Two new architect bloggers to note. Jim Clark is a business architect on the Architecture Strategy Team. Jim spends a lot of time with what he calls “Red River” – identification and definition of business architectures, ontologies and environments that promote trusted business solutions. His first post is about Familiarity and Trust. Steve Cook is a contributor to Software Factories and works for Keith. Steve is looking forward to OOPSLA. So am I.

In addition to event activities, we also take advantage of SAF to have side meetings with customers. Yesterday, I spent an hour discussing software factories and high-performance computing with Simon Cox from the University of Southampton. Simon is one of our inaugural group of Architect MVPs. We have fourteen architect MVPs across two categories: Visual Developer – Solutions Architect and Windows Server System – Infrastructure Architect. We’ll be growing this group significantly over the rest of the fiscal year, but there are already some influential names in this group, including Roger Sessions, Paul Preiss (founder of IASA), Ingo Rammer and Clemens Vasters. Congrats to all the new Architect MVPs!

Last night’s IASA meeting went very well. I always take it as a good sign when community get-togethers end because building security kicks you out 45 minutes after you were supposed to be done. About 25 people showed up and were treated to food, free materials and factories. Steven did a good job presenting Software Factories, and he was even nice enough to let me chime in on a regular basis with my $0.02. BTW, the next meeting is on Oct 27th (last Wed of the month) and I’m going to miss it because of OOPSLA. Watch the IASA website for more details.

One of the key questions asked was if MS was going to “break tradition” with factories and embrace open systems. I guess we still have a long way to go to change that perception, even though we standardized CLI & C# and continue to be a major driver of the ongoing web services standardization effort. Regardless of perception, I agreed – I think it’s important to enable Software Factories to be embraced by the industry at large. The Architecture Strategy team has several members who are heavily involved in standards bodies, and they had similar feedback. Of course, we have nothing to embrace beyond the book so far, but we have hinted at tooling to come. As promised, I sent last nights feedback to Keith, Jack and the other folks involved and I hope we’ll see that incorporated into their long term plans.

I asked the hard-core folks who stayed late last night what they thought was the best approach for MS to take for getting Software Factories embraced by the industry. Obviously, any tooling around Software Factories would be built on a set of specifications. We could standardize these specifications as we have for CLI, C# and web services. Alternatively, we could simply publish the specifications with an open and royalty-free license (similar to the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas). Given recent comments by Grady Booch and Simon Johnston (both from IBM) disparaging domain-specific languages and software factories, I’m not sure how well a standardization process around DSLs would proceed. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much industry buy-in there would be for specifications that weren’t collaboratively developed. Leave your opinion, and I’ll make sure it gets to Jack, Keith, et. al. just like the feedback from last night did.

It’s late notice, but tonight is the inaugural meeting of the Puget Sound chapter of the International Association of Software Architects. Steven Houglum, MS architect evangelist for the Pacific NW, is presenting on SOA and Software Factories. The meeting is on the MS campus from 6:30-8:30 and you can get all the details from the IASA site. As I wrote yesterday, I’m interested to see the general response to software factories, so I’m going to be there.

IASA is a relatively new organization with seven chapters in the US as well as one in Australia. It started as an architect user group in Austin – their first meeting was almost a year ago. The overarching IASA organization started about six months ago, according to the IASA weblog. I’ve spoken to the founder and director Paul Preiss on several occasions and hung out with the Twin Cities chapter president Alex Rupp at TechEd. I think they are doing a great job build a technology agnostic user group community and it’s great to see our local field architects supporting it.

As I said, the first meeting is tonight and that’s pretty late notice. If you’re interested and can’t make it tonight, there are two more meetings scheduled for the Puget Sound group in the next three months. Of course, the other chapters are on different schedules, so maybe you can find a meeting in a city near you. If there isn’t a chapter near you, I’m sure IASA would be interested if you wanted to start one.

I came back from the far east and got buried by email and meetings. Plus my stupid HP laptop is still stupid – now the both the built in wireless and the PCMCIA card slot are not working correctly so I can’t get on wireless. Amazing how quickly the ability to get online from anywhere in my house has become routine to the point where if I can’t get on wireless, I barely get online at all.

A couple of quick takes:

• Keith blogged about giving BillG the third copy of Software Factories that came off the presses. When he came to present Software Factories to my team, he gave me copy number four. He and Jack even signed it. Cool!
• Keith and Jack’s Software Factories presentation was a huge hit with my team. Our architects want their own copies of the book now. Pat even stole borrowed my signed copy to read over the weekend. I can’t wait to see the general response to this book.
• I got the scores back from TechEd Malaysia and Beijing. Metropolis was the top architecture session of TechEd Malaysia and Data in SOA was the top architecture session and in the top ten of all sessions at TechEd Beijing. Gurpreet’s sessions also did very well. There are still a few worldwide TechEd’s left, but I think it’s safe to say that the new architecture track has been a big success. We’re already in planning for next year, so look out for us to build on that success.
• I’m still pretty much at the “what good is this?” stage on WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration. I can possibly see using WS-Enum and/or WS-Xfer’s Get action for retrieving reference data, though recent issues with RSS and bandwidth demonstrate the inefficiency of polling for changes. David Ing commented that WS-Xfer provides “semantic understanding” of actions. True, but at the cost of semantic understanding of the data. It’s much easier to change the name of the action that to change the schema of the message, yet WS-Xfer and WS-Enum’s operations are completely untyped. So I remain unconvinced of the value of these specifications.