While I was in the far east last week, the Architecture and Design Events page of Architecture Center got updated. Thanks go to Lawrence, Richard and Mark – Architecture Center’s own three amigos if you will. Looks like the Software Factories guys are going to very busy, most of the upcoming events feature some type of presentation on factories, models or domain specific languages.

What’s cool about this list is that it features MS events like TechEd and PDC as well as non-MS events like OOPSLA, UML Conference and OOP. The only bad thing about this list is that I’d like it to be longer. Should there be more architecture-centric events or more architecture content at developer-centric events on this list?

I said yesterday that the Metropolis session had gone very well. Got the score back – 7.71/9 speaker satisfaction and 7.83/9 content satisfaction. Not bad, esp. given that it was a translated session. Today, I presented Data in SOA, and I thought it well also. This time, I did it without the translator at the audience’s request. We’ll see how the scores come back. I thought it was encouraging that attendance at the architecture sessions steadily improved. Gurp’s session yesterday afternoon had more people than my Metropolis session and today’s session had more people still.

After the session, I spent some time answering questions. After Metropolis, there was one guy from China Mobile. This time, he was joined by two dozen other attendees. And again, Mr. China Mobile had some great questions that really made me think. He pointed out that often architecture is focused on the non-functional requirements of a system (perf, scale, reliability, etc) that are very technology platform dependent. As the platform evolves, the decisions made in implementing a system become obsolete, which makes it very hard to evolve a solution to take advantage of the improved platform. He’s right. The reason he’s right is that we don’t a good mechanism to capture the design decisions made during the development of a system, just the outcome. Software Factories can really help out here.

After the presentation and Q&A with the attendees, several of the speakers and I were treated to a trip to the Great Wall of China. One of the other speakers was Stan Lippman, whom I had never met. As for the Wall, what can I say but wow. We climbed for about two hours – glad I put on my sneakers! We reached at least a local summit, where there is a quote from a Mao poem stating that you can’t be a real man until you’ve climbed the Great Wall. Well, I guess that makes me a real man now. The wall is over 45 degrees in several places that we walked. I sure got a good workout today.

I’m exhausted, but I figure I can sleep on the 12 hours worth of plane ride I have tomorrow so I’m heading out (after a shower) to do a little shopping. I’ve had a great trip and met with some great people – both MSFT employees and customers alike – but I sure am looking forward to being home.

I’m sitting in the Kuala Lumpur airport – my flight to Beijing leaves in about half an hour. I didn’t get a chance to blog all day yesterday, so here’s a quick recap:

• I’ve run into a bunch of people who I first met at TechEd Malaysia 2002. In particular, Adrian and Rathi who both wanted to see pictures of Patrick. The big bummer of only spending two days here is that I didn’t get to do much more that the conference.
• After the sessions on Wednesday, I hung out with a bunch of the other speakers at dinner. Several of the RD’s who spoke at TechEd US also came to our Architect Road Rally and had a great time. Always nice to be told you threw a great party.
• Thursday started  with Gurpreet’s session on Architecture Vision & Direction. I didn’t think this session did as well as the EA talk the day before. Part of that comes from the fact the EA talk set a high bar, but some of it comes from the fact that the V&D talk wasn’t as polished. In contrast, I did much better with my Metropolis Thursday than the SOA Data talk on Wednesday. Maybe I just need one talk to get back in the groove – I usually think I do better in my second session.
• After our sessions, lunch, and hanging around in the cabana with some other attendees, Aaron (the local Architect Evangelist) drove Gurp and I around Putrajaya. Pat often points out when he presents Metropolis that you can’t bulldoze Boston just because the roads aren’t straight. However, you can build a new city about a half an hour away and move into it when it’s finished. That’s Putrajaya – the new administrative center of Malaysia.  It was stunning – huge and ultra modern. But it was also strange as it is completely underutilized, so far anyway. We also did a little shopping and I was able to find a few things for the family back home.
• Last night we had a regional architect dinner, where we got to hang out with a bunch of the local architects in the region. Lots of good discussion.

