shlock (1) - Nigels Retrospective

Microsoft and Open Source: Two cats in a sack?

2009-06-18T07:09:00Z

Jorke pinged me with details of an event he and Professional Geek Nick Hodge are running in Melbourne next Wednesday night, aimed at discussing Microsoft's relationship with Open Source, the Open Source community, and how we as an organisation are embracing Open Source. This may seem strange, given the common dogma in the community that OSS is the antithesis of Microsoft's commercial model. But I think that this position - like many other dogmatic beliefs - doesn't survive analysis once you start to scratch beneath the surface.

There will be some presentations to frame and elicit discussion, but it's the discussion that is the aim of these sessions. Nick and Jorke are looking for frank and unfiltered feedback from you on what Microsoft should be or could be doing to work better with the Open Source community. Having read the feedback from simliar sessions the guys ran at WebDU I can promise it'll be an interesting evening. If you want to come along, it's on in Melbourne next Wednesday night (24th June), 5.30 to 8.30. You can get more details - the venue etc - at the registration site. They are also running sessions in Sydney (23rd) and Brisbane (25th) - register via the same link.

Does this brooch make my back look hairy?

2009-06-15T13:44:00Z

Princess and Jess both swear this character has nothing to do with me, but I don't know if I should believe them...

Meet Nigel and decide for yourself :)

CloudApp strewth = new CloudApp();

2009-06-12T14:01:00Z

Greg just announced that we're taking some antipodean liberties with the new CloudApp() competition that is running out of the US. If you've got a great idea for an Azure based application, we'd love to see you build this out and enter it into the new CloudApp() comp. Not only will your entry be in the running for the International Community category in the US comp, but you'll also be automatically entered Greg's second (sneaky) Australian competition, where he along with our very own cloudy DPE director GP and UNSW CSE Associate Professor and cloud prognosticator extraordinaire Anna Liu will adjudicate the winner.

If you win the US competition, you will get some stuff, including the adulation of your peers as well as being featured on azure.com. All good.

But, more importantly, if you win our Australian competition, you'll receive a free ticket to TechEd Australia 2009 worth nearly 2 grand. Plus we'll make you a star at one of our events and in our various communicatons leading up to and beyond the release of Azure later this year. That's serious recognition!

Anyway, if you're interested in this you'll need to move fast. Entries for the US comp close 9th July (US time, but aim for this to be safe), and you need to have an entry in that competition to be considered for the Aussie one, which will be judged on July 22nd. To get started,

Check out the terms and conditions on over at Greg's blog,
Register for the US competition. Make sure you type 'Australia' for the country. Preferably not 'strine. Or 'straya. Or Oz.
Submit your entry by 9th July

Looking forward to seeing some excellent entries from down-under!!

...now, what was I saying...

2009-04-28T08:23:00Z

Oh yeah, that's right. I've been busy doing a bunch of things that haven't involved blogging. My bad. And I'm going to try to fix that by ... um... writing more blog entries. Some interesting things have happened in the last few months:

The March 09 CTP of .NET Services and Azure was released. And with it, a slew of entries on Clemens' blog. I'm working through these as I get time to kick the tyres on the new release. My favourite statement so far is this one: "The .NET Service Bus is the “+” in what Microsoft calls “Software+Services”. Very true :) It will be interesting to look at what new scenarios are enabled by the addition of routing and queing capabilities. Did anyone say 'intermediary' and 'occaisionally connected'?
Geneva. Ok, so not so recent, but still one of the crucial building blocks that will enable very simple cross-platform identity federation in the cloud (as well as behind the firewall). Pretty much every cloud discussion I'm having at the moment drags in authN/R as part of the furniture. And claims-based is the way to go. The more I talk with customers and partners about this, the more I'm convinced that claims-based federation is at an adoption tipping point. Now, what we need are some nice big juicy proof-points to drive this home.
Projects Projects Projects. This is where I've been really tied down as of late. I'm working on some very exciting projects targeting Azure Compute, Identity meta-systems that are enabled by claims-based federation, and service bus connected clouds that are enabled by .NET services. As they start to come to fruition (and I'm sure at least some of them will :) ) I'll be able to talk about these in more detail.

