Sehmi-Conscious Thoughts : MSArchitectPortal

Microsoft Tag - Snap. Blink. Wow!

asehmi — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:21:24 GMT

Sometimes there's just a really cool idea worth mentioning. I hope this Mobile Tagging concept takes off because with server redirects from the info stored in the high capacity colour barcode tag, the possibilities seem endless and loose associative coupling between tag and function means the target scenarios can be really flexible.

"Microsoft Tag creates unlimited possibilities for making interactive communications an instant, entertaining part of life. They transform physical media (print advertising, billboards,product packages, information signs, in-store merchandising, or even video images)—into live links for accessing information and entertainment online.

"With the Microsoft Tag application, just aim your camera phone at a Tag and instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, and more. Nothing to type, no browsers to launch!"

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/tag/ for general info, http://tag.microsoft.com to make tags (you'll need to sign in using your Live ID), and http://gettag.mobi to download the tag scanning/snapping app for your mobile phone (Apple iPhone; Blackberry 81xx, 83xx and Bold; J2ME based handsets; Symbian S60 3rd Edition ; Windows Mobile 5 and 6).

This is my tag below and I can use the management tool to set up the associated tag action. In this case I've linked the first to my Blog and the second to my vCard, but you're also able to link to free text or a dialler. To get them to do their stuff just click to see a larger image, then Snap. Blink. Wow! :-)

This is the management console where, as of now, I have just two tags. Notice how you can get a report of how many times your tags would have been scanned.

This could be big for business to consumer scenarios!

Update: Long Zheng has written a couple of neat technical post on this technology. Check them out - [1] [2].

TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers - Introducing the Windows Embedded track

asehmi — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:46:52 GMT

Catherine Heller, Technical Evangelist on my team, has been working hard to put together a great Windows Embedded track at TechEd EMEA 2008: Developers in Barcelona, Spain | 10-14 November, 2008. She's provided a comprehensive write up of the track on her Blog - "We believe there's a huge opportunity for developers in this space, especially as solutions begin to span devices, the PC, and the Web."

I'm presenting at TechEd too, in the Architecture track. My session is:

ARC313: Decentralized Software Services in Action: Architecting Integration and Grid Patterns using the CCR & DSS Toolkit 2008

This talk will provide a brief introduction to the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR), Decentralized Software Services (DSS), and Visual Programming Language (VPL). They ship as part of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and the newly announced CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008. These .NET technologies are being used in non-robotics applications ranging from business processes, major web sites, retail automation, command and control systems, scientific computing, sensor-nets and much more. At the core of CCR/DSS lies a powerful concurrent messaging engine plus a REST-like protocol. This enables users to easily build applications that require coordination of messages between loosely-coupled service-oriented components within and across distributed nodes of the application spanning embedded and traditional client/server systems. To explore the applicability of these technologies to distributed systems computing we describe a couple of simple frameworks. The first shows how enterprise integration patterns can be built on DSS and composed with VPL. And the second is a system to host and dynamically deploy autonomous connected DSS services. Both can run across the full range of Windows embedded, server and client operating systems.

Day 5, Friday, November 14, 15:15 - 16:30, Room 117

Hope to see you there!

Architecture Journal #17 - Article on Distributed Embedded Systems

asehmi — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:21:01 GMT

I've been working on Distributed Embedded Systems and related communications technology recently so for the "Distributed Computing", Issue #17, of the Microsoft Architecture Journal I wrote a paper on the subject. My Aim was to open up - 'expose' - this very exciting field to the "traditional" distributed systems community. As the industry moves from standalone, smart devices to connected devices and then towards systems of service-oriented connected devices, we will begin to see much more overlap with "traditional" distributed systems design and architecture practices. Not everything we (traditional distributed systems developers and architects) know translates easily to the world of distributed embedded systems, so it's vitally important to understand the different challenges and issues faced, technical imperatives, development strategies, and technology road maps. Hopefully, in my paper, I've done some justice towards answering those questions.

