Don Smith

If you're building web apps, this will just take 2 minutes

LockSmithDon — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:55:00 GMT

... to fill out this survey about what guidance you think is most needed when it comes to building web apps.

This includes front end design and development (html, css, javascript/jquery, canvas, svg),
Back end dev (asp.net mvc, dependency management, repositories, domain model),
And exposing and consuming services (rest, json).
This also includes application structure,
Unit, acceptance and automated testing

The patterns & practices team is building some guidance around some of the things above and we could use your direction and influence to make sure we build something you'll find useful.

It's only 15 questions and will take less than a couple of minutes (more time is welcome).

Go ahead and get started. You'll be on to the next thing before you know it.

Update: ~~The results aren't immediately available, but I'm happy to share the results.~~ I just made the results of the survey public. Please tweet. Let's get a good turn out. Thanks. #asp #mvc #webdesign #html5 #javascript #jquery #css3 #canvas #svg

Thanks!

Symposium give-aways

LockSmithDon — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 23:30:00 GMT

As someone who has spoken at quite a few events over the past 10 years, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what goes into running a conference. With less than 2 weeks before the start of the Symposium, I can already appreciate how ignorant I was. Fortunately, I've been a speaker and attendee enough times to have a decent understanding at what makes for a high quality event and what can screw it up big time. Obviously, the value per cost is an important consideration and I've tried to organize as much value as possible. Earlier today I was checking on how things are shaping up ... and I think it's looking pretty good.

Free books and ebooks from Pearson and O'Reilly
A month of online training from Pluralsight's OnDemand! Series
The three newest books from patterns & practices (Azure, EntLib and Parallel)
All presentations and demo code on a 2Gb thumbdrive bracelet (it's pretty cool, trust me)
Three evening events (ascending in coolness factor) that include food and open bars
Lots of food (big breakfast, buffet lunches and dinner with snacks in between)
Conference t-shirt that you'll customize for yourself (should be fun)
And 10 attendees will win a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Professional

All of this for only $999 is a steal. Now we're less than 2 weeks out and it has all indications of being a really awesome event. These always tend to be really intimate events and this year we have some really great keynotes, hands-on workshops and interesting talks lined up with loads of time for great conversations in between.

If you haven't already registered, what are you waiting for? Do it now!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Symposium Agenda RC1

LockSmithDon — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:37:00 GMT

Of course when it comes to conference agendas, they're really released incrementally as the sessions happen, but we think the agenda in place now is pretty darn close.

Click the image to get a better look at it. You can also see it on the Symposium's schedule page.

We're pretty excited Don Box will be joining us on Wednesday to talk about Dallas, OData and whatever else is on his mind. You can always count on walking away from Don's talks with new ideas and perspectives to consider. Also, Chris Tavares has been gracious enough to step in and give us a half hour topic on Command Query Separation. Chris has been applying this pattern to work he's been doing on Azure and this was a topic I really thought we should have. Thanks Chris. We also know more about what we're doing around MVVM on Thursday afternoon with Karl Shifflett and Ward Bell.

We still have around a half a dozen abstracts to post, but we've been posting abstracts and speaker bios regularly so check out these pages if you haven't seen them in a couple of weeks. We only have a month to go and we still have some room so be sure and register right away. It's going to be a great week and it's a perfect way to get some face time with the movers and the shakers ... especially since the PDC is sold out. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Symposium Progress Report

LockSmithDon — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:59:00 GMT

We've been making some great progress on the Symposium ... so I guess you could call this a progress report. I wrote most of this up as a response to an email asking if this event was focused on ISVs and if it would be recorded. I ended up answering these questions a quite a few more ... so I thought I would just provide my response:

I wouldn’t say the event is focused on the ISV because we also cater to the enterprise developer/architect. I also wouldn’t say it’s 100% developer focused. We find that architects and project managers also get a lot of value. Our target audience is people building solutions on the .NET platform who care a great deal about their craft - whether it’s coding, patterns, architecture, process, teamwork, testing, or the best way to think about some of the new technologies. Here’s a very brief rundown of what we have planned:

Oct 18 (Workshops): Three simultaneous half-day hands-on workshops on Enterprise Library, Prism and Windows Azure
Oct 19 (Architecture and Software Engineering): Uncle Bob Martin keynote, Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection pattern, Reusing UI, Solution considerations, Parallel tasks and Architecture Katas.
Oct 20 (Server side stuff): Azure keynote, REST, Cloud Guidance, Command Query Separation Pattern, Codename “Dallas” and Agile ASP.NET MVC development
Oct 21 (Client side stuff): Windows Phone 7 keynote, Windows Phone Guidance, JQuery, MVVM, Prism 4, Design data & the repository pattern
Oct 22 (Visual Studio): VS2010 keynote, Feature Builder Power Tool, Agile team patterns with TFS
List of many of the sessions and their descriptions (more being added regularly) also, check out the speakers we have lined up

There will be a game show night hosted by Scott Hanselman called Who’s Code is it Anyway? on Oct 20th (with dinner and drinks) and a bowling party with dinner and drinks on Oct 21st. Of course lunch is provided every day. One of the big changes this year is creating more time for everyone to interact with … well, everyone else. The breaks between sessions is 20 minutes and lunch is 80 minutes. Lunch is also done in an ask-the-expert style setup where each table with have a topic so you’re more able to sit with other like-minded individuals. The long breaks and lunches will also give us the time we all need to plan the 3 Open Space sessions we end Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with.

