Afternoon Coffee 123

Morning Coffee is late this morning because we went for our Christmas portrait this morning and it took forever. The pictures turned out great though.
Nick Malik finishes up his series on business operation models by covering the diversification model. Also, Nick’s points about the synergy between a diversified model and the coordinated model are spot on. I happen to be a big fan of those models (aka the models with low standardization) which probably drives some of the more my “unique” perspectives on SOA.
Scott Guthrie starts out a new series and future technology, this time it’s ASP.NET MVC Framework that gets the series treatment. The first entry in the series is a general overview. I wonder why there’s no cool code name for the MVC framework? Whatever it’s named, I like the auto routing and action rules – it seems very Rails-inspired.
Over the weekend, Don Box points out that the REST authentication story “blows chunks”. I’ve recently given up on the reliable part of the original “Secure, Reliable, Transacted Web Services” vision – and I never believed the transacted part. Security, on the other hand, is the one part of that original vision that has worked out IMO. My experience with the WS-* security stack has been pretty good, though Dare Obasanjo thinks that OpenID and OAuth are the final nail in the WS-* coffin.
Speaking of Dare, he goes on to say WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice. He makes the point that “The only times I encounter someone with good things to say about WS-* is if it is their job to pimp these technologies or they have already “invested” in WS-* and want to defend that investment.” I gave up ~~pimping~~ evangelizing technology a while back and I don’t want to be in the position of defending a bad investment, so I’m spending lots of time looking at REST.
Jesus Rodriguez takes a look at the Managed Services Engine and comes away excited. Jesus is a self-described “strong believer” in SOA governance. I’m a self-described strong disbeliever in SOA governance, so MSE sounds like more of the Worst of Both Worlds to me.
A little light reading: I pulled Applied Cryptography and A New Kind of Science out of my garage last weekend. Plus my copies of RESTful Web Services and Programming Erlang just arrived yesterday.

Morning Coffee 122

Sorry for the posting lag. Had a few technical difficulties around here. In the process of moving hosts, so expect more glitches.
My talk at the p&p Summit on Monday went really well. At least, it felt good and the applause at the end felt genuine. I recorded the audio on my laptop, so I’ll be posting a Silverlight version as soon as I figure out how to adjust the levels so their somewhat consistent. Paraesthesia and #2872 have reactions.
Speaking of the p&p Summit, Scott Hanselman posted his ASP.NET MVC demo from his talk. Said ASP.NET MVC bits aren’t available yet, so you can’t, you know, run the demo for yourself. But at least you can review what the ASP.NET MVC code will look like.
I stopped by the SOA/BPM conference last week and saw Jon, Sam and Jesus among others. Spent quite a bit of time talking to Sam and his Neudesic colleagues about this “physically distributed/logically centralized” approach that I think is hogwash. It sounds to me like Neudesic approach is really federated not centralized, though I’m not sure David Pallmann would agree. Federated makes much more sense to me than centralized.
Nick Malik continues his series on SOA Business Operations Model. I especially like his point that this isn’t a series of choices, you need to “look at your company and try to understand which model the business has selected.”
The first CTP of PowerShell 2.0 is out! Check out what’s new on the PowerShell team blog and Jeffrey Snover’s TechEd Presentation. (via Sam Gentile)
Soma announced updates to VC++ coming next year, including TR1 support and a “major” MFC upgrade to support creating native apps that look like Office, IE or VS. I get supporting TR1, but the idea that people are clamoring for MFC updates is kinda surprising. Many years ago when I first came to MSFT, a friend asked “But don’t you hate Microsoft?” to which I responded “No, I just hate MFC”. Obviously, not everyone agrees with that sentiment.
Steve Vinoski thinks there’s no hope for IT. Funny, I keep agreeing with Steve’s overall point but disagreeing with his reasoning. I still don’t buy the serendipity argument. I like compiled languages. And I think he’s overstating the amount of “real, useful guidance” for REST floating around. Basically, there’s “the book“.
In widely reported news, Windows Live launched their next generation services. Don’t bother with the press release, just go to the new WL home page.
Speaking of WL, Dare Obasanjo points to the Live Data Interactive SDK page where you can experiment with the WL Contacts REST API. It gives you a good sense of how the Web3S protocol works. Pretty well, IMO. However, how come WL Contacts Schema doesn’t include some type of update timestamp for sync purposes? If you wanted to build say a Outlook to WL Contacts sync engine, you’d have to download the entire address book and grovel thru it for changes every sync.
Speaking of Web3S, I’d love to see some info on how one might implement a service using Web3S. Yaron Goland positions Web3S as an alternative to APP that WL developed because they “couldn’t make APP work in any sane way for our scenarios”. I’m sure other folks have similar scenarios.