Apart from my own paper there's a fab collections of others. I haven't started reading them as yet, but personally know and respect many of the authors. I know attendees of PDC2008 will be receiving a copy of the Journal, so we've been calling this the "PDC Issue"! The new editorial team are beginning to make their positive marks and you'll notice a new clean, bold look to the Journal as it starts to establish a shared identity with Microsoft other "architecture evangelism" assets. I approve wholeheartedly, but it still hasn't got the minimalism I think we prefer in Europe Western/Northern. But at the end of day it's about content value and that you certainly have in abundance.

http://www.msarchitecturejournal.com/pdf/Journal17.pdf

On another note, my colleague, Yuriy Zaytsev, alerted me to a Japan MITI survey which concluded:

(4) Over 40% of the quality problems with embedded products after shipment are caused by software errors.
The leading cause of the quality problems with embedded products after shipment was software errors (46.3%), followed by hardware design faults (21.8%) and production faults (12.7%). A trend over the past four years is that the percentage of faults during product conceptualization and specification continues to fall year after year. Software errors have remained the major cause of quality problems for the past four years.
(6) Advanced* embedded software engineers are needed.
Although overall shortages are easing, demand is still high for embedded software engineers with advanced skills; the shortage rate of entry-level engineers was 26.3%, while that of advanced (experienced) engineers was 48.4%. Over the three years from 2006, the shortage rate of entry-level engineers fell from 44.2% to 26.3%, showing the largest decline among all the categories. The shortage rate of advanced engineers stood out last year at 64.9%, but the rate declined this year, making the disparity between different skill levels restored to an extent equivalent to that of two years ago.

*Advanced: Capable of implementing technologies, methodologies and businesses while exercising leadership or capable of implementing these while leading internal and external teams by means of standardization and the development of new technologies.
Intermediate: Capable of discovering and solving challenges in business operations while exercising leadership.
Entry-level: Capable of discovering and solving challenges in business operations under the leadership of higher-level engineers.
(7) Software engineering methods have been introduced for improving quality and developing human resources.
The respondents’ most common reason for having adopted solutions developed and provided by the Software Engineering Center was “quality improvement” (cited by more than 75%), followed by “human resource development” (more than 60%). This suggests that many respondents recognize SEC’s solutions as effective for solving major challenges in developing embedded software. About 70% of those who have adopted SEC’s solutions give high marks to them, rating them as being “beyond expectations” or “just as expected.”

The questions that arise for me, especially in the context of realizing Distributed Embedded Systems solutions (i.e. Complex Embedded Systems), are:

Which, if any, of the software development processes, design and architecture methods we use in traditional software development, can be leveraged in Embedded Systems development to mitigate these quality problems and skills shortages?
What is Microsoft doing to address these issues in terms of next generation tool chains for this industry?

Over the next few months we'll certainly be exploring these questions in more detail and report back our learning.

Anyway, here’s wishing you a great read of Journal 17!

JAOO 2008 Presentation

asehmi — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:46:19 GMT

In a previous post I listed all the Microsoft folks presenting at JAOO 2008. Well that event has successfully come and gone this week and I'm pleased to share my presentation with the community.

My talk went pretty well and I achieved my objective to explain the relevance of Distributed Embedded Systems to traditional distributed systems developers and architects. I briefly discussed the Device Profile for Web Services and CCR/DSS as good candidates for DES communications infrastructure, choosing to describe these technologies mainly because they would be relevant to my audience in non-DES scenarios too.

The back end of my talk hints at Fabriq4Dss - an implementation of Fabriq (remember that?) on CCR/DSS. I skipped the demos of Fabriq4Dss because I only had 45 minutes for the session, but rest-assured you'll be hearing more about this here soon.

Other highlights of the conference were meeting, Gregor Hohpe and Jeff Sutherland. Gregor attended my session after which I demoed another recent CCR/DSS/VPL project of mine ("PIE") related to his famous book on Enterprise Integration Patterns. We're plotting something together which I hope can be pulled off.

I sat next to Jeff Sutherland at the speaker's dinner. He is of course the co-creator of Scrum and as we chatted he intrigued me with a number of non-S/W development uses of the process. Having myself, just prior to JAOO, attended at a team offsite exploring elements of virtual teaming and organizational design with Dr Homa Bahrami, I thought this conversation with Jeff was sweet serendipity - which in turn reminded me of the late Roger Needham's words, "Serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer's daughter." How-so-very-true!