We will be recording the screens and the audio of each of the sessions. We won’t record the full-motion of the speaker, workshops, open space discussions, or lunch (duh). We’re not yet sure how or when we’ll release them. Certainly many of them will be available online shortly after the event. We’re not sure where yet (probably MSDN or Channel9), we’ll see. We still need to work with our external speakers on the posibility of publishing their talks.

For completeness, I should also mention that we’ve worked out some pretty good deals with sponsors. For example, each attendee will receive a month of OnDemand! training from Pluralsight ($100 value) and we’re working on arranging free books/ebooks from some well-known publishers including (of course) many p&p books. As always, attendees will leave the event with a thumb drive containing all the presentations and code samples. These events have been really successful in the past. Last year’s NSAT was 153 and 97% of attendees said they would recommend this event to others.

Well, I hope this gave you some ammunition to convince the powers that be to let you join us :) If so, you can register here.

Let me know if you have any questions. Hope to see you there!

Symposium planning and registration are in full swing

LockSmithDon — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:51:00 GMT

We have enjoyed the patterns & practices Summit for many years now. And each year it seems like we try something new. This year we’re combining some new ideas with a name change. And I’ve been spending a ton of time lately preparing for what we intend to be another great week. Not all of the sessions are locked in yet so there is still time to make some improvements. Here is what we currently have planned. Use the comments to let us what you think.

Web

Idea: a session on the results of the Microsoft/JQuery collaboration (templates for example) and how customers are using JQuery with ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure to build engaging Web experiences.
Idea: a session on development and unit testing patterns when using ASP.NET MVC (like testing routes for example). This talk could also provide a sneak peek into ASP.NET MVC 3.

Cloud

Confirmed keynote: Yousef Khalidi, a Distinguished Engineer on the Windows Azure team, will deliver a keynote on October 20th on the current and future state of the on-premise and off-premise Windows Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: the Cloud Guidance team in patterns & practices will deliver a hands-on workshop on how to get the most of the Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming (soon).
There are plenty of other options for sessions about the cloud. I’ll post some of our other ideas in the near future. In the meantime, I’m interested in what you would like to see. Perhaps something like connectivity with ...

Windows Phone 7

Confirmed keynote: Charlie Kindel, a General Manager on the Windows Phone 7 team, will deliver a keynote on October 21st on the developer experience. Abstract forthcoming.
Idea: given its mobile nature and its ability to always be connected, a session illustrating how best to use the Azure and Phone platforms together would be mega-useful. Other areas p&p has been working on is push notifications and how to take advantage of specific features like geo-location awareness and how to hook into the camera and audio features of the phone.

SharePoint

After having delivered three different sets of SharePoint guidance, there is a lot we can talk about. Some of the options include exposing and consuming data to/from SharePoint, testing and development practices, a broad overview of the changes in SharePoint 2010. Let us know.

Parallel

Confirmed: Parallel Programming with Design Patterns and .NET – Ade Miller
Multi-core and HPC technologies are rapidly moving into the computing mainstream, allowing us to develop applications with improved performance, increased responsiveness, and reduced latency. The many established design patterns in this space can help developers and architects reuse proven approaches to solving many types of problems using parallelism. This talk covers many of the key patterns and gives examples of how they can be implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 libraries. This talk is aimed at experienced software developers who are relatively new to the parallel computing space but expect it to become more important to their work.

Enterprise Library

Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: This relatively-advanced workshop will focus on the patterns and implementation of EntLib’s provider model to show how it reduces coupling and facilitates testing. This is a great choice if you’re using EntLib today. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Session on the new features of EntLib 5.0: If you attended the Summit last year, you heard about data accessors, the perf gains and a few other things. This year you’ll hear about the new things that made it in and see the new (super) config tool and other asked-for features. Abstract forthcoming.

Inversion of Control

Idea: How would you feel about a duo session between 2 heavy-hitters in the dependency injection space? We’re thinking one speaker can cover the preliminary principles, background and concepts to make sure everyone is on the same page and the other speaker can follow it up with implementation details using say, MEF. Thoughts?

Rich client

Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: The infamous David Platt, accompanied by members of the Prism team, will cover the latest Prism release in an overview of the major parts of the project. Abstract forthcoming.
This is another space that we have the opportunity to talk about a lot of different things from patterns to implementations and we’re talking to some rock star speakers on possible topics. Let us know what you would like to see and we’ll try to accommodate.

Visual Studio

Confirmed keynote: Jason Zander, Corporate VP of the Visual Studio team, will be delivering a keynote where he discusses the new features of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server and how they improve the experiences for .NET developers and architects. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Session on Feature Builder. The patterns & practices team has valued the automation and consistency that can be achieved through extending the developer’s tool box. Feature Builder is the latest incarnation of such tooling and is easily the most compelling offering to date. This session will focus on how easy it is today to bend Visual Studio to your will. Abstract forthcoming.

Agile Practices

Here are some of the titles we are currently considering. Which are you the most interested in?

What has changed in Agile
Behavior Driven Development and Executable Specifications in .NET
Patterns of Healthy Scrum Teams using Visual Studio and TFS
Be a Better Developer with Coding Katas
Effective Test Automation Strategies

There are a bunch of other sessions we’re kicking around that I haven’t included here. Be sure and stay tuned for them. You can also regularly check the Symposium page on MSDN to stay tuned. But the easiest way would be to follow the Symposium on Twitter or the event on Facebook.

