Morning Coffee 112

The Lee Holmes over at the Powershell Team Blog writes about alternatives to the “decades-old” Windows console host. Powershell Plus looks awesome. PoshConsole also looks pretty cool (though far from finished yet) and is free.
WL ID Web Authentication SDK has been released. Details on the WL ID team blog. It looks like what Passport SDK provided for quite some time, but now it’s free. There’s also a client auth SDK in development. (via Dare Obasanjo)
Libor Soucek leaps to the wrong conclusion about not differentiating enterprise & support systems. Of course, different systems will have different availability requirements. But what happens when we connect them together? We can’t let the support system effect the availability of the enterprise system, right? To me, that implies either a) the support system now needs to conform to enterprise system availability requirements or b) we need some other mechanism (like async durable messaging) to act as a buffer between them. Personally, I like “b”.
Nick Carr points to an article The Trouble with Enterprise Software by Cynthia Rettig. Cynthia writes that while the massive complexity of enterprise software, especially large-scale ERP systems like SAP, significantly hinder it’s value. It’s a must read. Choice quotes:
- “It is estimated that for every 25% increase in complexity in the tasks to be automated, the complexity of the software solution itself rises by 100%.”
- “The notion of reusable software works on a small scale. Programmers have successfully built and reused subroutines of standard functions. But as software grows more complex, reusability becomes a difficult or impossible task.”
- “Hope, unfortunately, has never been a very effective strategy.”
- “Is enterprise software just too complex to deliver on its promises? After all, enterprise systems were supposed to streamline and simplify business processes. Instead, they have brought high risks, uncertainty and a deeply worrying level of complexity. Rather than agility they have produced rigidity and unexpected barriers to change, a veritable glut of information containing myriad hidden errors, and a cloud of questions regarding their overall benefits.”

Morning Coffee 111

I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry at Nick Malik’s definition of politecture. I mean, it’s funny so I’m laughing, but it’s so true that it makes me want to cry.
Don Box comments on retiring the tenets. It’s good to see him say “please God tell me we can do better” than CLR interfaces or WSDL.
Looks like the P2P APIs are finally getting the managed treatment in .NET FX 3.5. A long time ago, John deVadoss asked me what an enterprise system like CRM might look like if it used a peer-to-peer approach instead of client-server. If I had any free time, I’d prototype one out on this API. (via Mike Taulty)
Scott Guthrie goes back to his LINQ to SQL series to tackle Stored Procs and UDFs. Being able to use UDFs inline with LINQ queries is very cool. However, it seems to me that LINQ discourages the use of stored procs. As a developer, I’d rather write LINQ queries than stored procs, if I can. The probably puts me at odds with DBAs who’d rather all DB access be via stored procs they control.
Soma writes about new MSBuild enhancements in VS08: multi-targeting and parallel build.
I just discovered Vista Battery Saver. Basically, it turns off Aero and Sidebar when you’re on battery. I’m traveling to Chicago next week, so we’ll see if it has much impact on my battery life. (via Plenty of Code and Larkware)

Morning Coffee 110

Monday @ Gamefest, the XNA team announced XNA Game Studio 2.0. The two big new things are support for the entire VS product line (1.0 only works on VC# Express) and the addition of networking APIs. Let’s Kill Dave has a good wrapup of the announcements from Gamefest Day One.
Speaking of Xbox 360, I played thru the demos of Stranglehold and Bioshock. Two thumbs up on both. It’s gonna be an expensive year for Xbox gamers.
Mark Cuban noodles on taking your house public. “Why not create a market or exchange where homeowners can sell equity in their homes?” I’ve thought about this myself from time to time. However, Mark thinks making it happen would “probably take the country’s biggest banks working together”. I wonder if there’s a more Web 2.0 social lending approach that would work better.
Jeff Atwood calls virtualization as “the next great frontier for computer security”. I agree 100%. But I don’t think the action is going to be in “full-machine” virtualization like Virtual PC. Rather, it’s going to be sandbox virtualization. Jeff mentions GreenBorder (now part of Google) but it’s not the only solution. Some time ago, Microsoft acquired SoftGrid which uses sandbox virtualization for application deployment, but using SystemGuard for security sandboxing seems like a logical step.
The WCF LOB Adapter SDK has released. Sonu Arora has the details. As part of the Integration team @ MSIT, I have a feeling we’re going to become fairly familiar with this technology. (via Jesus Rodriguez).
Speaking of Jesus, he thinks the six new SCA4SOA committees are “going to help”. Why? Because inventing technology in committee has turned out so well in the past?
John deVadoss cements BPM’s fad du jour status by contrasting “big” BPM and “little” BPM. It’s fairly obvious to me that big *anything* just doesn’t work in the enterprise. But I worry that little *anything* doesn’t work that well either. So how long until someone (probably Nick) starts arguing for “middle out” BPM?
David Bressler wonders “What is it about registries that everyone thinks is a panacea for all things SOA?” Amen, Brother! Joe McKendrick claims it’s required for governance, but then gets to what I think is the *real* reason for focus on registries: the “registry is a tangible offering” that vendors can sell. Just because it’s productizable doesn’t mean you need it.
Hartmut Wilms responds to my retire the tenets post, but he seems to contradict himself. On the one hand, he suggests that “the four tenets just expressed, what “almost” everybody outside the MS world knew already”. But then he goes on to dispute that the SO paradigm shift has even occurred! Hartmut, I’ll grant you that WCF (among other similar stacks) are way too focused on “you write the classes, we’ll handle the contracts and messages”. On the other hand, if you don’t provide a productive interface that most everyone can pick up and run with, the technology won’t get adopted in the first place.