Mkay? Mkay. :)

Ron Jacobs Architecture Council slides

2008-05-23T07:04:00Z

Ron Jacobs was recently down in Australia for the Australian Architecture Forum as well as for an Architecture Council tour in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.

At the councils, Ron delivered a talk on "The Perfect Pattern Storm: Where TDD meets UX and MVP", which provided some insights into how Test Driven Development (TDD) is influencing solution architectures. His talk pointed out that the test-first mantra was/is having a significant impact in how we design software, in that a lot more thought gets put into making sure that components are testable from the outset. Sometimes this requires a change in approach, and Ron's example of this was how the 'traditional' Model View Controller pattern gave rise to the Model View Presenter (MVP) derivative. This evolution allowed the View to be made as simple (and testable) as possible, by delegating the responsibility for handling UI events to a Presenter class, which was then independently testable in isolation from the actual UI technology (web or forms) that was feeding events to the view.

The testability challenge of MVC never occured to me when I was first exposed to the pattern in my SmallTalk80 days at University, as I was too busily immersed in telnet-based multi-player dungeons and drinking beer with various mates (you know who you are). However, looking back through the lens of Wikipedia, one thing that surprised me was that Kent Beck - the originator of Extreme Programming - was actually a big SmallTalk proponent, and that in fact he'd been thinking of these things all the way back in the mid 90's. It still boggles my mind that anyone would want to build a payroll system in SmallTalk - even back then - given the demands the environment and runtime made on hardware, but then those were the heady days of computing where anything was possible :)

Anyway - Ron's slides from the Architecture Council tour can be found here. Enjoy!

Is there no end to the delic8genius branding phenomena?

2008-05-21T11:03:00Z

Got back to my desk this afternoon to discover that my machine had been defaced by a certain colleague. Not content with something like seventeen hundred impressions of his likeness during the auREMIX keynote, he also managed to 'brand' my machine, albeit in a fairly low-tech, low-brow way ;)

I think he must have run out of DG stickers.

Australian Architecture Forum 2008 - done and dusted

2008-05-21T09:41:00Z

After many, many months of planning, and a couple of crazy days of actual doing, the Australian Architecture Forum event in Melbourne and Sydney is finally over. We had a great turnout in both cities, and judging from the conversations I had with various people on the day, everyone loves the round-table/breakout format, and the opportunity it provides to get directly connected with other architects. Some of my highlights included:

Meeting and talking with architects from a very wide range of industries and organisations. Again, for me this is a key value of the AAF, in that it brings together a very diverse group of architects who - as it turns out - tend to share a very common set of opportunities and challenges around SOA.

Getting some excellent insights into Service Economies for SOA; I'm planning on writing a white paper and/or series of blog entries on some of the ideas I've been pursuing around building better alignment between the business and IT on SOA investment. I decided that I wanted to kick off my research in this area by putting the topic to AAF round-table attendees, and the feedback was very useful. Most salient comment of the day came from one of the attendees (from a logistics org) in the Melbourne round-table: "Why is it so easy to get the business to buy a truck, but so hard to get them to invest in SOA?". Why indeed? This will be the basis of some future thinking and writing on my part :)

Seeing Ron Jacobs in action, presenting on RESTful services for SOA. I actually had the priviledge of spending the few days prior to the AAF with Ron, delivering Architect Councils in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, as well as at various other developer and architecture events, which was a blast!.

Sitting in on Gianpaolo's session on the Consumerisation of IT, and a couple of his S+S round tables. GP is a very influential thinker in the S+S/SaaS industry, and it was great spending time with him, both in the round tables as well as in the spare time around the AAF.

Encountering some unexpected branding for a certain recently announced Microsoft consumer product. And no, it's not Groove done right for the internet, nor is it just foldershare re-invented. LiveMesh is something else entirely, but that's a topic for another day.

Watching Jim Webber and Josh Graham ham it up during their entertaining - and sometimes off-colour - locknote lampooning the entire SOA industry. I'm pretty sure that no stone was left unturned in thier effort to find something or someone to poke fun at :)

I also - unfortunately - missed a lot of sessions as I spent quite a bit of time running around concentrating on logistics. My thanks go out to Graham Elliott, Dave Lemphers, Yuri Misnik, Tom Hollander, and Matt Chessell for their contributions at the AAF, and also thanks very much to Object Consulting (especially Esther and Andy, as well as the rest of the Object team) for putting the shin-dig on and letting us participate!