My App Arch deck from the China Summit

LockSmithDon — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:31:00 GMT

This is a deck I created for the China p&p Summit. I'm posting this because I spent some extra time creating each of the 5 application type diagrams (from the Application Architecture Guide) in PowerPoint. I thought this might be useful for others who would like to use/modify them for their own use. Since this deck can have a dual purpose, I also included 12 slides of nice vector icons for using in network/software diagrams that I've benefited from for years. I used them in both PowerPoint and Visio. Let me know if you find it useful.

AppArch-ChinaSummit2009.pptx

Unfortunately, I optimized this deck for the delivery - opposed to being useful as a standalone deck. The presentation was video taped, so if you're interested in the delivery, I'll update this if I learn of the link if it is published publicly. Otherwise, I can update it with loads of comments in each slide.

Updating the factories to VS2010

LockSmithDon — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:10:00 GMT

This is just a quick post to let you know that I just posted an update over on the p&p team blog. Since this effort spans GAT/GAX and 3 factories, it makes more sense to post the updates there instead of here. Sorry for any confusion. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions. I'll still be blogging here (hopefully more) just not about the factory refresh project. Thanks.

Data Access Guidance

LockSmithDon — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:26:00 GMT

A few of us in patterns & practices, with some help from our partners on the Data Platform team have been working on some guidance to help .NET customers build data access layers (DALs). We’ve been hearing for a while that data access on the .NET platform is not intuitive and this confusion is related to technology choices, approaches, design decisions, and implementations. So in response, we putting together some guidance that will hopefully reduce the confusion.

High-level Description

The role of the DAL is to consume services* that save and retrieve data on behalf of the application. Preferably it’s loosely coupled from the application through interface definitions provided by the application layer. Often the service it’s consuming is a SQL Server (TDS/T-SQL), which implies a relational store, and there are lots of APIs to use to do this (like ADO.NET). Other times – like when you can’t get to the SQL Server or when you’re using something other than a relational store – it’s a different kind of service or one you must build yourself (e.g. REST).

* I draw a distinction between these data services and services that represent course-grained business processes and operations (think SOA, SOAP, and things in that vein). I’m not talking about business services, but I am talking about crossing tiers.

There are quite a few factors that will influence the type of store you use and the services used to interact with the store. While I personally believe our industry needs (and is continuing to go through) a reassessment of various data storage solutions, that’s not the aim of this guidance project – we just don’t have the experience and resources to do an adequate job right now. So this project is scoped to address relational stores and custom data services.

Assuming a relational store, the app will either be able to access the SQL Server directly, or it won’t. This guidance will address both of these scenarios. In the case of being able to go straight to the SQL Server, there are 2 high-level patterns for doing so: object/relational mapping (O/RM), and tabular access. So to summarize the high-level scope of the guidance:

Direct access to SQL Server
- 1. Use object/relational mapping (ADO.NET Entity Framework)
- 2. Use tabular access (Classic ADO.NET)
No access to SQL Server
- 3. Consuming data services (ADO.NET Data Services, WCF, etc.)

Specifics

We’re going to use 2 forms of guidance to illustrate these 3 primary scenarios:

Reference Implementation (RI). This is a real worldish application that is made up of an ASP.NET MVC web app, a WPF client, and a Silverlight client that each cater to the 3 different roles who use the solution. This RI will only include the O/RM and data services scenario. Tabular access isn’t illustrated since it is better understood. The image below summarizes this online commerce platform.
Written guidance. This book/PDF will have 2 parts.
- Architecture. Technology-agnostic topics and cover important concepts, principles, and framing. These topics will cover all 3 scenarios (O/RM, Tabular, and Data Services).
- Implementation. Technology-specific topics that correlate the architecture topics with how and where they are implemented in the RI.

Engage!

Like all p&p projects, we’re dropping code after each iteration (2 weeks) on the CodePlex community site and are actively soliciting feedback from YOU about what you need and how we’re doing – the more you engage, the better the guidance will be.

So hop over, download the latest drop, and let us know what you think of how we view the world of .NET data access. We’ve set up a specific page for feedback if you’re curious what questions we have – we’ll continue to build on this list over time. We’re looking forward to your feedback!

What's the deal between Devs and DBAs?

LockSmithDon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:42:00 GMT

As part of this Data Access Guidance project I'm workin on (which I'll blog more about soon), we're having a discussion with our advisors about the contention between the influence a Developer has on an enterprise solution and the influence a DBA has on the same solution. Because one of the deliverables of this project will be some written guidance, this seemed like a great opportunity to help each side identify with the other perspective so they both can have maximum impact on the solution. This will likely have a considerable effect on the architecture of the solution too.

I've created a wiki page on the project's CodePlex site so we can capture your experinece. Please pop over and drop us a line. We'll incorporate the comments into the draft over time. Thanks!

EntLib is listening ... be heard now to influence the next rev

LockSmithDon — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:52:00 GMT

Grigori, the PM for Enterprise Library, just posted version 5's tentative backlog stories and is giving you the chance to influence the priority of the stories. So don't waste anymore time here, head over, get more details, and be heard.

