My old boss’s boss seems like he was in a downer mood yesterday. First, he blogged about the “Myth of Reuse in SOA“, then the “Achilles Heel of SOA“. Actually, truth be told, I agree with him on both counts.

I slam the door on the reuse argument every time it comes up in my new job. Actually, I slam the door on what I call “Naive Reuse”. When John talks factoring for agility, he’s talking about a form of reuse – similar to how use “reuse” code when you refactor. What does it mean to refactor service? How about refactoring your enterprise?

As for the Achilles Heel “data problem”, I think that’s an artifact of the prevailing stateless request/response mindset most people have about services that I touched on yesterday. I think Pat Helland described a very good approach for dealing with data in an SOA, but I haven’t seen it implemented broadly. Rest assured, many of the concepts Pat described are at the forefront of my thinking as my new project takes shape.

Speaking of Sam, he talks today about one-week iterations and having a “shippable” version of the code every week. Reminds me of Jim McCarthy’s classic book “Dynamics of Software Development”. One of the many rules from that book is “Get to a Known State and Stay There” – I’m sure that sounds familiar to Sam. Other classic rules include “Don’t Flip the Bozo Bit” and “When You Slip, Don’t Fall”.

I just noticed MS Press is putting Dynamics of Software Development back in print with a new cover and a DVD of the the original “21 Rules” presentation that begat the book. It’s a great book – I highly recommend it as well as his other book “Software For Your Head“. Also, Jim and his wife Michelle are doing a podcast called The McCarthy Show. Subscribed.

Last fall, I was presenting to a group of architects about SOA. The previous speaker – Rich Turner – was running way late. As I walked in, he was doing a WCF demo and wanted to show how easy it was to change transport by changing the config file. He wanted to change it to run over named pipes, but he couldn’t remember the name of the binding. He asked me, and I confessed that I didn’t know either. So he gave up on demoing named pipes, finished his presentation and went on his way.

After he left, I confessed to the assembled architects that I knew *nothing* about WCF beyond the high-level concepts. I hadn’t spent any time working with it at all. In fact, the only reason I had it installed was because it got installed automatically when you installed WPF which I was working with at the time. My reasoning, as I explained to them, was that WCF is a low-level abstraction. That is to say, WCF is nearer the bottom of the .NET Abstraction Pile than the top. I figured I’d let the people building the next generation of service-oriented infrastructure to worry about WCF.

Fast forward eight months, and my new job is about building service-oriented infrastructure. You know, the type that builds on WCF. Maybe it’s karma, but I’m having to learn a lot about WCF right quick.

So as I get back into the blogging saddle, expect to see a bunch of stuff about WCF.

BTW, Major thanks to Sam Gentile, who’s taken the time on email and the phone (on his vacation no less) to help talk some things thru. He suggested the WCF Hands On book, which is pretty good.