Beat Schwegler's 2 Cents

Architect and Develop Search-Enabled Enterprise Applications

beatsch — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 19:43:00 GMT

I have to admit that I fell in love with Enterprise Search... Finding stuff within an Enterprise is a very challenging task that differs in many ways from searching html or pdf on the web. Some of the questions I started to ask myself were:

What is the impact of Enterprise Search for a Solution Architect?
What does it take for an application to become searchable?
Or even more interestingly, how can I add search capabilities to my application?

If your interesting in these topics, my paper on "Architect and Develop Search-Enabled Enterprise Applications" might be an interesting reading for you ;-)

BTW, this will also be the topic for my TechEd.session in Barcelona.

The Iron Architect is back...

beatsch — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:37:00 GMT

Simon just announced this year’s Iron Architect problem! I’m already looking forward to see some inspiring solutions…

We just got a superstitious rebate

beatsch — Tue, 29 May 2007 11:27:00 GMT

Last week, I was speaking at the Developer Summit in Stockholm. It was after the speaker dinner when we (Erik, Dan, Patrick, Niclas and others) were heading to a bar for a couple of drinks. Patrick was in the process of paying when he suddenly started to laugh out loud. It was then when he realized that we just got a superstitious rebate;-)

Swedish to English translation: (“Vidskeplig \n\r öppen rab.kr” = “Superstitious \n\r Open rebate.sek”)

TechEd Europe, I'm coming...

beatsch — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:28:00 GMT

After Tech·Ed Israel and Tech·Ed US, Europe will be my third TechEd this year and I'm really looking forward to it! Being part of the content team, I'm especially proud about the great speaker line-up and the quality content. Everyone involved in events like this knows how much energy and passion is required to compile a great track. And so was it for Emmanuel and myself: Over the last 5 months, we put a lot of effort into our two tracks, the ARC and the CTS track. (If you wonder why there is no session with a CTS prefix, here is the answer: "We decided to reduce the amount of tracks to 5 (ARC, DEV, MBS, OFF, SQL). Therefore the CTS track is now embedded within the DEV track. However all CTS sessions are part of the BPI (Business Process Integration) virtual track.").
As you can imagine, we're really looking forward to see the result of our work...

If you can't go to Barcelona check out the amazing Virtualside. This is just a great idea, I love it...

If you're lucky and will go to Barcelona here are a couple of things you shouldn't miss:

The ARC booth
Whether you have a specific question or just want to have a chat with another Architect, this is the place where Architects meet! BTW, this is also the place where you find more information about the great p&p stuff such as the Enterprise Library or the Service Factory. Come and visit us...
Participate in the Iron Architect Contest
Who comes up with the best/most elegant/most innovative/smartest/... solution for the given problem and wants to win an amazing price? Come to the ARC booth and pick up the 'ingredients' for the Iron Architect showdown. The showdown will be live on Friday Fri Nov 10 15:15 (ARCWD06 Iron Architect Finals).
Don Smith's and my session "Proven Practices for Implementing Services"
DEV308 Thu Nov 9 10:45 - 12:00 Room 113
This session will take a closer look at some of the issues developers and architects encounter while implementing services using ASMX and Windows Foundation Classes (WFC). We'll discuss common challenges around contracts and messages and elaborate on how to decouple the service internals from its service interfaces without adding too much complexity to the overall service design. At the end of this session, we're going to demonstrate how to implement such services by leveraging the ASMX and WCF Service Factory from the patterns and practices team.
My session "Abstract Concepts: Architecting Applications for a Service-Oriented World"
ARC 206 Fri Nov 10 13:30 - 14:45 Room 112
Many people still believe that service-oriented systems are just a Web of applications connected through Web services, where as the real power of service-orientation lies in the definition of a conceptual service model that defines the contract and interaction of the services. Given the fact that few projects count as 'grass root' projects, this session covers how to build new applications and also about architectural re-factoring to move an existing application into the service-oriented space.
Iron Architect Finals
ARCWD06 Fri Nov 10 15:15 - 16:30 Room 130
Come and be a member of the audience and help decide the winner of the first annual Iron Architect showdown. Contestants have been given their ingredients, now it's time to see them perform in front of a live audience. All members of the audience will participate in voting for the winner. Come and be part of history and make your vote count!

