Beat Schwegler's 2 Cents : General

My Tuesday at JAOO

beatsch — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:37:00 GMT

What a day it was. I was surfing on a great wave while attending sessions about DSL, AJAX and Agile Development. I started the day with Markus excellent session on DSL best practices. Beside many other things, he emphasized on building your own metamodel, which represents the formal definition of the domain being described. Hey and I couldn’t agree more with his advice to never ever modify generated code (that’s exactly why I love partial classes ;-).

After lunch, I decided to interrupt my flow on DSLs and I attended Nikhil’s session on ASP.NET Ajax (aka Atlas). I liked his definition of Ajax: “It’s not about scripting or XML over Http but about providing a smarter experience for the user”. How right he is! An important building block for ASP.NET Ajax applications are server side controls. They provide a very nice programming model to abstract many of the client side scripting and therefore simplify the creation of consumer pleasing websites. In addition to that, it also provides a nice separation between content and site functionality.

A short break, and it was time to learn more about the intention of “Intentional Software”. They have a very ambitious goal of changing the way software is written: Today, the gap between the domain knowledge and the actual implementation in code is too big. Therefore it’s extremely difficult to provide traceability and consistency between these two representations. In contrast to the classical DSL approach, “Intentional Software” developed a “domain workbench” which allows them to mix the representations of different domains within a unified view. I certainly stay tuned on that…

Now back to web and Ajax: I attend Bruce’s great session on the “Google Web Toolkit (GWT)”. In a nutshell, it’s a toolkit that allows developers to build “Ajaxy” websites by leveraging the Java programming model. Its architectural foundation is around a Java compiler that finally produces JavaScript. It comes together with a Java class library to build the actual sites. Bruce really emphasized the fact that they put a lot of effort to make building Ajax applications as easy as possible and to give the user a very rich user experience. For example, this includes support for history, bookmarking and keystroke enabled tree controls.

Last but (certainly) not least, I attended Alistair’s session with the arcane title “If I was going to Glasgow, I wouldn’t start from here”. If you haven’t been there, you truly missed something. I don’t even try to summarize this 45 minutes but I want to say “thank you Alistair“: “I really enjoyed it and I wished it didn’t end after 45 minutes…”.

http://tempuri.org needs to be updated soon...

beatsch — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:33:00 GMT

I'm really looking forward to see the following lines on http://tempuri.org:

[ServiceContract(Namespace = http://microsoft.com/webservices/")]
public interface IMyWebService{
}

Speaker Idol - Are you the Next Speaker Star?

beatsch — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:43:00 GMT

I’m super excited about the “Tech·Ed Europe: Developers” Speaker Idol contest. I believe this is a great opportunity to become an invited speaker at Europe’s largest IT event! If you’re a great presenter as well as a subject matter expert, you should definitely consider to participate in our “Speaker Idol” contest. I thoroughly believe this is a great platform and I hope to discover some new super stars! We're looking for you...

Don’t wait; go for it!

From Batman to Service BAT

beatsch — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:48:00 GMT

I’m really happy to announce that the Service BAT workspace went public yesterday! What started as project Batman resulted into a full blown effort called Service BAT! Edward Bakker wrote a great blog entry about this new guidance and tooling experience for the service development domain!

Thank you guys @ p&p! I really like that stuff…

It’s not about the Feature, it’s about the Scenario!

beatsch — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 13:23:00 GMT

I just came back from South Africa where Arvindra, Ingo and myself delivered the Architect Forum on Software Factories in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Since the Cape Town event was on Friday, we stayed over the weekend to explore the great landscape of the Capes.