On the subject of Software Factories ...

LockSmithDon — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:14:00 GMT

Overview

As many of you know, the patterns & practices team has been involved in Software Factories for a number of years now. As a team who is responsible for a number of Factories and the technologies that many of them depend on (GAT/GAX), we are committed to the scenarios that benefit from their use. Okay, that was subtle, so let me repeat it for adequate emphasis. We are committed to the scenarios that have proven over time to benefit from the use of Factories. Now you'll probably hear these scenarios defined differently depending on who you hear them from, so this is what is sounds like coming from p&p: Software Factories have shown to add the value of consistency, quality, predictability, and productivity when a team must build a specific type of application multiple times.

And?

The point of this post is to communicate our commitment to these scenarios by way of the p&p roadmap for our Factories and the GAT/GAX technology. I'll share our roadmap for the near-term and let you know when you can expect us to refine this roadmap with more details and precision.

The Smart Client, Web Client, and Web Service Software Factories

Today these factories are available, are being supported, and are adding value to many customers. We're not actively adding new features to them right now because we wanted to give the teams using them to use them and deploy real apps with them so we can get their feedback that will influence their next versions. And honestly, we really needed to address some other very pressing things (like SharePoint, Silverlight, and the Application Architecture Guide). It wouldn't be wise to consider these deliverables dead. We're continuing to invest in sustained engineering and we'll be updating each of them for Visual Studio 2010. Which segues into ...

Visual Studio 2010

Some of you might remember we were a bit slow to get updated versions of these Factories out when VS2008 was released. We learned our lesson ;) From now until the VS2010 beta 2 timeframe, we'll use the time to get a sense of the work involved in updating GAT/GAX to the new development platform. Around the VS2010 beta 2 timeframe we'll begin the work of updating each of these factories to VS2010 so we can release updated versions of them within a month after VS2010 ships.

New Features

With your help we have identified a number of useful features in the Web Client and Web Service Software Factories - thank you for all the feedback. We'll communicate our roadmap for these factories in the coming months. We are also planning to bring the Mobile Client Software Factory back to life (we deprecated it last year) and add new features to it. More on this later too.

Blueprints

Many of you are aware of the Blueprints project that Microsoft's Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) team has been releasing for the past year. Today, the patters & practices team does not own and has never contributed to this technology. Sometime around the middle of the calendar year, we'll do a technical assessment of Blueprints as a candidate technology to use in the future. Obviously we'll have more on this later too.

How you can help

Help us understand the most important scenarios for you. Right now we think that includes:

The ability to create and unfold solution templates (multiple projects) in Visual Studio
The ability to gather information from devs and architects in Visual Studio (via a wizard, DSL, etc.)
The ability to invoke T4 templates and generate code

We also know there is a need for building/authoring these "factories", but we need specifics. We also need more details around the 3 high level features above.

That's all for now

There are a lot of teams in Microsoft that are extending Visual Studio to help you get the most of out of their products (WF, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET, etc). It's going to be very interesting to see how all of this can come together to help you address the Software Factory scenarios. And even more interesting to see where patterns & practices can help make the experience even better. Expect us to refine this roadmap in August 2009 after we've made some assessments and received more of your feedback.

Early Christmas: Sticky Notes

LockSmithDon — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:04:16 GMT

My good friend Pablo Galiano just let me know that Sticky Notes is ready for primetime. WooHoo! It’s not my decision, but I’m going to try to talk Mike into letting us use it on the data access guidance project I’ll be talking more about real soon. Of course, even if Mike doesn’t want to use it, I can still use it for personal sticky notes since they aren’t checked into source control, unlike the team sticky notes which are. This image shows how I might do that.

Pablo was a dev on all versions of the Service Factory and has done a ton of work for us in p&p. In addition to being a great human being, he walks on water when it comes to Visual Studio extensibility. Which is just one of the reasons you owe it to yourself to check out Sticky Notes. This video is where I started. Have fun and happy holidays. Thanks Pablo!

A Data Access Discussion at the Summit

LockSmithDon — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:17:00 GMT

I spoke this morning at the patterns & practices Summit about data access. As I described this morning, I've mostly been working in the area of Web Services for the past number of years and didn't keep up too much with the advances in data access and UI development. I'm going to be kicking off a p&p project in the coming weeks focusing squarely on your options for dealing with data in your .NET applications.

As I've come to appreciate in many aspects of my life, once you get your head in the right place ... you know, that place where everything is just resonating ... well, if you can get there, everything just seems to go smoother. So I wanted to share with everyone where my head was around data access, so they could help it get to the right place.

The premise of the talk was a correlation I made between 2 core qualities we all have as software builders (creativity & resourcefulness) and 2 major forces that have influenced software construction for decades (more abstraction layers & separating concerns). In other words, you only have to look at 2 of our strengths to understand why we've choosen these approaches (zooming out & pulling apart) in order to address increasing complexity.

When you look at the specific advances that are the result of our creativity and resourcefulness, you find Dependency Injection, Aspect Oriented Programming, Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development, etc. It could just be my perspective, but it feels like Object Relational Mapping, Repositories, etc are lagging behind. I understand it's a difficult space to get right. So, that was my justification for being excited about the opportunity to make a difference in it.

I enjoyed giving the talk. They were a great group and it was a good discussion (and it's still going). Hopefully, I was thought-provoking enough ... but even if they just sat there wondering how I get my hair to stick up like that ... I guess that's okay too.

