Bye Bye Application Blocks and Shadowfax
So I'm half way Tech Ed and I'm quitte statisfied. This morning started with a session from Wojtek Kozaczynski about how to realize a Service Oriented Architecture. Pat Helland was assisting Wojtek as he talked us throug 9 points you need to realize when you start building SO software. Some things were obvious (leave the legacy where it is, just wrap it) but some others were eye openers to me:
Performance (just accept that WebService is slower than Remoting (Is your businesslogic that simple that the action taking the most time is the communication?),
Store the messages you receive and the results of the mesage (because a message can come in multiple times)
Cache ( to beef up some loss of performance )
Aggregation (use some service to just aggregate data from one or more services,)
Based on my day-to-day activities in our Software Development Line I attend the session from Rafal Lukawiecki on the Micorosft Solution Framework. It gives guidance on how to do software development and has a lot of simalarities with RUP (from Rational). I feel that Rational has better support for here RUP approach with their tools but Visual Studio Team System is going to be a major threat to that position (although I don't thin Visual Studio 2005 will hit a RC before Q2 of 2005). I think we will have to review all our processes for MS based projects...
The session on new goodies in the CLR 2.0 was not that spectactular. Generics is great, some performance goodies. Funny to see that MS is back in the Ex ing their classes and API's. Also in .Net we are going to see the same Class in v1.0/1.1 and in v2.0 (with Ex). Interface versioning is still very complex. The only thing I hope we can stay away for ExEx-ed classes... ;)
Wojtek did also a session on Patterns and Practises Application Blocks. Poor Wojtek is a great thinker but not a great programmer (or he is not using Visual Studio on a day-to-day basis) but he managed very well. He talked about all Application Blocks and what the idea was behind them and what they can do for you at this moment. He admotted that there are some flaws in the blocks. They don't operate always well together, they are not designed/programmed/documented with the same principles in mind, complexity and so on. He appoligized for that a few times (we kept the tomatoes in our pockets ;-)). Amazingly this will be the last version of the application blocks.
The new kid to look out for is Application Block Library. (EnterpriseBlock). The major blocks (not the UI blocks) are being converted to a new Application Block Library that is go developed with a partner. It will ship in decmber. It will bring the app blocks to more stable level but I don't think you shouild heavily invest in them right now.
Then there is Shadowfax. It is gone! Shadowfax will be broken up in smaller pieces and become blocks in the new Application Block Library. So MS is stepping out of her own implementation of the reference architecture and is just putting the lessons learned into application blocks. I wonder, is that the reason that Fabriq is so prominent on this TechEd?
Anyway, learned a lot, drink a lot, eat a lot and now up to the final session for today.