While Ingo and I were visiting the area of “Cape Point” and “Cape of Good Hope” I got attracted by the following historical actuality:

As we all know, sailing along the coast of South Africa was a big challenge in the early days of our global economy. A lot of ships crashed on riffs which surround the capes. In the mid of the 19 century, the plan emerged to build a lighthouse that helps ships to navigate around the cliffs of “Cape of Good Hope” and “Cape Point”. The big question was where to place the lighthouse:

On Cape of Good Hope, the most south-western point of the African continent
On Dias Point, close to the actual riffs
On Cape Point, 249 meter high peak between Cape of Good Hope and Dias Point

They decided to build it on Cape Point because it can be seen from far away. The lighthouse was built in 1860 and the white flashing light of 2000 candlepower could be seen by ships 67 kilometers out of sea! From an engineering perspective, this was great work. But in reality, the lighthouse proved to be ineffective as it was often covered by cloud and mist. At this point one important question arises. The scenario that makes a lighthouse most valuable is navigating in bad weather and poor visibility. By solely focusing on the candlepower and the ability to be seen as far as possible, the decision to build the lighthouse on the highest point sounded brilliant. In reality, it was very ineffective as it didn’t support the most important scenario: navigating in bad conditions! After the wreck of the Portuguese liner “Lusitania” in 1911, it was decided to erect a new lighthouse on Dias Point, 87m above sea level.

I think this is a great example why scenario driven design approaches makes so much sense and can prevent our systems from great but useless features!

Why Restaurants aren’t run by the Software Industry (part 2)

beatsch — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 12:38:00 GMT

In my last post, I discussed some assets that restaurants enable to deliver high quality dishes on budget and on time. I truly believe that in the software industry we have to step up to the next level of predictability, quality and efficiency. Software Factories are a long term vision to improve productivity and predictability across the software life cycle. Let’s have a look at the four “pillars” of Software Factories and how they address some of our pain points in our industry:

Software Product Lines

Product lines help to avoid expensive and error-prone one-of developments. In our restaurant example, once the core dishes are defined, a customer may still choose his preferred type of meat (configuring) or he might even be able to convince the kitchen to use tofu instead of one of the meats on offer (customization). But most of the processes, the ingredients and the used tools are still the same and therefore well planned.

In Software Factories, Software Product Lines are described as following:

Build new solutions by assembling partial solutions and/or configuring general ones
Specify only the unique features of each solution and assume the common ones
Variations in requirements map predictably to variations in artifacts and processes
Reduce custom development by 40% to 80% for the typical solution

Software Factory Schemas

The Software Factories Schema describes how the different assets (tools, patterns, guidance…) are aligned with the supported viewpoints for the whole software lifecycle. In our restaurant example, the waiter presents you with a menu. Every item on that menu has a clear relationship to a dish preparation process. Every stage of this process lists recipes, ingredients, essential preparation steps (such as heating a plate) and the transition between these stages.

In Software Factories, Software Factory Schemas are described as following:

Define viewpoints that identify and separate key stakeholder concerns
Organize tools, process and content by viewpoint
Relate and integrate life cycle phases, system components, and levels of abstraction

Model Driven Development

Models are used to formally express the artifacts of a certain domain. The menu is a formal way the restaurant presents its customers the available dishes. It usually consists of a name, a price and optionally a number and/or description. Sometimes it also lists available variations such as the different meat. In most cases, menus are easy to understand and are the preferred way of communicating the available dishes to the customer. Different type of restaurant may require different type of menus to ensure they speak the language of the customer (pizzeria vs. gourmet restaurant).

In Software Factories, Model Driven Development is described as following:

Create highly focused custom languages for specific problems, platforms or tasks
Develop custom tools to support them
Use metadata captured by models for automation

Guidance in Context

Context-less guidance is not very useful because different project types require different decisions. Guidance in Software Factories is valid in a certain context and is optionally supported by automation. Having well described recipes in place allows the restaurant to distribute some of the work to less experienced stuff. The chef just has to ensure that the recipes are not too generic but explicitly tight to the menu he is going to prepare.