JAOO was a great conference and I'd like to extend my thanks to Beat Schwegler, Microsoft Denmark and the JAOO organizing committee for having me.

P.S. We'll be talking a lot more about these topics at Tech-Ed EMEA Developers 2008, 10-14 November (select Embedded Systems, Architecture tracks).

ARCast.TV - Nice Example of CCR Adoption in the Enterprise

asehmi — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:52:14 GMT

Over on ARCast.TV, Bob Familiar interviews Stephen Tarmey of Tyco Software House on how he discovered the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) in the Robotics Studio SDK and used it to implement a high-throughput asynchronous messaging I/O pattern. This is a very common problem scenario that a number of enterprises are discovering can be solved rather elegantly with CCR.

ARCast.TV - Stephen Tarmey of Tyco on adopting Robotics Studio CCR for High Performance Async IO

Also, see my earlier post on CCR/DSS Use Cases in the Enterprise for some ideas. Watch this space as we'll be publishing some public case studies soon.

Microsoft folks at JAOO Conference, Sep 28 - Oct 3, 2008 Aarhus, Denmark

asehmi — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:31:29 GMT

Many of my colleagues and I will be presenting at the very popular JAOO Conference in a couple of weeks time. Although I can only be there for one day for my own session, I'm really looking forward to it. There's a buzz at JAOO that is rarely matched in other developer conferences.

"JAOO Aarhus is Europe’s premier developer conference on software technology, methods and best practices. The conference is designed by developers for developers and as a result JAOO provides a unique combination of industry leading expert presentations, learning, and networking opportunities."

Here's a list of 'Microsofties' speaking:

Anders Hejlsberg, Opening Keynote: Where Are Programming Languages Going?; C# 3.0 and LINQ
Arvindra Sehmi, Distributed Embedded Systems -The 5 Billion Devices Developer Opportunity
Beat Schwegler, Enterprise 2.0 & Enterprise Search
Erik Meijer, Why Functional Programming (Still) Matters; LINQ + New Microsoft Things; JavaScript as an Assembly Language
Jeffrey Snover, PowerShell
Joe Duffy, Concurrent Programming with Parallel Extensions to .NET
Josh Holmes, Architecture of a Rich Internet Application (RIA); Developing RIAs with Silverlight 2.0 (session + tutorial)
Mario Szpuszta, Office in a World of Services and Mash-Ups; Understanding the ASP.NET Web Development Platform (tutorial)
Pratap Lakshman, ECMAScript 3.1
Ronnie Saurenmann, A Developer's Guide to the Microsoft Platform (parts 1 & 2)

There's a great keynote line up and big selection of well organised tracks. Take a look at the agenda - it's pretty damned good. I hope to see you there!

Gorgeous Fractals with VPL and Distributed DSS Services

asehmi — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:43:21 GMT

I think Angel is fast becoming one of VPL's biggest fans. After discussing some ideas with him about simple Map-Reduce scenarios for his agent toolkit and a grid system that I'm building, he went ahead and did it. Check out his distributed Mandelbrot fractal generator. Gorgeous results. A bit over-engineered as a fractal calculator, but that wasn't the point really!

You can get Angel's blog, agent toolkit and sample applications here.

Using the Visual Programming Language (VPL) as a Deployment Tool

asehmi — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:43:48 GMT

When building applications using CCR, DSS and VPL one doesn't need to know a priori the precise order of data and message flows between services. Many of the VPL examples provided with the MRDS show services already 'wired' up which can give the impression that one needs to know this information and design one's set of services to be orchestrated as such up front. What if you don't know this information up front but still want to use the VPL? Well, there's the pub/sub pattern supported by DSS out of the box which is very handy and well-understood. Or one can define a 'host' service that acts as a message forwarding system based on its own service directory (perhaps using the one built into DSS). Or one can use an external configuration file that defines the orchestration itself (like a BPML specification, say). Additionally, one could use UPnP device (service) discovery.

But orchestration is not the only thing, what about deployment? Well, the VPL also supports service deployment and this works across multiple physical nodes too!