Architecture Forum site is now back up and running.

2008-05-12T06:55:00Z

Minor glitch I think, but the AAF site was back online this morning. Register away - only a few days to go before we kick off in Melbourne!

Report just in: www.architectureforum.net.au is down...

2008-05-11T13:40:00Z

Got a report this evening (thanks, Michael) that the Australian Architecture Forum site is down. It'll be back online asap, so hold tight if you are trying to register, and keep checking back in with us.

In the meantime, check this little fella out:

We were on the road between Traralgon and Woodside this weekend, on our way to visit P's mum, and came around a corner to discover an 'ex-Roo' laying in the middle of the road. Being a moderately blind corner, it wasn't a great place to suddenly come accross for a large amount of animal at 100Kph, so after a bit of discussion we decided to turn around and move it off the road. Lucky we did, as this little guy was still in it's mum's pouch.

Although sadly it's mum hadn't survived, the Joey seemed to have escaped trauma. We gently pulled it out of it's mum's pouch, wrapped it up nice and warm and called Wildlife Victoria when we got to P's mum's place.

They were amazing, and had a local carer over within the hour to pick it up for fostering. The carer said that it's very common for Joey's to be found alive in their pouches days after their mum's have been hit by vehicles. It just goes to to show - if you hit something, it's really important you stop and check whether it had any young that might have survived (as well as assessing whether the animial you hit can be saved and/or isn't suffering, and doesn't represent a risk to other people on the road).

Australian Architecture Forum - only nine (9!) days to go

2008-05-07T07:46:00Z

We're in the final countdown to this year's Australian Architecture Forum, which I'm very proud of being a part of again this year. The AAF - in case you didn't know - is a unique conference designed to maximise opportunities for IT architects to (a) network with other architects and (b) learn how other architects practice architecture, and what they think. The idea is that rather than spend most of the day listening to presenters talk about their topic, AAF attendees split up into smaller round-tables to discuss specific topics with a subject matter expert but mostly with each other.

This is a great opportunity to get with other architects from similar (or dissimilar) backgrounds and industries to learn how they approach architecture, to find areas of common interest and practice, and to get to know others in the industry. It's also a great opportunity to get into a room in order to disagree with what everyone else is saying, which is always entertaining (and educational) if last year's forum is anything to go by :)

This year is shaping up to be very interesting, with Microsoft, IBM, SalesForce and Thoughtworks and Object Consulting working in unison to produce a single-day event that addresses multiple industry points of view. We're at an inflection point in the industry, with traditional on-premise models of software delivery being transformed by the availability of new services provided in the 'cloud'. What does this mean for architecture? How do the traditional concepts of SOA apply to this new model, and what does the future look like. I can't think of many forums where you could get the major players at the same event debating and discussing this topic on neutral ground, which for me is what makes the AAF model compelling.

Some particularly interesting (at least for me) sessions on the agenda:

Ron Todd, Worldwide Solutions Architect delivering the AAF keynote on SOA and business agility.
Peter Coffee, SalesForce Director of Platform Intelligence busting some myths about SaaS.
David Lemphers, newly minted MS corp Cloud Services Product Manager talking about SOA strategies designed to leverage the best of on-premise as well as cloud services.
Chris Seymour from Object Consulting talking about key SOA drivers for Smart Client applications
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft Corp WCF/WF evangelist talking about RESTful services co-existing with traditional SOA web services.
Gianpaolo Carrao, Microsoft Corp, discussing some of the implications of the consumerisation of IT services.
The Thoughtworks team - Jim Webber, Joshua Graham and Richard Durnall delivering what I think will be an extremely interesting (and knowing Jim) quite possibly very entertaining locknote on how the enterprise is responding to pressures in the modern computing environment (and hopefully it's not all about enterprise computing being backward ;) ).

There's only nine days to go before the first event kicks off in Melbourne on Friday 16th May, while the second event is on in Sydney on Monday 19th May. If you don't have your ticket yet, don't despair - there is still time to register at the AAF site to secure your spot. This is one architecture community event you don't want to miss!