June 2004 - Posts

Tech-Ed Wednesday
Wed, Jun 30 2004 7:28 PM

Reading back my blogging of yesterday, I think I did good in keeping a diary, but not so good in telling new stuff. So I will cut it short (at least I will try).

I did a SOA session and a Fabriq lab this morning, then three Team System sessions, a Black Belt BizTalk session and a not-so Black Belt (very basic) BizTalk session, which I left after 5 minutes.

First of all, although nothing new to most blogreaders, Visual Studio Team System IS GOOD STUFF. It is going to be pricy, though, although Universal Subscriber will get a reduction to SOME parts IF they are subscriber on the day of shipping. Prashant Sridharan showed an awful lot of good demo's. Of course, anything he showed can already be done today, but not in one integrated environment. There's change management, work item management, Excel integration, unit test integration, performance test integration, class diagrams, application diagram, physical system diagrams. application to system mapping diagrams. Luckely there's lot's written on the subject, so I won't redo that, but one thing I like to share is the enhancement of Source Control to the notion of shelving. Shelving is a kind of check-in where you do put stuff back in Source Control but do not actually check-in to the main stream. This means that you can store unfinished code centrally without breaking the main program flow. This also allows for code reviewing by other teammembers. Looked very promising to me.

FABRIQ Lab was nice, but a little limited. I think I like FABRIQ but need to see more to really know. The SOA session ("Realizing Service-Oriented Architecture) was good. What I generally like about the SOA sessions, is that they are really going down into the details of building it, describing different kinds of services, different kinds of approaches, different kinds of data, etc. This does mean that a lot of new terms are made up describing all the different concepts (today I learned about process services, activity services and entity services). All those terms are sometimes a puzzle, but in the end I like it, it really describes what it's all about.

Shoot, it has become another long story. Sorry for that, but I'm really enjoying this Tech-Ed, and you know, writing about something is a good way to remember it. So, more to come...

by Carlo Poli | with no comments
My Tech-ED Tuesday afternoon
Tue, Jun 29 2004 8:12 PM

After all the fun this morning, stuff got more serious.

First of all, I got a chance to talk 1-on-1 to Scott Woodgate, which was good. He gave some good advices on the real problems we have and noted down the ones he didn't cover. That was very good.

My afternoon was planned around SOA in three steps, namely:

1) BizTalk in a Service Oriented environment -> Good presentation from David Chappell. What I found a little anoying is, that after a very good half an hour, he spend the second half an hour on explaining BizTalk concepts at a high leveling, while I hoped he would give some better examples of how BizTalk can be placed in a Service Oriented environment. Great takeaway -> David believes that in one to two year everybody wants to develop in BizTalk.

2) Using data in a Service Oriented Architecture -> Good session from Pat Helland. Jumped in a little late from my chat with Scott, I saw some good ways of looking of different kinds of data, the lifecycle of that data and versioning of data. Very interesting.

3) Metropolis: Building Apps in a Service Oriented Enterprise -> Pat Helland again. I didn't like the session, wrong choice. I think Pat is taking his analogy work to far here. His session was about comparing buildings to applications. Although he's able to take the analogy remarkably far (I agree on parts of his analogy), the presentation felt very 'made'. I didn't see the comparisons he saw and I think I can reasonably argue against some of the statements he made.

I think I've seen enough of SOA for now, tomorrow will be my VS Team System day. Let's see if it's as entertaining as today.

by Carlo Poli | 1 comment(s)
Entertaining first morning on the Tech-ED
Tue, Jun 29 2004 2:41 PM

The keynote and my first session-presentation were very entertaining.

The keynote started with a drum session. Fun part was, everybody has got it's own drum, so everybody without a car is walking around with a drum now. But it was very entertaining to be part of several thousands of drummers, drumming at the same time. Brilliant. Besides that, the keynote was pretty calm. They announced the Visual Studio Express Edition, which is supposed to be very cheap and allow everybody, including students, to build .NET applications. There was some new stuff in it that was interesting, like an integrated way to insert codesnippets that looked pretty cool, but it didn't really warm me up. The Team System demo did, but the coverage of that was very high-level, didn't really touch the good points yet.

My first session was the Metropolis session from Pat Helland, who I respect for a long time now. I've been at the first MTS-announcements, back in 1996, with him convincing everybody about the revolutionizing technology MTS was bringing. The Metropolis session tries to create an analogy between the development of cities, railways, transportation and the like, mainly in second half of the 19th century and the current development of applications that start communicating and exchanging data etc. A already knew his analogy but yet it fun seeying him making his point and I believe he's right. The major point I took from his presentation, is that every application should really standardize on it's communication. Not in technical sense like XML and SOAP, but in a business sense. There are lots of examples, where this already happens, like between dutch electricity companies through ECH, but this is just the beginning.

O, and Pat closed his session with a song, while Don Box and David Chapell played along. Brilliant performance. He announced it to be posted on his website by wednesday (I guess that is tomorrow, but he might also mean next week).

 

by Carlo Poli | with no comments
Getting ready for Tech-Ed Europe
Mon, Jun 28 2004 10:31 AM

Haven't posted a lot lately, I've been quite busy with finishing up the BizTalk-project I'm at (today is my last day). It's been quite hard, we stumbled on some nasty pitfalls, that made us do some late-project redesign. I'm busy on writing a post that describes my learnings from the project.

But first, there's Tech-Ed Europe in Amsterdam, starting tomorrow! I feel very exited about this Tech-Ed, it's packed with stuff that has my attention and I probably will have a very hard time creating a schedule that allows me to see a bit of everything. I think my Tech-Ed will be about SOA, Whidbey (especially the Team System bit), Yukon and BizTalk (in no particular order). But there's also some SharePoint, MCMS and CMS stuff I'd like to stay updated on. Some timeslots have 5 sessions running in parallel I'm interested in, so I've got another run to do.

I certainly hope to get a change to speak to all the BizTalk 2004 people walking around on this Tech-Ed. Thinking about it, maybe some of us can have lunch together and share some experiences. Write a comment if you like the idea and we can try to arrange something.

I plan on posting daily about my experiences during the Tech-Ed. I hope I can find the time to do it.

by Carlo Poli | with no comments
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Coding BAM vs Configuring BAM
Tue, Jun 15 2004 9:55 AM

Christoph has published about programming BAM. In general, I hate programming something that I can configure too, because if I want to change it, I need to roll out a new version of my assemblies. So I had my second thoughts. But tracking using the TPE is limited and sometimes a real pain (read my versioning comments on the TPE here), so I've been thinking about this too.

There is a way though to combine TPE and programming. What is required here, is a unique key that is available in the message that starts your orchestration (this key can be composed of multiple fields). In the TPE you attach this key to the ActivityID. In code you use the very same key to write to the activity, just like Christoph describes in his post.

This way, you combine the strength of the TPE with the extensibility of programming BAM.

One note to this. The key must stay unique even after your orchestration ends because it is actually used as the primary key in one of the table where activities are stored.

 

by Carlo Poli | with no comments
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New BizTalk blogger writes great introduction to BizTalk
Thu, Jun 10 2004 8:42 AM

Jan Tielens has introduced Christof Claesens, a new BizTalk blogger. Christof has started his blog with an introduction to BizTalk that is an easy read and has a refreshing look on the subject. Great job.

by Carlo Poli | 1 comment(s)
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