FYI, I haven’t been accessing my DevHawk email address for a while. Basically, I never got back in the rhythm of checking that address after the site came back up in early May. Excuses abound – I was way to busy with TechEd, work, family, I get more than enough email at my work address, blah blah blah. Anyway, I’ve finally got around to checking that email. Besides the ton of spam, there was also a bunch of real email from people asking questions. If you sent me email in the past two months, sorry I’ve ignored you. I’ll stop ignoring and respond shortly! 😄

I keep bugging Greg about better folder hierarchy support in NewsGator. While I have some news feeds directly under my news folder (Don Box, Dilbert, my dad) I categorize most of my feeds into subfolders. One subfolder is for MSFT architects – my teammates, Michael, Keith & Kevin among others. That folder is where I typically start reading, esp. when I’m a week behind.

After a long absence, both Pat and John are blogging again. Pat’s been busy working on his new talks that he will be presenting at TechEd Amsterdam. We will be taping them for inclusion in the Architecture Strategy Series. He’s got a surprise planned for the end of his Metropolis overview talk (GNLARC) that I’m in charge of getting up on the web as soon as possible after it happens…watch this space…

John has written two pieces – on SOA and smart clients. John’s amped about the SCAG and he blogs about his smart client thoughts. I liked his observation that building browser-based apps “is all about service provider ease of delivery” while smart clients are “all about service consumer ease of use”. Today, ease of delivery wins out over ease of use, but I wonder how long that will last.

However interesting John’s views on smart clients are, I typically have long conversations with him about the finer points of SOA. A conversation that starts with “Got a sec?” typically turns into an extended discussion with crowded whiteboards. What I’ve realized recently is that John and I tend to approach a topic very differently. John is very pragmatic, so he tends to disagree with my more radical opinions (such as the endangered middle tier) which aren’t really feasible in the short term. I, on the other hand, start from a desired state and work backwards, trying to figure out what short term investments will lead to the long-term ideas. I used to think John and I disagreed about the desirable granularity of services. What it turns out is that we agree about what we want, but he focused on the fact we can’t feasibly build fine-grained services in the short term while I glossed over that fact and thought about what we needed to make fine-grained services feasible in the long term. Neither viewpoint is right or wrong, in fact they are very complementary. John keeps me grounded in reality while I push the limits of his event horizon. Among the recent topics of debate:

• How fine grained should services be?
• Should customers be thinking about building domain specific languages?
• How will the role of the ISV’s and SI’s evolve?
• How much of a typical enterprise should be outsourced?
• Is a service-oriented architecture more data-centric or process-centric?
• What would a requirements modeling language look like?
• What is the most important criteria for evaluating software systems for the enterprise?

Keep it up, John.

My pal Tom – who hosts DevHawk for me – recently set up a traffic analyzer so I can get a better idea about who’s visiting this site. I found it interesting that just under 52% of the visits are coming from the US. Rounding out the top ten DevHawk visitor countries are UK, Canada, Zimbabwe, Australia, Germany, Sweden, China, Netherlands and France. I really dig that almost half my traffic is from outside the US. Plus, it serves as a good reminder that getting good content up on Architecture Center in English means we’re still missing large chunk of the audience.

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.

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?