We've done a serious working day today in Seattle with some of the EMEA Architects. We met 3 new colleagues from Greece, Romania and Gulf region. We were quite happy to welcome them.
Oh yes, did you guys know that July 21st is the National Day in Belgium?
Introduction
The day has started with Beat Schwegler who explained the way EMEA Architects would actually help us this year by:
This is actually a very serious investment that Microsoft is doing.
Pattern & Practices team feedback
Next, we had Don Smith, Program Manager for the Integration and Web Services on the Pattern & Practices team.
Don did a fantastic talk about the Web Service Software Factory. And let me tell you one scoop: It's gonna be released in 7 days from now! This version will only focus on ASMX web services. Next version, available early next year, will have the WCF support.
It's WS Software Factory is a great productivity tool but, as everything you do with P&P, the code you use from P&P is considered as your own code. So it's supported as such and, it's your duty to maintain it.
WS Software Factory actually implements a number of nive features among wich:
Every single piece of code generated by the WSSF can be customized and is fully opened to the user.
There's no versioning support in this implementation but this is something that really is key to the next version.
Last but not least we'll have a complete list of links to the documentation and the recipies that will be offered to the user. This will be visible in the "Guidance Navigator"
CardSpace
Then Richart Turner came for a discussion on CardSpace(tm) (CardSpace was previously known as InfoCard). Richard did that really as a discussion. It was both entertaining and interesting.
He explained the notion of Identity. Trying to answer the very simple question "Who am I?" on today's web really is a challenge. In a nutshell the conclusion is that there is no one identity and certainly not when it comes to Web Identity. So Microsoft is building an identity metasystem that matches the Laws of Identity, that is:
On top of that, there will be, on Microsoft XP and above and on Windows Server 2003 and above, a graphical user interface to help choose the identity (in the form of a membership card) you want to submit to a web site that comes with with a number of claims.
There will be 2 types of card:
Of course, Managed Cards will be more "trustable" than the self-issued cards. But sometimes, self-issued cards are enough if you want to become "John Doe" on that web site you'll never come back to again.
But hey, if you want to know more about that - because I won't write it all here- don't hesistate to read Kim Kameron's blog on the Laws of Identity or look at this Video or the complete document explaining what CardSpace is all about.
Looking at Kim's video talking about the identity laws can be quite informative as well.
Architect survey
Last section of the day has been done with John Devadoss, director of Architecture Strategy. He came to give us some hints on a recent Architect survey that we have done.
Without releasing neither the whole content of the conversation nor the entire results of the survey (more than 1000 pages!), I'll give you some interesting facts. Did you know that, amongst the persons that have been surveyed, there was:
Now, more seriously, it seems that the Architect Journal receives quite a serious traction from the Architect community. It's published at 42,000 copies and the journal web site has about 12,000 unique visitors per month. If you want to receive this very interesting publication, you can subscribe here and it's free of charge!
OK, that concludes my post for the day. I suppose I've bugged you enough with all that! :-)
Stay tuned for tomorrow's story...