe. Mike, I can't speak for Scoble or any of the other MS bloggers, but I'm sorry that it's been hard to keep up. You're a member of my target audience, so it's good to know where we are missing the mark.

In my post, I said that Scoble shouldn't focus on how syndication evolves in the Longhorn timeframe, rather how it evolves in the face of Service Oriented Architecture. And as watered down and nebulous as the term SOA is, when I use it I'm not implying that you have to wait for Longhorn. Indigo will be a great platform for services, but that doesn't mean you can't do them today. In fact, the advice coming out of my group is to start doing services right away. Check out the first two sessions from the PDC Architecture Symposium (here and here). In 110 slides there are only about three slides that mention Longhorn, Indigo or Yukon. The rest of the slides are focused on "Practical Advice for Building Your Services Now" (PPT deck from first session, slide 5). Stuff that you gotta worry about regardless of the infrastructure you're building on. Tentative Operations. Avoiding Ambiguity in Messages. Stability of Data and MetaData. Service Masters and Service Agents. Mike, when you get a chance, please check out those sessions from the PDC Architecture Symposium and then let me know if they can help you right now.

It's too bad the chapter on SOA that's posted on MSDN is from a book on Longhorn. That implies you can't do one without the other. Truth is, you can build traditional tightly coupled apps with Longhorn and, more importantly, you can build services without Longhorn.

What's weird is that I'm actually not dogfooding anything right now. Oh, I have a VPC with the PDC Longhorn bits and another with Yukon and Whidbey installed, but I haven't spent much time with them recently. I guess I didn't make it clear in my recent post on SQL Service Broker that I can't wait for it because I'm not actually using it yet. The only beta software I'm running on my host machine is Firebird and Thunderbird. I have two primary development VPC's - XP and WS03 - and the only beta stuff running in either is WSE 2. Call me a slacker, but Whidbey/Yukon/Longhorn aren't far enough along yet for my current projects.

The Architect's Journal

Clemens blogged the Microsoft EMEA Architect's Journal a couple weeks ago. In addition to his article on dasBlog, issue 1 contains articles on SOA, architecture design, business process, meta-data driven design and rule-based application development. You can download the entire issue as a PDF. Major props to Arvindra Sehmi, editor of the Architect's Journal. When I first took this job, Enrico Sabbadin suggested that MSDN Magazine should have a regular architecture focused article. I think we will all agree that Arvindra's journal dedicated to the topic is an even better idea.

Going forward, my group will be working Arvindra's group to help publish the journal. It's interesting to note that none of the six articles in issue 1 are written by Microsoft architects. While I hope to see some articles written by Microsoft architects, the plan of action is to primarily feature architects from our partners, our customers and from the community. Anyone interested?