In Software Factories, Guidance in Context is described as following:

Provide guidance that helps practitioners know what to do and that helps them do it
Build installable packages containing organized sets of configurable guidance assets for common use cases
Attach guidance to steps in the process and parts of the architecture
Scope process steps with pre and post conditions to let project work flow vary subject to constraints

Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about Software Factories, here’s a list of resources:

Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools
The book: Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools
Jack Greenfield,s blog
The recordings of Ingo’s and my Architect Forum on Software Factories. (site is in Finnish but the recordings are in English)

Why Restaurants aren’t run by the Software Industry

beatsch — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:04:00 GMT

Last week, I attended a great cooking class as part of my Architect Bootcamp delivery in Denmark. It is really impressive to see how this industry understands the streamlining of the creation of a meal but still is able to ensure the highest level of quality. While we were preparing parts of our own meal, I started to think what would happen if our industry would run a restaurant:

Let’s imagine the experience of a dinner in a restaurant that is run by the methods and principles of software development:

You entered the restaurant and the waiter guides you to your table. After you’ve been seated for already 15 minutes you start to wonder when he is going to present you with the menu. At this stage you can’t know that many waiters also act as cooks and the reason for this delay is based on fact that he currently was cooking a dish for table #5. After another 15 minutes the waiter finally made his appearance and asked you what you want for dinner. Since this is not your first time in a restaurant, you wonder why he is not presenting you with a menu. Based on experience there exists only one possible reason for that: They don’t offer an “a la carte” menu and there is no need for you to specify your choice. You just order the multi course gourmet menu, that’s it. But wait a minute; this restaurant is run by the software industry: You can order whatever you want! You only have to ensure that the waiter understands what you mean by “medium” or “well-done”. After a lengthy discussion about the different type of meat you decided to order a lamb shoulder on herbs and served with a red wine sauce. As a side dish you wanted something that another restaurant called “potatoes a la Provencal”. Regrettably, you’re unable to explain this dish in a way the waiter understood so he suggested you should go with rice. The waiter disappears in his kitchen and starts to cook your meal: First, he’s looking for appropriate cooking books containing a suitable recipe. After a couple of minutes he found something: It was a recipe for a beef roast with a delicious red wine sauce. If it works for beef why shouldn’t it work for lamb? When he was trying to organize a lamb shoulder he realizes that this is going to be more expensive than expected so he decided to replace the lamb trough pork. But the real trouble started as soon as he wanted to create that delicious red wine sauce. He suddenly realized that the sauce is based on a stock that itself is a reduction of 110 liter of water together with 10 kilograms of beef bones. Making such a stock takes ages because it will be cooked until only approximately 8 liters of intense and concentrated beef stock is left. That was the point where he decided to replace the red wine sauce with the leftover of the previous meal: a sweet curry sauce… All in all more than an hour later, the waiter also known as the cook serves your dish: “A nicely roasted pork shoulder on a sweet curry sauce served with rice”. This is for sure a nice dish but just not what you ordered. As if this wouldn’t be enough, the dish was even more expensive than agreed. The restaurant argued that everything was especially created for you and therefore they couldn’t accurately predict the cost… as if you would care…

While analyzing their approach I came up with some interesting points that may help our industry to better understand how we can become more efficient

To deliver on the highest level of quality, you need to be specialized. Not only are most restaurants categorized (Thai, seafood) but the smaller the menu, the more likely the ingredients are fresh (freshness increases the quality).
To create a dish fast and on the highest level of quality you are required to focus on a small number of dishes. This allows you to think about the streamlining of the preparation and you’re able to prepare the different “building blocks” in advance.
To avoid misinterpretation provide your guests with a menu. Also be aware that they might be unknowledgeable of the domain specific expressions such as “Pommes Dauphine”.
To deliver on time, planning and preparation is essential. When the chef is planning a new dish, he is not only thinking about the recipe but also about the way he can streamline its creation. What are the “building blocks” that need to be prepared upfront (such as the stock), what is the stuff that will be prepared before the restaurant opens (such as cutting onions or herbs), what are the required tools (e.g. steamer)… For a restaurant, a successful dish doesn’t only require a great recipe but also clear descriptions of the requirements, different building blocks, tools and a process that describes how to cook a meal on a consistent level of quality.
Prices are based on a transparent calculation based on the cost for ingredients and the time needed to prepare that dish.