Morning Coffee 121

My daughter had her tonsils & adenoids out on yesterday. It was a routine procedure and it went by-the-numbers, but any parent will tell you it’s hard to see your kid in a hospital bed.
Given the previous bullet, I’m not at the SOA/BPM conference for the big announcement. Don’t worry, there’s lots of other folks covering the news.
It was a crappy sports weekend in the Pierson house. Va Tech snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, Southern Cal never led at Oregon, the Capitals lost twice, and the Redskins got blown out by the Pats. At least the Caps won big yesterday in Toronto.
Speaking of the Capitals, Peter Bondra retired Monday. I still think it’s a travesty that he didn’t spend his whole career in DC, but I’ve made my peace with it.
Nick Malik has a great series on business operations models and how they apply to SOA. Regular readers should be unsurprised that I favor low standardization, though I can see the value of high integration. That makes the Coordinated Operating Model my fav, though I can see the benefit of the Diversified Model as well. I can’t wait to read what Nick has to say on changing models.
Speaking of Nick, I’m doing a roundtable with him on “Making SOA Work in the Enterprise” @ the Strategic Architect Forum. Should be fun. Sorry for the lack of linkage on this, but it’s an invite-only event.
Jezz Santos has a new series of white papers on building software factories. First up “Packaging with Visual Studio 2005”
Aaron Skonnard has a new whitepaper on using the WCF LOB Adapter SDK with BTS 2006 R2. I’ve been building one of these things recently, so I’m looking forward to checking that out. (via Sam Gentile)
Tim Ewald looks at Resource Oriented Architecture (when did ROA become a TLA?) and wonders “what if your problem domain is more focused on processes than data?” I wonder that all the time. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
It’s not just durable messaging – Libor Soucek also disagrees with my opinions on centralized control. I agree 100% with Libor that centralized management would make operation’s lives “much, MUCH easier” as he puts it. However, that doesn’t make it feasible at any significant scale. Furthermore, I wouldn’t describe an approach that requires that “all services adopt [the] same common management interface” as “pragmatic”. Frankly, just the opposite.

Morning Coffee 120

Doing these morning coffee posts is a lot tougher since I cut back my blog reading. Where I used to have no trouble finding 4-5 coffee-worthy items every day, these days I seem to only get 1-2, if that.
After starting off 3-0 and 100% on the PK, the Caps dropped four in a row and have been miserable on special teams. The special teams woes continued last night against the Lightning, but they still won. Caps went 0-4 on the powerplay, and coughed up a short handed goal. But they also went 3-3 on the PK, so I guess it wasn’t all bad. Maybe my mother will stop calling for Hanlon’s job now. It’s a long season and as Peerless Prognosticator points out, the rebuild isn’t over.
Jomo Fisher, who helped Scott Hanselman auto-merge assemblies, has been digging around in F# of late. As it turns out, he’s joining the F# team so I’m thinking it’s not a huge stretch for him. If you’re a C# developer trying interested in getting a handle on this new F# thing, his blog is a good place to start.
Speaking of F#, Don Syme posts about yet another new F# feature: Async Workflows. Workflow is a bad term here IMO since it can be easily confused with WF. Regardless of it’s name, Async Workflows is about making .NET’s Async Programming model a first class citizen in F#. Robert Pickering has a good post explaining how this new feature works.
Microsoft sure has a lot of multi-threading / async-programming tools coming out. In addition to F# Async Workflows, there’s the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, Parallel LINQ and the Task Parallel Library. I would hope all this work eventually coalesces as a coherent product offering.
Now that F# is being “producized”, I wonder if the language evolution will slow down. Async workflows were introduced in F# 1.9.2.9. Other recent changes include Computation Expressions (v1.9.2), Use Bindings (v1.9.2) and Active Patterns (v1.9.1). F# seems to churn more in minor releases than C# does in major releases. Of course, that’s because F# was a research project, not a “real” product. Now that it’s going to be a product, will the rate of innovation slow?

Morning Coffee 119

The biggest news of the week IMHO is Soma announcing the formation of an F# product team. Specifically, they will “fully integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and continue innovating and evolving F#.” Though Soma calls F# “another first-class programming language on the CLR”, I get the feeling there won’t be a “Visual F#” sku. Don Syme has more on the news.
In other Soma announcement news, Popfly is now in beta. More details on what’s new on the Popfly Team Blog. I haven’t played with Popfly in depth, but I think it’s got huge potential.
Scott Guthrie details the upcoming ASP.NET MVC Framework. Personally, I’m not building web apps much these days, so I’m not really invested one way or the other. Given the interest in this approach, it’s nice to see the ASP.NET team respond to the market, though I’m sure someone will complain that we’re trying to kill off the various open-source MVC Web frameworks that have sprung up.
Over in Windows Live, they shipped a new version of Live Search Maps, upgraded WL Photo Gallery (which I’ve been digging) to support Flickr and shipped an update to WL Accounts which allows you to link accounts.
The Clarius folks keep churning out great tools for software factory developers. The latest is the T4 editor, which brings intellisense, color syntax highlighting and property inspector support for Text Templating Transformation Toolkit (aka T4) files. T4 files are used for code generation in both DSL Toolkit and GAT.
David Pallman (again via Sam Gentile) suggests there are only three choices for infrastructure architecture: None/Point-to-point, Centralized/Hub-and-Spoke and Thin/Bus. I get the first two, but his explanation of the third goes to far into the “magic framework” category for my taste. “Physically distributed but logically centralized”? That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
Fellowship of the Ring makes its way onto XBLM. Alas, not in HD so I’ll stick w/ my extended four hour DVD version thankyouverymuch.

Series

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The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion.