Viking quest

Packaging & Building Software Factories - by Jezz Santos

2007-10-30T22:09:00Z

For those practitioners who are building software factories on our platform today I would like to direct you towards a blog entry by Jezz Santos: See here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jezzsa/archive/2007/10/29/packaging-building-software-factories-series.aspx

SOA Platform: "Oslo"

2007-10-30T21:54:00Z

On Tuesday, October 30^th Microsoft announced an important set of technical investments and a new technology roadmap at the SOA and Business Process Conference. The code name for this is “Oslo”. This announcement had three parts:

· Vision to significantly simplify the effort required to design, build, deploy and manage distributed applications within and across organizations

· Roadmap for SOA & BPM technologies, including a new set of technical investments codenamed “Oslo”

· Announce the next major versions of System Center, Visual Studio, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services and the .NET Framework.

Major League Baseball and Silverlight 1.0

2007-08-08T19:42:00Z

The first big deployment of Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0 technology went live yesterday (Tuesday), with the Web site for Major League Baseball using it for interactive video content.

http://mlb.mlb.com/index.jsp

Another polished example of how WPF can transform user experienceSilverlight 1.0 is the New York Times Reader, which many folks have blogged about in the last few months.

Recent Whitepaper Overview on Visual Studio 2008 ("Orcas")

2007-08-07T03:01:00Z

Here is an updated great overview of "Orcas" as of July 2007,by Microsoft veteran Tony Goodhew

"Team Development with Team Foundation Server” Guide now Available

2007-08-06T21:29:00Z

August 6^th, 2007

Microsoft just released the final version of the “Team Development with Team Foundation Server” Guide. This guide has been in beta for the last couple of months. This guide shows you how to get the most out of Team Foundation Server to help improve the effectiveness of your team-based software development. Whether you are already using Team Foundation Server or adopting from scratch, you’ll find guidance and insights you can tailor for your specific scenarios. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide

"Rosario" August 2007 CTP News - From Jeff Beehler

2007-08-06T20:17:00Z

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the availability of the Rosario CTP (officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” August 2007 CTP). Customers can immediately begin downloading the VPC images and learning more about the specific features in this release from the Rosario CTP whitepaper.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/08/03/first-rosario-ctp-now-available.aspx

Microsoft patterns & practices is pleased to announce the latest addition to the p&p library of architecture guidance

2007-08-06T19:42:00Z

The July 2007 CTP of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions

is a minor update to the previous February 2007 CTP, and includes the following fixes and

improvements:

– Support for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 Betas 1 and 2 (Orcas)

– Improved installer (using The Windows Installer XML (WiX))

– Support for Registration as Normal User (RANU) and experimental hive

– Enhanced support for installing Visual Basic templates

Upcoming TFS MSDN article

2007-07-20T21:02:00Z

In the pipeline is an MSDN technical article based on a large government TFS implementation (can’t say which one yetJ). It will be technical content to educate the MSDN readers on "how to extend TFS functionality" with practical 'real world' examples. It will include the following:

Brief comparison of TFS and IBM Rational Clearcase functionally - and
how TFS adds value in the enterprise space.
Overview of MSSCCI Interface and how we can extend it to communicate
with non MS products
Solution Architecture for hosting mainframe and Seibel code in TFS

Step by step process to create scripts to access MicroFocus
using MSSCCI
'Check in' and 'Check out' of mainframe code
Generate a Build report. By implementing the Code Migration
process as a TFSBuild, a Build Report is automatically generated within the Source Control repository.
Tracking errors / exceptions from mainframe seamlessly to be
handled by TFS build

Stay tuned…

Service Factory Customization Workshop

2007-07-20T20:46:00Z

There will be a Service Factory Customization Workshop on Microsoft’s main Redmond WA campus July 30th – Aug 1st 2007. This 3 day workshop will walk a limited number of Microsoft partners through the comprehensive process of adding a new model (an entity model) to the Service Factory: Modeling Edition. Participants 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, participants will also have the opportunity to ask questions, and get a glimpse into the future of the software factory platform.

For more info, see attached URL.

SOA Workshop for Architects: Tools & Modelling Web Cast

2007-07-20T20:28:00Z

A few weeks ago, I and Don Smith (Senior Product Manager Patterns & Practice Group) recorded a web cast on how development fits into the overall SOA story from Microsoft. And in particular, how Tools and modeling fit in. This web cast is about 1 hour 15 minutes long. The first 15 minutes provides a short PPT presentation positioning the Development capability of Application Platform Optimization (APO) with SOA. The remaining hour is dedicated to Don doing an amazing end-to-end high level demo (all live!) of the latest Services Software Factory (which you can find out at www.codeplex.com/services ). This factory illustrates the use of modeling (DSLs) and Guidance Automation within Visual Studio.

See presentation at: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6818541

This is one of a number of presentations (and demos) associated with the APO Infrastructure Optimization segment (see www.Microsoft.com/IO for more details).

Packaging and Building Software Factories, with Visual Studio and Team Foundations Server

2007-07-20T19:57:00Z

At the request of EPG, Microsoft, Jezz Santos (Microsoft MCS) has created, along with the product group, a two part short whitepaper series on ‘Packaging and Building Software Factories, with Visual Studio and Team Foundations Server’. The first paper will be published shortly under MSDN. The second will be published not long after. Here is a (draft) preview of the first paper. Stay tuned…

Creating Software factories today on the Microsoft platform typically involves the combination of one or more Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) packages, and one or more Domain Specific Language (DSL) packages, often combined with additional components and customizations of Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) such as tool-windows, editors, commands, services etc.

Ideally, the basic deployment of a single software factory would be within a single installer (MSI) containing all guidance packages, all DSL’s and all extensibility code and components. Although each authoring toolkit (GAT and DSL) offers easy means of creating individual setup projects, there is no integrated way of combining multiple GAT and DSL packages into one setup project, combining the required information to deploy these combined packages as a single factory deliverable.

GAT and the DSL Toolkit both require intermediate parsing/compilation/registration steps before design-time changes take effect in the packages they produce at runtime. In the case of GAT, a special registration process parses a package XML manifest file, and compiles and registers the recipes and templates to be used by the Guidance Automation eXtensions (GAX) runtime. In the case of a DSL, the DSL designer requires transformation of its text templates to source code files which are then compiled into the package and registered with Visual Studio for runtime. Both these quite unique intermediate ‘pre-compilation’ steps require deliberate and manual intervention steps from the developers creating these packages. But neither is enforced as part of the check-in or the build processes. In team development and build scenarios, these pre-compilation steps must be explicitly invoked and verified to ensure that design-time changes result in valid packages that don’t break builds, and that can be deployed.

This article delves into the various issues facing those building and deploying software factories today in team environments. The article provides practical guidance for packaging a single software factory, and automating the build process of GAT and DSL packages for team build scenarios with Team Foundation Server.

Software Factories Illustrated StoryBoard

2007-07-20T18:59:00Z

Many folks have asked me to (simply) explain what a Software Factory is, and why should they care? To that end I have created an illustrated story board. It walks through a high level value proposition of software factories using a car analogy most folks are familiar with. It was developed recently to help Microsoft partners better communicate the value proposition of software factories to non-technical folks within their organization. Software Factories are a dynamic effort and will take many years to reach its full potential. That said, you can start today with first generation software factories available at http://www.codeplex.com/.

You may use the illustrations providing you give credit to Microsoft Corporation.

Cheers - Enjoy

Intoducing the Viking MSDN blog - by Erik Gunvaldson, Microsoft

2007-07-20T17:19:00Z

This blog talks about my area of work at Microsoft within the Enterprise Partner Group (EPG) at Microsoft. Here you will find blog entries about software factories, Application Lifecycle Management, User Experience, and just general enterprise distributed development on .NET. I created this blog so partners and the general public can receive periodic tidbits on new (public) developments.

Why this blog is called Viking? Partly because I’m largely Norwegian and partly because this blog is all about discovery of new software development trends and (more to the point) conquering the traditional software development problems we all face today. I hope you enjoy. It is my first blog - so be gentle and patient in your expectations.

Enjoy!