On coupling and dependencies

LockSmithDon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:27:28 GMT

For my whole software development career I’ve been focused on the enterprise app dev space. (I did try to join the Zune team at one point, but that’s the topic of another post ;) While some people baulk at the term “enterprise” it does actually carry certain connotations to many of us. This blog entry is an inquiry - a checkpoint if you will - into that space to see if things have changed recently.

One of the things that has been consistent in almost all of the enterprise implementations I’ve written and seen customer write is the assurance that custom code be very separated from vendor technology. When you have millions of dollars invested in a [multi-year] solution, the last thing you want is for a vendor that you’ve taken a dependency on (yes, Microsoft is a vendor in this context) to change something that causes an unexpected investment in revisions.

Don, where are you going with this?

Well, I’m in the process of starting a guidance project that deals with data access – specifically, using the latest Microsoft data access technologies. Since the patterns & practices team focuses primary on enterprise scenarios, to me, this means “how to build the most appropriate data access layer (DAL) for your scenario.” (as always, please correct me if I should think about this differently)

In preparation for this guidance project, I’m going through and trying to get smart about things like LINQ to SQL, the ADO.NET Entity Framework, and what it means to use them to build a DAL. In the process, it looks like the creators of these technologies expect the developers (you) to NOT isolate their code from vendor code (LINQ to SQL is integrated into the actual C# and VB.NET languages and EF expects you to use the entity classes directly from your business logic).

So my question is … are you okay with this? In using LINQ to SQL and/or EF, are you okay with the dependencies you have to take in your DAL or are you jumping through hoops trying to avoid it?

Of course I’m mostly asking to try to assess what you would expect from the guidance. Thanks for your help.

Pair doc writing

LockSmithDon — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:51:51 GMT

That's write folks! (haha) Just minutes ago I heard through the wall what I've come to recognize as "productivity in action" and I thought it might be valuable to capture and share with you. In this photograph we're witnessing a first hand account of a dev lead, Bob Brumfield (left), a product planner, Glenn Block (center), and a technical writer, Nelly Delgado (right) huddled around a monitor talking about the best way to structure the documentation on Prism. I love seeing this level of teamwork and common purpose.

But what I love about this picture is how it illustrates Nelly's complete mastery of her role as a tech writer (relaxed, in a director capacity, letting someone else do the manual stuff): getting the others to do some writing. Well, I guess she could be manifesting complete and utter frustration at Glenn's incessantly obstinate comportment ... nah. Go Team!

WCF Security Guidance

LockSmithDon — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:39:00 GMT

If you're looking for pragmatic guidace for securing your WCF services, look no further. The WCF Security project has been posting how-to documents and videos on its community site.

Now is the perfect time to give the team feedback. They aren't done yet and are completely willing, able, and even looking forward to apply your feedback so this can be the best resource on the 'net for WCF security questions.

If you want more details about the project, check out J.D.'s post before you head over to get the goods.

Using MessageContracts and DataContracts

LockSmithDon — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:10:00 GMT

Users of the Service Factory often ask about the rationale behind the required use of MessageContracts even though the use of MessageContracts aren't mandated by WCF. I've answered this question in other venues, but it seemed like a good thing to put here in case I need to point others to it in the future.

If you ask the WCF product team when you should use a MessageContract versus a DataContract, their guidance usually revolves around the level of control you need over the message - like when you need to use custom SOAP headers*. You can find more detail in this topic of the WCF documentation. Their guidance makes complete sense if you think about the motivation they had when building WCF: to unify all of the Microsoft communication mechanisms into a single approach that is relevant to all scenarios. This is great for someone who has traditionally only done object-oriented or component-oriented development. They can be successful without understanding the nuances of building Web services.

In our experience one of the biggest hurdles for many developers who are new to Web services has been the concept of the message - rather than just passing around types like they've always done. You can characterize this distinction as implicit versus explicit message design. We have a topic in the Service Factory documentation that touches on this distinction. I think there is some room for improvement on this topic, but you can find it here nevertheless.

However, the confusion over a message isn't the only reason we elevate the importance of the message and recommend these usage patterns. We intentionally draw a clear distinction between types (both primitive types like string, and complex types like Customer) and messages (like ProcessExpenseReportRequest). From our perspective, DataContracts represent types and types are reusable. Messages are not used as types but rather the payload a method operates on - and it is not reusable since they are specific to the operation they are passed to and from. This level of distinction provides architects and lead developers a means of achieving better consistency throughout their organization by being more prescriptive about reusability.

I am aware that Juval's position is that MessageContracts are rarely needed. And, I hold Juval in the highest regard - I've not yet had an opportunity to learn what is motivating him to take this position. Some might argue that MessageContracts are just an additional (unnecessary) level of redirection. I can understand this point of view. We just feel the benefits greatly outweigh this nominal cost, and the feedback we've received from customers has been completely supportive of this approach.

* In my opinion, there is only one reason you would need to create a custom SOAP header that isn't already defined by a standards body like WS-*. (hint: if it's already defined elsewhere, you should use it to ensure interoperability, instead of "rolling your own") And, that reason is if you need to pass around localization information (like "en-us"). I don't think this is covered by any WS-* or other spec.