Next stop – China!

Actually, I don’t think he’s “officially” part of the team ’til next week, but Josh Lee has already started a blog about his new job on the Architecture Strategy team. Josh is “The FinServ Guy”, and is a member of the IFX Forum Board of Directors. Nothing really meaty on his blog yet, just a Hello World post, but I hear great things about him.

Speaking of the Architecture Strategy team, I finally took 5 minutes to term serv into the machine that hosts DevHawk to update the theme. I keep mentioning the Architecture Strategy extended team OPML file, but I wanted to add a blogroll to the site theme. Now, I have a Team Blogroll on the left hand side of my website featuring all of my blogging teammates as well as all the blogging architect evangelists. Enjoy.

We keep getting more and more field architects and architecture strategy team members blogging. Remember, I keep a list (I am becoming the Scoble of Microsoft Architecture). Anna Liu is a field architect evangelist who presented at TechEd Australia (but we didn’t get a chance to hang out). Anna’s also been thinking about software development as an engineering discipline.

In addition to Anna, two of my teammates are blogging: Chris Keyser and Dave Welsh. Chris is a solution architect who’s doing some awesome next gen SOA work. He’s been bloggingabout using WSE2 to manage Security Context Tokens. Chris, like John deVadoss (who has relapsed into silence), is very pragmatic so it’s great to run radical ideas past him.

Earlier this year, our team “inherited” a group of awesome vertical architects – I’ve blogged about John Evdemon before who’s from that group. Dave is also from that group. Like many of our vertical architects, Dave is heavily involved in standards bodies – in Dave’s case it’s UN/CEFACT. He’s got an great article on how Standards Development Organizations traditionally work and another on how MSFT (and our specification partners) is improving on that process. He’s shining a light on the dark corners of the standard process, which is a good thing since so many people act like standards are a silver bullet solution. I love Dave’s description of the traditional standards process:

[L]aunch a committee, politically pick a chair, generate lots of hype and expectation on how this spec will solve world hunger, stack the new committee with people who may be able to contribute, host conference calls and arm wrestle the original idea down to some compromise that seems to make sense, then hope someone’s got a number of free weekends over to write up a draft of the new spec.

You want an example of the results of a traditional standards process? How about XSD? I think XSD is the ugliest widely-used spec around.  Don agrees, according to his comments from last years SellsCon:

Nothing illustrates [the cost of standardization] more than XML schema. XML schema is the quintessential example of what happens with a design by standards body specification. Rather than taking something that worked and something that was done and that there was experience with and effectively dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s you had two from every company off doing wanton innovation and invention without implementation experience. It was a train wreck in the making, especially when you consider the fact that you had people who vehemently disagreed about what they were building. Some people thought they were bringing object orientation to XML. Some people thought they were bringing database schema concepts to XML. Some people thought they were just, you know, reliving the SGML dream. So what do we get? We get a Frankenstein’s monster that is dumber than the dumbest person in the committee. No one person on that committee could have produced something this bad. It took an army of people to work hard day and night to build something that is not good. It’s not terrible – can we make it work? Yes. But it’s going to take a lot of work from a lot of plumbers and a lot of tool vendors to make XML schema palatable to the average developer.

A great example of the opposite approach is RELAX NG. It is widely believed at this point in time that RELAX NG is a better schema language for XML than XML schema. Why? Because two guys who were really smart said why don’t we go do this and let’s get it working and let’s build it while we do it and let’s iterate it and see what works and what doesn’t work. And then when we’re done we will take it to the rubber stamp – I’m sorry, Oasis – where they will carefully vet every decision and bless it and give it UN status.

I’m with Don and Tim: I want RelaxNG. More importantly, I want standards that are built like WS-* and RelaxNG.