We’ve updated the Architecture Center blog page. We added John Evdemon (who I already blogged), Stuart Kent and Alan Cameron Wills. Stuart and Alan work on the Enterprise Frameworks and Tools team which is producing the VS2005 modeling tools formerly known as Whitehorse. They are mostly blogging about domain-specific languages (DSL), software product lines, code generation from models and a variety of other Software Factories related ideas. They also touch on the relationship of the DSL/Factories approach to the UML/MDA approach. Stuart has a great response to a post by Grady Booch where Grady disparages the DSL approach stating that he “always found the DSL play to be one of classic over-engineering”. Given the recent “Unwanted Modeling Language” backlash against UML 2, I’m not sure how fair it is for Grady to be calling any modeling approach over-engineered.

If you were intrigued by my Software Factories post last week, you might want to consider attending OOPSLA ’04. It’s in Vancouver this year, making it an easy trip from Seattle for me. There’s going to be an all-day tutorial on Using Domain Specific Languages, Patterns, Frameworks and Tools to Assemble Applications presented by the authors of Software Factories. There’s also a half-day tutorial on Generative Software Development presented as part of the Generative Programming and Component Engineering ’04 conference, which is co-located with OOPSLA ’04. OOPSLA will also feature talks by Rick Rashid, Steve McConnell, Ward Cunningham and Herb Sutter. And I’m not quite sure what this is about, but Jaron Lanier will be presenting a keynote entitled: “Exocomputing in the Year 2304: A Survey of Confirmed Alien Information Technologies”. I’ve got to check that out, if just to see what confirmed alien information technologies look like.

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?

Now that Tech·Ed is over, I’ve got some time for things like playing Xbox, yard work and reading. I just finished The Footsteps of God (not bad, but not great – fine for airplane reading below 10,000 feet and after my battery died). On the technical side, I’ve been rereading ATL Internals for a COM based coding project I’m working on in my nearly-non-existent spare time. I also just started Software Factories by Keith Short and Jack Greenfield (with contributions by Steve Cook and Stuart Kent). Keith and Jack are architects in the Visual Studio Enterprise Tools Group. They are responsible for driving Microsoft’s model based development tools initiative and are heavily involved in the creation of the Whitehorse tools. Software Factories isn’t available yet – access to an early electronic copy is one of the perks of knowing the authors and having one of them speak as part of my Tech·Ed track.

Software Factories is about approaching application development with an industrialized manufacturing mindset, rather than the hand-crafted mindset we have today. It’s interesting how well this dovetails with Pat’s Metropolis work – both draw parallels to and learn from the Industrial Revolution. To quote from the website:

The industry continues to hand-stitch applications distributed over multiple platforms housed by multiple businesses located around the planet, automating business processes like health insurance claim processing and international currency arbitrage, using strings, integers and line by line conditional logic. Most developers build every application as though it is the first of its kind anywhere.

Without significant changes in our methods and practices, global demand for software development and maintenance will vastly exceed the pace at which the industry can deliver in the very near future.

Scaling up to much higher levels of productivity will require the ability to rapidly configure, adapt and assemble independently developed, self describing, location independent components to produce families of similar but distinct systems. It will require a transition from craftsmanship to manufacturing like the ones we have seen in other industries, and will eventually produce more advanced earmarks of industrialization, such as supply chains, value chain integration and mass customization.

We must synthesize…key innovations in software development…into a cohesive approach to software development that can learn from the best patterns of industrialized manufacturing.

This is what we mean by Software Factories. The industrialization of software development.

The book is fascinating, and I only just got started. The book should be available soon. Going forward, you can expect coverage on Architecture Center, as well as the official Software Factories website. In the meantime, keep an eye on Keith’s blog, check out this piece from the Architecture Center Update as well as this article on domain-specific languages, and watch Keith’s session from The Architecture Strategy Series.

One of the big announcements at Tech·Ed was the Visual Studio Team System, a set of lifecycle management tools for architects, developers, project managers and testers. Check out this episode of MSDN TV introducing the Team System that was shot at Tech·Ed.