Pretty Impressive Management

LockSmithDon — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:17:00 GMT

I was pretty impressed by something my manager did recently. I've shared it with a few other people, but I think this is noteworthy enough for a blog entry. My hopes are that other mangers will be equally impressed and carry out similar acts.

My manager (we'll call him Shaun ... since that's his name) and I were talking about career development during one of our weekly one-on-ones about 8 months ago and I mentioned to him that I would really like to take on some direct reports and more responsibilities at the group-level (of patterns & practices). I've always enjoyed seeing people succeed and am ready for my job to allow me to have a more direct opportunity to influence that more. I've also been in p&p for almost 3 years now and feel I have a deep understanding of what we do and how we do it.

I really shared this with him so he would know what I was thinking - not because I expected him to do anything about it. Actually, I didn't think he could do anything about it. You see, p&p is a small group - only about 30 full-time Microsoft employees. In other words, there is no way for me to move up and stay in p&p unless another manager slot opens up, which isn't likely, or Shaun leaves his position, which I also didn't think was likely. Shaun was basically the second employee of p&p - he and Mike Kropp founded the group.

Of course Shaun also knew there wasn't anywhere for me to go if I wanted to stay in the group (which he knew I absolutely wanted to do). Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was around this time that he began looking for other opportunities outside of p&p. Fast forward to today. Shaun has found a very challenging role in another group in Microsoft and has named me acting* Senior Product Planner. After this week, I will be honored to have Glenn, and Grigori reporting to me and I'll have to hire my replacement (let me know if you're interested).

When he told me that it was my desire to move up that caused him to reevaluate his situation, I was more than impressed. Yes, Shaun has been a fantastic manager (Glenn and Grigori agree) and it is this kind of act that speaks volumes about the kind of person and manager he is. I'm not so naive to think that my desires are the only thing that motivated him to move on, but knowing it was a factor is impressive enough. It's very different from the "yeah, I'll get to move up when Joey Stayput dies" situation we always hear about.

Thank you Shaun. I have some great shoes to fill and I promise do my best.

* Right now p&p doesn't have a leader. Once one is appointed (hopefully in the next 2 weeks) he will decide if I take on the role completely or if he would rather hire someone else into it. So until then, I'm just "acting".

Roger joins the fray ... w00t!

LockSmithDon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:32:00 GMT

My good friend Roger Lamb has just joined the blogsphere and I assure you that if you are interested in anything remotely related to Sharepoint, you'll want to subscribe now. Check out his first post.

You see how I just did that? How I increased your expectation, and thus, his commitment around his blog?

Isn't the blogsphere wonderful? haha

Welcome to the chaos bro!

Influence MSF guidance

LockSmithDon — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:27:00 GMT

My colleague, Andrew Delin, is making the process of developing software real for development teams. However, he doesn't want to do it in a vacuum. If you think you know anything about development processes, I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. http://blogs.msdn.com/processblog/archive/2007/09/25/so-tell-us-what-you-think-about-the-msf-guidance.aspx. Thanks.

Service Factory Customization Workshop

LockSmithDon — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:20:00 GMT

Microsoft Main Campus (Building 20)
July 30th – Aug 1st 2007
Redmond, WA

Description

Many software factories being built today use a number of different technologies, which include the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX), the Domain Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit, Visual Studio extensibility components, and a few other additional utilities. This is definitely true for the Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition. Much of the feedback we’ve received about these technologies, with regard to building and modifying software factories, revolves around the difficulty of customizing them. More than 40% of all users of the Service Factory will change it in some way before using it to build Web services. Typically, this is done to specialize it for some additional requirement or customize it towards a specific customer domain (i.e. industry vertical). Requiring development teams to know these technologies at any technical depth, beyond what the factory itself provides, justifies any effort to make the customizations as easy as possible.

This 3 day workshop will walk you through the comprehensive process of adding a new model (an entity model) to the Service Factory: Modeling Edition. You will become very familiar will all aspects of the factory infrastructure: DSL models, recipe automation, model validation, cross-model references, model views, project mapping, technology extenders, code generation, and factory deployment. Because the workshop will be hosted by the Service Factory team and other Software Factory experts, you will also have the opportunity to ask questions, and get a glimpse into the future of the software factory platform.

Purpose

Transfer knowledge from factory experts to attendees about building software factories on today’s technologies with insights on how these technologies are changing in the future.
Transfer knowledge from the attendees to factory experts about the most important and common types of modifications necessary to build other software factories.
Design hands-on exercises for others in the software factory community to learn from

Prerequisites

This should be considered an advanced workshop. It is highly recommended you have a working knowledge of GAX and the DSL toolkit. There will be some introductory content around the technologies, but there will be a heavy focus on writing C# source code. It is recommended you have reviewed the source code of the most recent Service Factory v3 pre-release (v3b87).
You must bring a laptop and a VPC will be provided. If you can have Microsoft Virtual PC installed ahead of time, it will save you from having to install it after you arrive. This will prevent you from having any other system requirements on the machine.
If you plan on attending, please have a number of changes you would like to make to the factory in mind. One of the main reasons we’re hosting this workshop is to be sure we understand what the most common and important customizations are (so we can make it as easy as possible). We will ask you to define your scenarios at some point while you are here.

Agenda

DSL modeling
Recipe automation (GAX)
Model validation
Cross-model references
Model views (tool windows)
Implementation project mapping
Technology extenders
Code generation framework
Factory deployment
Factory futures

Cost

There is no registration fee for the workshop.
Attendees are responsible for making and paying for their own travel to and from bldg 20 in Redmond, WA.
Attendees are responsible for their lodging accommodations during the workshop. Suggestions can be provided after registering.
Breakfast and lunch will be provided on all 3 days and a dinner event will be provided on Tuesday night (July 31st).

Registering

We apologize for the short notice, but please register by July 27th so we can ensure your ability to attend. Attendance is limited to 60 people so please RSVP by sending an email to Don Smith as soon as possible. In the email, please provide the following information about each attendee:

Full name
Company name
Email address (required for internet access)
If a vegetarian or high-protein lunch is required

Please email Don if you have any questions.

A time for reflection and assessment

LockSmithDon — Tue, 08 May 2007 09:15:00 GMT

Wow, it's hard to believe it has been almost a year since the patterns & practices team released our first software factories. Remember when the early customer previews were called Baseline Architecture Toolkits? Oh, the nostalgia :) We could have had so much fun with the BAT acronym ... haha.

So that means now is a perfect time to take a quick assessment on how we're doing so far ... that's right, a survey. Now hold on a second! At least hear me out for the rest of the paragraph. I can't devulge too much detail yet, but some team in Microsoft might be in the middle of building some serious software factory infrastructure for a future version of Visual Studio - that's right, much better than GAX and DSL tools. Do you want it to suck? Do you think software factories are just a pipe dream and would rather they build something else? If you're thinking, "Oh no Don, I like software factories, especially the Service Factory (okay, I'm embellishing - haha)," then I would ask you to keep reading. I promise we've tried to optimize the survey to allow you the highest level of impact in the least amount of time possible.

Whew, you're still reading ... excellent! Okay, so you're only looking at 9 generic questions and 9 questions for each software factory you've evaluated/used. This survey covers the 4 factories released by p&p (web service, smart client, web client, and mobile client). The first 8 questions will take no more than a minute or two. The 9 questions for each factory shouldn't take more than 10 minutes each and you will only see the questions for the factories you choose. The last question is an anything-else-you-want-to-share question - you can take as long as you want on it. That's it ... super quick-n-easy.

Here is the URL you need to take the survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2266YYVWSKP

We're really looking forward to your feedback so we can help the future include some truly kick-ass factories.

First Service Factory v3 Community Drop

LockSmithDon — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 09:28:00 GMT

Okay, we're off and running now. Earlier today I posted the first of many community drops for Service Factory v3 - don't let "build 19" fool you - this is the first one. It took us longer than expected to get this one out the door, but we're all set now.

I suspect the first question you have is "What is so specially about this release?" Fair enough question. Well, probably the biggest thing is the addition of models. This alone accounts for most of the improvements over v2. I'm not going to go into too much detail here (there will be plenty of time for that later), but here are the high points:

Now Visual Studio has a memory about your decisions. In v2 you place your decisions in wizards. In addition to models, there are still wizards, but it's the model that "remembers" so you can generate code anytime you like.
Now you have a visualization of the application you are building. The designers provide this. Right now there are 2 designers/models. The first screen shot below shows the one for service contracts and the one after that shows data contracts.
Now you can delay the platform decision (WCF/ASMX/etc) and the language decision (C#/VB/etc) until as late as you like (way after you define all the service, message, and data interfaces.
With this version there is also no assumption that you have already define the service contract before you start using the factory. You can either approach the solution from a capability perspective (dropping operations on the service contract designer) or from a data perspective (dropping data contracts on its designer).

Here is what they look like (I added the thin red boxes):

I'm trying something new during this release by including a "start here" document and a "walkthrough" document for each drop. I'm hoping this will:

Save you lots of time in evaluating this drop.
Set your expectations around how much time you will need to evaluate the drops.
Provide you a very directed way to provide feedback about the drop.
Give you an easy way to see what the new features are every 2 weeks.
Let you know what the known issues are with each drop.
Get me more high quality feedback so I'll know we're building the best, most appropriate Service Factory we can for you.

So please use these docments and give me your thoughts about them.

You can expect new community drop every other Friday until the end of October (unless something really unexpected happens of course).

Download Service Factory v3 Community Drop 19 here

Looking forward to your feedback ...

Now Available: Aaron's new Service Factory article on MSDN

LockSmithDon — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:04:00 GMT

Steven just told me that Aaron Skonnard's latest Service Factory article about the December release was just published through his Service Station column in the MSDN Magazine. Talk about timing ... sweet.

Even though it was written and finished before we locked down the code, it is still very accurate and comprehensive. I mean, it's Aaron ... what else would you expect?! There a few minor places where we changed the code out from under him so if you have a question about anything in it, feel free to leave a comment here and I'll field it.

Oh, and if you're building ASMX services, be sure to check out his first Service Factory article about the July (ASMX) release.

Great job Aaron!

... come and get yer Service Factory!

LockSmithDon — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:30:00 GMT

That's right ladies and gentlemen, the December release of the Web Service Software Factory and a VB.NET version is now available for your consumption, modification, and production pleasures :)

Okay, I'm just going to do 3 things in this post since I know there will be many more to follow:

Lay some links on ya. For downloading the Service Factory releases and more info.
Share my favorite new features of the Service Factory with you.
Give you a sense of what is to come in the near and not-so-near future.

