Two new architect bloggers to report. Javed Sikander is an architect on the Architecture Strategy Team focusing on RFID. He links to a pair of articles about Microsoft and RFID plus provides his thoughts on why RFID is a big deal. David Solivan is an architect advisor and an ex-teammate from my old .NET Adoption Team days. So far, David appears to be blogging at conferences. He started in July at MGB and then went dark for a few months. He picked back up at SAF. I hear he’s at a conference this week, so maybe we’ll see some more from him.

That brings the total number of bloggers from my team to 14. That’s over half of the team and I know at least two more coming down the pipe.

Roger Sessions, noted architectural guru, author and Microsoft Architect MVP, has posted his latest newsletter on the WS-* family of specs. In typical Roger fashion, he decides to give them his own name – WS-SCRAM with SCRAM standing for “Secure, Coordinated, Reliable Async Messages”. (I forget where, but I once heard Roger refer to “three-phase transactions” instead of the relatively standard “two-phase commit transactions”.) Roger claims MS et. al. are pushing WS-STAR where “STAR” is an acronym standing for “Secure, Transacted, Async, Reliable”. Personally, I’ve never seen it written out like a an acronym and I always thought the * in WS-* was used as a wildcard, but it is true that we are focused more on transactions than coordination. On the Longhorn DevCenter, Indigo is described as providing “secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability.”

This is actually the second time Roger’s taken on transactions in a web services architecture. His last newsletter on the topic had a much more detailed but harder to follow example. He points out that there are two related specs in this space – WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity but that he thinks only WS-BA is going to work in the long run. WS-AT requires holding locks open in the DB, which is highly unlikely between services in different trust boundaries communicating with async messaging. Am I really going to lock the records in my database while I wait for a service that I don’t trust to figure out if it is able to commit or abort? I don’t think so. Pat’s wrote a great scenario showing how unrealistic the concept of long-running transactions really are.

However, at the end of the newsletter, Roger takes Indigo to task for implementing WS-AT and not WS-BA and I don’t agree with him. While I think WS-AT shouldn’t be used in web services architectures, Indigo is also responsible for moving existing technologies like COM+ forward. Leaving out WS-AT isn’t really an option in those scenarios. As for not implementing WS-BA, I’ve got to wonder just how valuable is WS-BA? While WS-BA avoids the DB locking issue of WS-AT, it still doesn’t deal with the delegation of control. WS-BA still leaves me beholden to the decision of some outside coordinator. This seems to violate two of Don’stenets of service orientation: “Boundaries are Explicit” and “Services are Autonomous”.

Gareth Jones is another blogger from the VS modeling team. He’s got some great posts on using OneNote as a shared whiteboard and the use of color-coding in modeling. Given the fact that a popular use of modelling today is for sketching, it’s interesting to read about how the team is looking at bringing those idioms forward while also making the models precice enough to be used as development artifacts.

BTW, no problem on the image “borrowing” Gareth. 😄

We announced it last week, but the DSL Tools home page just went live today. The big thing is the Microsoft Tools for Domain Specific Languages Technology Preview. There’s also a walkthru of the tool, a newsgroup and Jochen’s blog. We also published the third article in the Software Factories overview series.

The DSL Tools is the first in a collection of “workshop” projects that relate to Team System. These projects will be run as transparently as is feasible, so watch that site to be pretty dynamic as we post things like specs and lots of interim builds. Scoble has talked in the past of transparent projects, this I think will be a much more transparent project than we’ve done in the past.

(BTW, if you want to try out the DSL Tools, you need VS2005 Beta 1 as well as the VSIP SDK 2005 Beta 1)

Some other ‘softies blogging OOPSLA:

• Keith Short talks about the DSL Tutorial and apologizes for our keynote demo.
• Steve Cook talks about the MDA panel and says the keynote demo “wasn’t such a great idea”
• Stuart Kent describes the DSL Toolkit and calls the keynote demo a “commercial break”
• Michael Lehman briefly describes his work building a software factory for the DSL Tutorial and blogs Jack’s GPCE keynote presentation on Software Factories

Finally, Brant Carter took me to task for pointing out that Alan Kay ended his Turing Lecture with a product demo. Brant makes good points and I agree with all him. I think all the ‘softies blogging OOPSLA have acknowledged how poorly this went and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that somehow we were vindicated by Alan’s demoing stuff in his lecture. I plan on giving Squeak a deep look when I get some free time – I have an 18 month old son so Alan’s lecture on teaching computer science resonated with me.