Distributed Rants, by William Oellermann

This will be my final post on MSDN blogs.  To follow my future activities, thoughts on integration, and industry observations, please check out http://www.opusgrid.com .  There isn’t much there just yet, but you might want to check back on November...

Tomorrow will be my last day as a Microsoft employee.  Over the last 6+ years I’ve been able to tackle some great challenges and learn a great deal about the software industry and the real world challenges of large enterprise organizations. ...

This phrase was used quite a bit this week at the Gartner AADI conference and while I am pretty skeptical when it comes to new acronyms and technology names, i do rather like this one for two reasons. First it allows us to cut through some of the ambiguity...

I'm attending Gartner's AADI conference this week. They might as well call this the Application Platform as a Service (APaaS) conference as its all about the Cloud, SOA, BPM, and distributed application development. It's a very nice to hear Gartner recognizing...

This week we published a technical whitepaper on Microsoft downloads that discusses in some detail how we enable service virtualization on the .NET platform through the Managed Services Engine (MSE). Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight authored this document...

As a US holiday, today has long been designated as "clean my office" day. Since I am often on the road, my office is my home study and over time, a number of papers, notes, mail, and computer parts seems to somehow accumulate (I swear sometimes these...

I'm in the Southeastern U.S. this week and next for the Microsoft Connections Spring Symposium. I'm speaking on The Need for SOA in the New Economy, touching on the keys to success based on our experience with customers across the world. There are four...

Over the past year and a half, there have been many articles, books, and blogs covering SOA Governance. While I initially thought this was a good shift by the industry to focus on the process and people side of SOA, I now realize that most of these efforts...

In the services world, there has been a lot of attention on discovery: the need to discover the existence of services through a directory or tool. UDDI attempted to solve this problem with limited success, but has gained "checkbox status" among organizations...

It recently dawned on me with all the discussion around "SOA is dead" and the desire of analysts to discover the next thing, that IT mindshare is really very similar to a reality show. I'm not just talking about the life imitating art aspect, I mean that...

Last night we released the February 09 CTP of the Managed Services Engine (MSE) on CodePlex. With this release, we are crossing over into the modeling paradigm with a new WPF-based UI that allows you to not only define your service components, but visualize...

So its been a while since my last post... okay, about 3 months if you check the archive. I've been heads down for just about that long to help get the next release of the MSE ready (which will be available later this month). We have been working on some...

I'm over in Barcelona this week for TechEd EMEA Dev Week. Many thanks to all of you that attended my session on "SOA Governance and Service Virtualization" on Wednesday and asked some great questions. It is great to get some international perspective...

I'll be in Barcelona for TechEd Dev Week to present on SOA Governance & Service Virtualization (SOA01-IS) on November 12th at 9am. My good friend and colleague, Wolf Gilbert (VP with SOA Software), will also be presenting on SOA Governance on Nov...

Last week, SOA Software announced their certification of the Managed Services Engine (MSE) as a governable solution, along with their continued support for .NET and BizTalk. This release highlights some of the collaborative work taking place between Microsoft...

Steve Martin today posted a preview of some of the announcements that will be made during PDC later this month: http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/10/01/the-road-to-pdc-net-framework-4-0-and-dublin.aspx I know that Microsoft has taken a couple...

I have been very critical of the SOA articles that have been written over the last several... well, ever since people started writing them. They have typically come across as very self serving (simply promoting a product, vendor, or organization) and...

During TechReady7, I was asked by Kirk Evans, Architecture Evangelist with Microsoft, to demonstrate some of the latest features and capabilities of the Managed Services Engine (MSE). The MSE is one of the assets we have developed leveraging WCF and SQL...

David Chappell made this statement last week during one of his presentations at TechReady7, Microsoft's semi-annual internal technical conference in Seattle*. While I'm certain that this statement was made in part to shock the audience (after all he is...

I came to Microsoft in February of 2004 to be a part of the best software company in the world to help customers realize the full potential of SOA. It started as a team of one and over time it became a lose group of individuals that put a lot of effort...

To many people's satisfaction and disappointment, I have decided to start a blog. For several years, I've been asked by colleagues and friends "Where is your blog?" This has often been followed by chastising comments when they learn that I don't have...