Angel Lopez has extended his Web Crawler sample and without knowing the orchestration a priori uses VPL simply to create multiple instances of his several service 'agents'. The actual 'orchestration' is emergent as a result of collaboration between his agents and the 'agent host' - in fact he can have several agent hosts in the same Web Crawler application. The agent hosts forward messages to service agents based on their capabilities inferred from a logical 'URI' which gets physically bound when the agents themselves register with their (machine) local hosts. Should more than one agent service offer the same capability, such as web crawling or page downloading, the agent host will automatically load balance across them.

An interesting benefit of using the new VPL (in the April 2008 CTP of MRDS) is its ability to deploy services on multiple DSS nodes which themselves can be hosted on physically different machines. Angel does this with his Web Crawler application and together with the application-level load balancing facility his sample offers a neat and simple outline of potentially powerful solutions that you can build using this approach. I particularly liked the lack of a priori orchestration and the use of VPL as a multi-node deployment tool.

Check out Angel's application here.

Aspiring Architect Series - 2008

asehmi — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:45:18 GMT

My mate Mohammad Akif in Microsoft Canada is doing a sterling job helping folks aspiring to become Software Architects by providing a gentle introduction to common methodologies and software architectures. Visit his Blog to see the full list of upcoming Webcasts in the Aspiring Architect Series - 2008! These will run, one every day, from June 16 - 26, 2008.

For those of you new to this field, definitely plug into The Microsoft Architects Journal as well. We have a ton of very useful material you will benefit from regularly.

If you want more visit the MSDN Architecture Center.

CCR/DSS Use Cases in the Enterprise

asehmi — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:40:18 GMT

I'm often asked what Enterprise customers are using CCR/DSS in serious, i.e. pretty significant, production deployments. I'm not at liberty to disclose the names of our customers without their permission - a few will be made public soon - but I can say there are quite a lot of application domains where this technology is being applied seriously. Here's a list of scenarios I mined from our internal list of CCR/DSS adoption customers in the Enterprise:

Very large scale web request load balancing & IO handling (online social networks)
Security systems (distributed sensor networks)
Package sorting system (real-time logistics monitoring and control)
Real time processing of seismic data in drilling control (industrial automation & control)
Supply Chain Modeling (simulation and control)
Law enforcement information intercept/inspection (large scale complex event processing)
Automated inventory inspection system in FMCG/retail scenarios (vision processing)
Financial trading systems (transaction flow routing and processing)
Business processes - there is an academic BPEL implementation on CCR
Scientific computing – MPI primitives concisely written as CCR patterns (exchange, shift, double shift)

Hopefully that's useful and piques your interest to look at this Microsoft Robotics (CCR/DSS) stuff deeper.

The Next Revolution in Productivity - Harvard Business Review Article Related to MSBA

asehmi — Tue, 27 May 2008 04:15:40 GMT

I got my monthly issue of HBR this weekend and was really pleased to see the article "The Next Revolution in Productivity" by Ric Merrifield, Jack Calhoun and Dennis Stevens. For those of you who've followed my posts on Business Architecture and Capabilities, this article will be a welcome and easy going read with a strong connection to MSBA, though the terminology used is a little different.

The article makes strong points that "most companies that have embraced SOA have applied it without first rethinking the design of their businesses. This omission means they have overlooked SOA’s greatest value: the opportunity to create much more focused, efficient, and flexible organizational structures." And that "few companies are using SOA to create more productive and focused organizations or to slash costs by purging duplicative operations and technologies. They are not revisiting the fundamental design of their operations."

The idea of plug-and-play businesses is mentioned several times and builds upon an understanding of how new operating models can be developed from some key classes of capabilities or activities:

primary - i.e. core capabilities in MSBA terms - are activities that constitute the core competency of a company.
shared activities are re-useable across divisions.
shifted - i.e. outsourced capabilities in MSBA terms - are activities that can be performed by or transferred to a third party including partners, specialists and even customers.
automated activities are capabilities implemented as software services that can be incorporated into a SOA.