Last but not least, don't forget your swimsuit as there are rumors that it it's still possible to take a swim in the Mediterranean...

My Tuesday at JAOO

beatsch — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:37:00 GMT

What a day it was. I was surfing on a great wave while attending sessions about DSL, AJAX and Agile Development. I started the day with Markus excellent session on DSL best practices. Beside many other things, he emphasized on building your own metamodel, which represents the formal definition of the domain being described. Hey and I couldn’t agree more with his advice to never ever modify generated code (that’s exactly why I love partial classes ;-).

After lunch, I decided to interrupt my flow on DSLs and I attended Nikhil’s session on ASP.NET Ajax (aka Atlas). I liked his definition of Ajax: “It’s not about scripting or XML over Http but about providing a smarter experience for the user”. How right he is! An important building block for ASP.NET Ajax applications are server side controls. They provide a very nice programming model to abstract many of the client side scripting and therefore simplify the creation of consumer pleasing websites. In addition to that, it also provides a nice separation between content and site functionality.

A short break, and it was time to learn more about the intention of “Intentional Software”. They have a very ambitious goal of changing the way software is written: Today, the gap between the domain knowledge and the actual implementation in code is too big. Therefore it’s extremely difficult to provide traceability and consistency between these two representations. In contrast to the classical DSL approach, “Intentional Software” developed a “domain workbench” which allows them to mix the representations of different domains within a unified view. I certainly stay tuned on that…

Now back to web and Ajax: I attend Bruce’s great session on the “Google Web Toolkit (GWT)”. In a nutshell, it’s a toolkit that allows developers to build “Ajaxy” websites by leveraging the Java programming model. Its architectural foundation is around a Java compiler that finally produces JavaScript. It comes together with a Java class library to build the actual sites. Bruce really emphasized the fact that they put a lot of effort to make building Ajax applications as easy as possible and to give the user a very rich user experience. For example, this includes support for history, bookmarking and keystroke enabled tree controls.

Last but (certainly) not least, I attended Alistair’s session with the arcane title “If I was going to Glasgow, I wouldn’t start from here”. If you haven’t been there, you truly missed something. I don’t even try to summarize this 45 minutes but I want to say “thank you Alistair“: “I really enjoyed it and I wished it didn’t end after 45 minutes…”.

http://tempuri.org needs to be updated soon...

beatsch — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:33:00 GMT

I'm really looking forward to see the following lines on http://tempuri.org:

[ServiceContract(Namespace = http://microsoft.com/webservices/")]
public interface IMyWebService{
}

Finally an msdn site on SaaS

beatsch — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:49:00 GMT

Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/saas/ to get more information on SaaS.

Speaker Idol - Are you the Next Speaker Star?

beatsch — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:43:00 GMT

I’m super excited about the “Tech·Ed Europe: Developers” Speaker Idol contest. I believe this is a great opportunity to become an invited speaker at Europe’s largest IT event! If you’re a great presenter as well as a subject matter expert, you should definitely consider to participate in our “Speaker Idol” contest. I thoroughly believe this is a great platform and I hope to discover some new super stars! We're looking for you...

Don’t wait; go for it!

Service-Oriented Modeling for Connected Systems – Part 1

beatsch — Mon, 08 May 2006 11:05:00 GMT

Due my intense travel I completely forgot to blog that the first part of Arvindra and my paper on “Service-Oriented Modeling” got published on the Architecture Journal…

In this paper we introduce a three part model that helps you to map business capabilities to service oriented implementation artifacts by using a so called service model.

The more I work with this model the more I realize how important this separation of concerns really is. Especially defining the conceptional service model allows you to decouple contracts from technology restrictions. If you’re interested in that topic and plan to attend TechEd Israel or TechEd US, my session “Architecting for a Service-Oriented World” might be of interest for you.

From Batman to Service BAT

beatsch — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:48:00 GMT

I’m really happy to announce that the Service BAT workspace went public yesterday! What started as project Batman resulted into a full blown effort called Service BAT! Edward Bakker wrote a great blog entry about this new guidance and tooling experience for the service development domain!

Thank you guys @ p&p! I really like that stuff…