It’s very promising to see that these points are addressed by the four “pillars” of Software Factories, so stay tuned for the second part of that post…

We're looking for a new colleague

beatsch — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:22:00 GMT

We (Arvindra, Kevin & I) are looking for a bright new colleague in the role of a Solution Architect Evangelist working for Microsoft EMEA HQ. If you’re an experienced architect who's passionate about technology as well as the business and you don’t mind traveling, just have a look here.

Virtual Indigo Track @ TechEd Europe

beatsch — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 03:26:00 GMT

I'm really happy about the massive Indigo coverage we're going to have at TechEd Europe. Since this content is brand new, the presenters agreed on doing a lot of extra work! Thanks guys, I owe you all a beer...

Introducing "Indigo" - The Unified Framework for Building Connected Systems, Ari Bixhorn
Implementing "Indigo" Endpoints – Addresses, Bindings, and Contracts, Steve Swartz & Christian Weyer
Implementing "Indigo" Endpoints – Secure, Reliable, Transacted Messaging, Steve Swartz & Ingo Rammer
"Indigo" Under the Hood, Steve Swartz & Clemens Vasters
Implications of "Indigo" and Service Orientation for Architects and Architecture, Steve Swartz & Clemens Vasters
The Day "Indigo" Met the "Tiger", Ted Neward
BizTalk Server 2004 and "Indigo", Morten Abrahamsen

TechEd Europe is the best way to get a full dose of Indigo ;-)

WSCWS: Post Mortem,

beatsch — Thu, 26 May 2005 09:22:00 GMT

I delivered my Web Service Competency Workshop (WSCWS) in EMEA during the last 4 month. It was a great time: I met a lot of bright people, had great discussions about technology as well as the meaning of life. That’s why I like to share some of the non-technical experiences with you:

Iceland, Reykjavik
I haven’t seen much of this fascinating place (it was January and we had approximately 3-4 hours daylight). However, I won’t forget the great dinner (thanks Gisli) Eating seafood in Iceland is a must…
Norway, Oslo
With ~300 attendees this was definitely the largest audience on that tour. I would love to see Oslo in the summer…
Russia, Moscow
I’ll never forget that trip to Moscow. But also working with a translator added to the unique experience of delivering the WSCWS in Russia.
Spain, Madrid
During my stay in Madrid, an anti-terrorism conference was held in the same Hotel where I stayed. This implied security screening every time I got to the hotel. Beside that, I just liked the food…(thanks Carlos)
Finland, Helsinki
The Finnish language offered me some interesting challenges: Just try to tell the taxi driver that you have to go to a street called Satamaradankatu…
Ukraine, Kiev
Beside the frightening event in the hotel, I won’t forget the great atmosphere of that event.
Portugal, Lisbon
Jose and I really enjoyed the nice waves of the Atlantic ocean. Surprisingly, the water wasn’t that cold…
Israel, Tel-Aviv
A great place to be! Beside the superb audience you get a lot of sun, beaches and great food.

I’m looking forward to WSCWS Reloaded! Hope to cu there…

WSCWS Ukraine

beatsch — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 13:12:00 GMT

I’ve just finished my “Web Services Competency Workshop” in Kiev (Ukraine). I really have to say that this was an amazing experience: The event was hosted in a trendy restaurant with a very nice decoration (library style). They not only served superb coffee (such as espressos) but also played just perfect music during the breaks. Great people were attending this workshop: Thank you attendees for being so passionate; thank you Microsoft Ukraine for organizing the event and thank you Katya for just being such a superb event organizer! I hope to be back soon…

Just a policy violation...