Links

Service Factory December release helps you build both WCF and ASMX services in C#. The old July release is no longer available since everything it contained is included in this release. Web Service Software Factory–December 2006 (ASP.NET and WCF services in C#)
Service Factory July release that helps you build ASMX services in VB.NET. Yes, I know this is new and was actually published in December, but it is effectively the same exact version as the original July release - it's just been converted to VB.NET (that's why we're calling it the July release). If this is confusing, I apologize ... I'm to blame. Web Service Software Factory–July 2006 (ASP.NET services in VB.NET)
Service Factory information. If you're not sure what the Service Factory is and want to find out before downloading it, go to http://msdn.com/servicefactory to learn more about it.

Favs

WSDL-first support. This feature definitely wasn't the most challenging to include, but I still love it. I've spent a lot of time over the years monkeying around with WSDL files. The fact that Service Factory has a single recipe (wizard) that will take a single WSDL and generate the service interface, service implementation, binding configuration (config file), and all of the associated DataContracts/XmlSerializable types is just freakin' sweet. You have to see it even if you don't define all your contracts in WSDL first.

Versioning guidance. This is a favorite of mine because ... well, I wrote it haha. No, seriously ... it's no secret this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I have labeled the topic "emerging guidance" in the Service Factory documentation because I want to gather more evidence from customers that this approach is actually working for them before I propose we call it a "proven practice". I have spoken with a number of customers who have taken this approach and it is working well for them. I haven't spoken to anyone it didn't work for, but I'd love to hear from you. If you're interested in reading or sharing, I've also posted the topic on my blog here. Personally, I think the "strategy" section of the guidance is still weak on content, but more on that in the "futures" section of this post. I also plan to do a webcast on it.

WCF Code analysis. This one turned out to be the sleeper feature - we didn't expect this to turn out so sweet. As you may know, FxCop has been integrated into Visual Studio 2005 under the name Code Analysis. Well, we took all of the same rules that used to be the Security Analyzer back in the WSE days and converted them all to code analysis rules. They also work against the code AND the config files (something FxCop hasn't done historically). I know, pretty sweet, huh? Well, when we showed this to the WCF team, they asked if we could include some of the rules that they fire at run-time so they could be run at design-time (like the ones that make sure all the binding stuff is consistent). "Sure", we said. So there are about a dozen of them too ... and it's all integrated into Visual Studio ... even if you're not using Service Factory.

Recipe runner. Okay, now I'm cheating a little. This isn't actually a feature ... and it's not really included in Service Factory. One thing we learned while building the July release was that testing GAX recipes is feakin' hard. Well, harder than it should be. So the team took a couple of months at the beginning of this version to get it right. The result is something we call RecipeRunner. Those of you who are creating your own recipes or heavily modifying the ones we provide will really like this if you care about testing, which you should. We'll be making it available on the community site in the near future.

There are loads more things that are new and way cool in this release, but I want you to discover some of them for yourself too. Of course I'll be mentioning them as time goes on and in some mini videos. Oh, that brings me to the last item on my agenda.

Futures

Blogcasts. The very next things you're going to start seeing are more of the blogcasts I did some months back. Many of them are outdated now and I need to do more of them now that the WCF Service Factory has released. The feedback was very positive (thank you) and because I claim to listen to you, I promise to do more of them shortly.

HOL exercises. I've already began the process of converting the existing hands-on lab (HOL) to WCF. Additionally, we'll be adding a bunch of new exercises. What I need from you is some details so we're sure they are helpful. This is what we have in mind:

Modifying a guidance package - There is already a how-to in the Service Factory documentation, but customers are always telling me they need more help. If you tell me what kind of changes you're making to guidance packages I will try to create an exercise that illustrates how to make that change.
Building a service agent - A service agent is that layer of code on the consumer side that invokes the proxy (that's right, you're NOT suppose to do it in the button's click event handler :). It manages things like retries, response caching, offline support, asynchronicity, etc. I need you to tell me what kind of challenges YOU (not your neighbor) need. That will help me get this exercise right.
Versioning - this will build on the topic I mentioned earlier and will walk you through how to evolve a service in a number of ways.
Message validation - The reference implementation already illustrates this. But would you find a HOL exercise valuable? If not, cool, I'll spend that energy somewhere else. If so, also cool.
Exception shielding - The reference implementation also illustrates this. Same question ...
Create a code analysis rule - I think this is also covered in the VS documentation, but I've never looked for it. Are you going to be writing your own rules? If so, would you find a HOL exercise helpful?
Workflow Foundation - we actually did a lot of work with this, but had to pull it at the last minute (yeah, sometimes cutting scope at the last minute hurts). We might be in a position to create an exercise as a result of what we already have. We'll see.

v3 planning. We have already began the planning process for v3. But because we JUST started, we don't have a lot to share just yet. I can tell you (if you didn't already guess) that a service domain specific language (DSL) is the primary theme of the next version. I will be sharing everything with you around the features and their priorities as soon as we have something to share. As always, we'll be counting on you to steer us where you need us to go. All of this communication will naturally happen on the Service Factory community site, which will be moving to CodePlex in the very near future. More on that later too.

Okay, it's getting late and the weather is getting nasty so I'm heading home. Until next time, you have a lot to keep you busy :D Looking forward to your feedback. Thanks!