Morning Coffee 109

I forgot to add a number to my last morning coffee post. However, after extensive research, I have determined that it was #108. So thing are continuing as usual today with #109. On the other hand, do you really want development and architecture opinions from a guy who can barely count? 😄
The finalists in the Dream-Build-Play contest have been announced. I haven’t played any of them yet (some are available for download) but they several of them sure look good.
And speaking of gaming, MS announced an Xbox 360 price drop yesterday. So if you want to get in on some of the XNA action, here’s your chance (or you could just build for your PC – take your pick).
Finally on the gaming front, if you’re not busy Monday you can watch the first day of Gamefest 2007 online. Get the scoop on XNA 2.0 as well as the new XNA networking support. I, alas, am busy Monday so I’ll have to catch it on demand.
On to, you know, actual geek stuff things. Scott Guthrie seems to have retired his LINQ to SQL series and moved on to LINQ to XML. He shows how to build an RSS reader application with LINQ to XML. An oldie demo, but a goodie.
Wanna learn F#, there’s a whole site of samples up on CodePlex. (via Don Syme)
Jeff Atwood is annoyed at how many different products you have to install to get a current & complete setup of VS 2005. Of course, MS shipped two parts of that stack since VS05 shipped (TFS & DBPro), three service packs (VS05 SP1, SQL 05 SP2 and DBPro SR1) and a major OS upgrade (VS Vista update). Doesn’t the same thing happen with any shipping product after a few years? BTW, if this is such a huge hassle, I wonder why Jeff doesn’t create a slipstreamed VS installer?
Udi Dahan has a great post on estimation where he claims “Developers don’t know how to estimate.” No argument, but the way he phrases it sounds like it’s the developer’s fault they suck at estimation. It’s not. Developing – by definition – is building something you’ve never built before. Is it any surprise we suck at estimating how long it will take us to do something we’ve never done before?

Morning Coffee

Libor Soucek continues our conversation about durable messaging. We still don’t agree, but he says he “fine” with durable messaging. He does go out of his way to differentiate between enterprise and supporting systems. But when you’re building connected systems, does that differentiation still matter?
After taking a few months off, John deVadoss is back at the blog. Check out his Big SOA/Little SOA post. I especially like his snowball analogy “How do you build a big snowball? You start with a small snowball.”) though he’s also on this “middle out” bandwagon. Do we really believe “middle out” works, or are we just saying it because we know top down and bottom up don’t? And John: You’re welcome!
Anyone coming to the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference this fall? Maybe we can have a shindig / blogger dinner / unconference / something?
Remus Rusanu writes about SSB’s dynamic routing. One of the (many) cool things about SSB is that all the addressing is logical, not physical. Routing is what binds logical addresses to physical addresses, and it’s extensible.
Martin Fowler discusses the value of sticking to one language. I agree with his points about large frameworks being as difficult to learn as a new language. I’ve said for a long time “If you build a framework, build tools to make it easy to use your framework”. Language is obviously a core example of a tool. Another interesting point Martin makes is the traditional “intimate relationship” between scripting languages and C, but that the rise of JVM & CLR makes them impossible to ignore. Does the need to play well in a managed environment hinder a C based language like Ruby when compared to a natively managed scripting language like Powershell? Finally, Martin’s “jigger of 80 proof ugliness” quote made me laugh.
Politics 2.0 Watch: EJ Dionne says that DailyKos is doing for Democrats what Rush Limbaugh did for Republicans almost twenty years ago: mobilization. Josh Marshall points out that “what’s happening today is vastly more participatory and distributed…than anything happening back then.”

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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.