FYI, I haven’t been accessing my DevHawk email address for a while. Basically, I never got back in the rhythm of checking that address after the site came back up in early May. Excuses abound – I was way to busy with TechEd, work, family, I get more than enough email at my work address, blah blah blah. Anyway, I’ve finally got around to checking that email. Besides the ton of spam, there was also a bunch of real email from people asking questions. If you sent me email in the past two months, sorry I’ve ignored you. I’ll stop ignoring and respond shortly! 😄

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.

Sure has been quiet around here. Standard end of the fiscal year craziness. Plus, I had some dogfood issue w/ XP SP2 RC1, Office 2003 SP1 beta and NewsGator. Upgrading to XP SP2 RC2 seems to have solved the problem. Regardless of the cause, I’m way behind reading which in turn leaves me way behind writing.

I’ve blogged about Software Factories before, but from under the mountain of unread blogs I see Keith blogged about how VSTS will support software factories. He posted an excerpt from an article he’s working on.

A software factory is a product line that configures extensible development tools like Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) with packaged content and guidance, carefully designed for building specific kinds of applications. A software factory contains three key ideas: a software factory schema, a software factory template and an extensible development environment.

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.

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.