The article doesn't address what I see as a challenging gap between a capability definition and what you actually implement as a service in a SOA. The authors' use of the term activity rather than capability made it sound (to me at least) plausible if not easy to implement services in a straightforward manner provided activity analysis has been performed thoroughly. Getting to processes is then just a logical next step. But, having said this challenge is more or less glossed over, it's acceptable to omit tough technical design issues like this in HBR given its business-oriented target readership. The most important point that good SOA begins with good business architecture design and can lead to great improvements in productivity is made very well and with some great case studies too.

Finally, this paper is definitely worth reading and you ought to mail it to your CxOs immediately.

Web Crawler in VPL/DSS

asehmi — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:33:14 GMT

In another weekend project down in sunny Buenos Aires the prolific Angel "Java" Lopez has (re)written a web crawler sample app we had from another project so it can be used in the VPL in MRDS. Check it out here.

I had some minor Visual Studio version issues and in my case contract versioning issues getting it to work as is with MRDS April CTP and VS2008. The fixes are in Angel's blog comments.

Mexico Regional Architect Forum 2008

asehmi — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:27:32 GMT

Last week I had loads of fun delivering a CCR-DSS-Robotics presentation at the Mexico Regional Architects Forum (RAF) in Mexico City. There’s something wonderful about this technology that set many people abuzz and I had some great conversations and brainstorming with some customers over drinks at the evening cocktail party. I find there's a very strong connection to enterprise scenarios and I gave a number of examples of how CCR-DSS could be used in common enterprise situations. I only hope we can get permission to publish some of our internal case studies on how some big enterprise customers are using this stuff in pretty impressive ways.

Many thanks to Vlad Vinogradsky; Marc Mercuri; George Chrysanthakopoulos; Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Charles Liptaak for their material which I mashed together! Vlad did a great job putting together a compendium of samples that illustrate the basics of programming against the CCR which was extremely useful. To gain the most out of it, you must read Jeffrey Richter's MSDN magazine article on the CCR.

I also did a keynote presentation on Business Architecture and explained some of the recent fine-tuning being made to the MSBA methodology and I was able to demo a prototype of the new SQL-backed MSBA Entity Modeling Tool and Repository which replaces the unwieldy Excel-based heat maps and repository. My thanks here go to Mike Lloyd of Carbonflame who came up with a pretty neat Flex Index which helps contrast Capability models to Organizational Hierarchies, Process Optimisation and IT Infrastructure models. (Mike has been a long time proponent of MSBA since the days it was referred to a Microsoft Motion.)

I want to say what a pleasure it was for me to be in Mexico City which I thought was fabulous even though I saw very little of it. The food was superb and quite different to the commercialised Mexican food I have experienced in Europe and USA. The people I met are so easy going and friendly. Juan Lozada Villas, the D&PE Director, treated the RAF speakers to an evening at an authentic and apparently famous Mariachi restaurant (I think it was called Tarana?) which was awesome! I had an excellent education in Tequila from Jesus Hernandez Sanchez and tasted a number wonderful varieties. My favourite was Jose Cuervo 1800 Anejo and the Reposados generally... I bought three bottles at the airport Duty Free!

One last thing... Feliz Cumpleaños to Eduardo Nava Malagon! Sorry we didn't manage to sing to you during the keynote!

RoboChamps

asehmi — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:37:10 GMT

RoboChamps has launched!

I've been on the road in Latin America so am late to make this announcement as I was really busy. But better late than never as they say. Robotics = Services + Orchestration so it could prove really interesting - intellectually at the very least - to those of you who have not considered this area as useful as traditional application development in terms of learning about software design and architecture. It's time to prove yourself wrong.

Very briefly RoboChamps is:

A new simulation-based robotics league
New 3-D environments will be released every 1-2 months
Based on MRDS 2008
Targeted at ALL software developers - professionals, students, academics and hobbyists alike
A community site providing links, videos, samples, training and forums
Participants can win REAL robots

The Web site is chock full of great learning material and I especially like the tutorial videos, starter kits and the most excellent Chapter 3 on the CCR of Kyle John's upcoming book. I must admit I love all the bling too. :-)

Marc Mercuri has done a really outstanding job with this project - Thanks Marc!

Introducing Live Mesh

asehmi — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:12:56 GMT

Some say this is what will propel Microsoft innovation for the foreseeable future. One thing's for sure, it'll be big.

Angus Logan has the details.