Bill O'Brien's WebLog

evangelism can't last forever

2006-10-13T13:54:00Z

As you've probably guessed, I'm no longer posting on Architecture topics.

I'm still with Microsoft but I'm no longer the resident evangelist. Instead I've taken on the challenges of security and platform strategy (you'll have to ask me in person what that means).

So that means we are hiring an Architect Evangelist! If you think you can be the voice of Architecture for Microsoft, enjoy presenting, discussing and most importantly 'doing' architecture, then please review the job spec and apply. If you want to contact me to discuss please don't hesitate.

Otherwise farewell from this medium and thanks for reading.

Bill

VB.net team coming to town

2006-04-03T15:28:00Z

The VB.net team is coming to Dublin next week. They will be joined by our own Rob Burke and Dominick Baier, a security expert from Develop Mentor. There will be one-day technical seminars held in Belfast and Dublin on April 10^th and 11^th respectively. These events are free and include lunch.

I know there are lots of VB.Net developers out there so please sign up.

Web Developer competition for Ireland

2006-03-03T18:09:00Z

My team-mates Rob and Clare have just announced a great competition for web developers in Ireland. So if you want to expose your team to web development, try out some free (as in beer :-)) software and potentially win some great prizes then check it out.

Architect Forum - slides and comments

2006-03-03T14:13:00Z

Thanks to everyone for a fantastic turnout at the 'Software Factories' Architect Forum on Wednesday last in Dublin. We had 90 Architects listen to Beat (his blog has the 'why restaurants aren't run by developers story) and Ingo discuss this in some depth. As requested the slides are available to download (beware it’s a 23MB .zip file).

You will have heard reference to Jack Greenfield’s book on the same subject and that’s a great way to delve deeper. The guidance automation toolkit and the DSL tools are also available in preview form if you want to start playing around with the tools.

After the session we discussed an Irish Architecture special interest group. We have a great core of volunteers ready to speak and there are some nice ideas about making it interactive and a vehicle for developers who want to move into architecture. Expect an announcement on our first event soon.

Architect Forum - Dublin, March 1st, Software Factories

2006-02-14T18:35:00Z

Great news, the Architect Forum, such a success over the past 3 years is back in Dublin on March 1st. Attended by 75 of Irelands leading Architects, this is a great way to meet your peers and discuss an architectural topic with some leading speakers.

This year we have my colleague Beat Schwegler and Ingo Rammer form ThinkTecture disucssing Software Factories, an effort underway at Microsoft to evolve beyond the universal one-size-fits-all approach to constructing, deploying and managing software.

This event is typically invitation only but I have some open spaces for the community, I felt the fairest way was to make it first come first served so please register now as I expect it will fill up quickly.

Office 12

2006-02-03T16:34:00Z

I'm researching Office 12 at the moment. Looking at Office as a solution developer, things got really interesting with Office 2003. The core scenarios moved from document CRUD to include collaboration via Sharepoint integration and the Information Bridge Framework suddenly made the 'Office as Smart Client' concept more capable.

Well Office 12 ups the ante again with server based scenarios.......... oops, I had a paragraph of juicy information here but I've just checked and its internal only at the moment - sorry I'll just have to promise to come back to it soon. As a colleague told me, the office clients (word, excel, etc) are just the tip of a very large O12 iceberg.

New Architecture Forum

2006-01-06T14:35:00Z

Belated happy new year. I had a tech free Christmas break :-( but now that I'm back its time to get stuck in to content development for a series of Architecture talks I'm hoping we can run in the community over the next few months. If you are interested in talking to your peers about a topic of interest to Architects please let me know.

The new resources for Architects keep coming from Microsoft. Following the new Architecture Centre last year a set of Forums dedicated to Architecture has just been launched. Some interesting Microsoft Architects are moderating so please post and have fun - you never know who is listening :-)

Bill

New PAG guide

2005-12-14T12:08:00Z

A new Patterns and Practices guide "Web Services Security" has just been released. Its based on WSE 3.0 but as always with the PnP material it focuses on best practice and design fundamentals that can be applied in other scenarios, such as Windows Communications Foundation.

Calling IT Pro's

2005-12-09T15:58:00Z

Many of you have been using our MSDN connections experience to keep updated on events that we run in Ireland. This is going from strength to strength and you can still sign up.

Lacking so far, has been something similar for what we call IT Professionals. This includes infrastructure architects, support engineers, network designers, system administrators etc. Well we've just launched a portal and Technet Flash - newsletter that will help keep you informed and its just for the IT Pro's among you.

Bill

The Vista is fine when the Momentum is good

2005-12-02T15:41:00Z

Thanks to the members or Momentum for the opportunity to speak about Windows Vista last week. I was asked to follow up on some questions. Sorry for the delay but it took me a while to get to them. As I researched these areas it really brought home to me the huge changes taking place to the fundamental design and behaviour of Vista that will make its day to day reliability and manageability radically better. At the moment many vista demos show whiz-bang graphics or consumer apps. That’s fine but the main message is that Vista is more reliable, secure, and capable: this is often just slide ware with no demo and I think fails to show the depth of change to backup the story of improved fundamentals. The answers to these questions are really encouraging for me as it shows the breath of work going on to make Vista a great platform.

File Metadata - I was asked a great question about how the metadata is associated with files and the relationship of this metadata to the OS. To paraphrase - how does Vista know what metadata is available for each file type and can this be customised? At the time we supposed that it was probably something to do with the registry. That’s part of the answer but the whole is more interesting. PropertyHandlers are registered (yep in the registry) for each file type and they form the basis of how the various parts of Vista interact with the file. e.g. the Indexer calls the handlers to get the properties of the file. They are a very important concept and if you want to add file types or customise the handling of existing files you can read from the guru Marc Miller here.

A follow up question was if the existing Vista File explorers default search folders can be configured. The answer is no BUT you can achieve a similar result I would assume through a custom file type and your own applications.

I demoed the new event viewer which has been well described elsewhere. I mentioned that events can now be forwarded to a central server for monitoring/recordkeeping. I was asked how this works, and was it file based? The answer is that the each machine still stores its local event log (not as XML but can be rendered or exported as such) and it can be configured to forward these events to a central server. The news got even better when I delved in and found that this is supported by WS-Management and WS-Eventing. This was discussed in PDC05 session FUN316 if you access to the DVD's.

I was then asked if there are improved backup capabilities in Vista. Yes!

SafeDocs - file based backups for people without servers. It can be used to perform incremental scheduled backups of files.

System Restore - As the name suggests - allows you to restore a system to an earlier state. This uses Shadow Copies of volumes for restore. This is already in XP but it’s improved in Vista [If you restore and individual file using File Shadow Copy it can make the System Restore as well as SafeDoc versions available to choose from].

File Shadow Copies - similar to Windows Server 2003 where shared copies of documents can be restored if accidentally deleted or wound back to earlier versions.

Bill