beatsch — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 14:18:00 GMT

I’m currently in a very nice hotel in Kiev. They gave me a room high up on the 7hth floor. Having the room high up usually implies silence at night and this is exactly what I’m looking for. However, it was 5 o’clock in the afternoon when I’ve heard some strange noise in my neighbor’s room. After hearing this guy crying I’ve started realizing that it smelled quite smoky for a non smoking room. I’ve opened the window and saw a lot of smoke coming out of my neighbor’s window. It was then when I realized that there was a fire! I opened the door where the whole hallway was completely filled with smoke. Shall I walk through the smoke are shall I wait for the firefighters to rescue me? This is actually quite a tough decision, because the smoke was really burning in my eyes and it was near to impossible to breath under these conditions. I've decided to stay and I took the blankets and put them in front of the door, to make sure the smoke doesn’t get into my room. After doing this, I immediately called the receptionist to tell her that there is a fire on the 7^th floor (There was NO fire alarm at all). To my surprise, she told me that there is no fire alarm because this is only a test. “A TEST” I cried into phone and told here there is some serious smoke on the floor. “Smoke?” she replied and meant maybe it’s better to call the fire department… In the meanwhile I opened the window to grasp for some fresh air. It was then when I’ve realized that all my neighbors where grasping for fresh air as well. I’ve told them about the test and asked them to call the receptionist as well, just to make sure they are really calling the firefighters. After a couple of minutes the guys returned to the window, and explained to me that the hotel stuff just told them that this is only a test! We were so frightened! Think about it: being on the 7^th floor and there is a fire on your floor and the personal still believes it’s only a test. What would you do? I instantly called my wife and told her that I’m in trouble! “I’m on the 7^th floor and there is a fire. If I don’t call you in the next hour I’m going to be in even more serious trouble…” Well how nice was this phone call?

After maybe an additional 15 minutes I’ve realized that there was no more smoke getting out of the windows and I tried to open the door again. To my surprise, most of the smoke disappeared. It was then when I saw one of the hotel staff. I’ve asked her what happened. She told me that it was only at test! Unbelievable! Only a test! Only a test! I was frightened to death. At the reception, they told me, that they usually inform the guests, but this time they just forgot. How can you forget that? Informing customer in such a scenario is a policy!

Policy violations can be very frightening…

Great time ahead

beatsch — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:46:00 GMT

I’ve just came back from my skiing holidays in Zermatt. It was great fun! The weather and snow conditions were superb…

However, I’m back @ work and look forward to the following events:

2^nd German Archtitects Forum, 14. April 2005, Wuppertal
TechDays 2005, 15. April 2005, Geneva
Web Services Competency Workshop in Finland, Ukraine, Portugal and Israel
University of Helsinki, 22. April 2005, Helsinki
TechEd 2005, 5. - 10. June 2005, Orlando
TechEd 2005, 5. – 8. July 2005, Amsterdam

I hope to cu there...

What's more important: service & ambience or food?

beatsch — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 00:36:00 GMT

While I was sitting in a lovely restaurant in Spain I was thinking about the most important thing that makes eating in a restaurant a great experience. Is it really the food? I ate in a restaurant last Monday that hadn’t served great food. But I felt so welcomed: The prices were moderate, the waiter was just phenomenal and the dining room was nicely decorated. In contrast, I’ve dined in so many restaurants that served great food but they were either overprized or the service was just horrible (sometimes even both applied). If I have to decide between a great ambience and great food… well I would most of the time go for the ambience.

Speaking in Russia is different

beatsch — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:18:00 GMT

Because half of the audience wasn’t very comfortable with English my workshop got simultaneously translated to Russian. The translator used my natural breaks to translate. This means that I had to speak in small portions; otherwise I would overstretch his memoryJ But it also means that my sessions were longer than usual! It was a very interesting experience: It forced me to make short but very clear statements. I also had enough time to think about the next statement while he was translating. I hope to be back soon…