Dave Welsh's WebLog

Can't believe the last time I blogged was TechED Orlando, in June. It's September and the summer flashed by ... Well, we finally published some very new Archietctural Guidance material on the topic of managing services, in the general sense of 'services' including business services but also there is a very real Web service angle to the content.

It's part of a new Microsoft Architectural Series and this series is about 'Managing Connected Systems'. The link to the public library where the content is, is here http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/MSArcSeriesMCSIntro.asp and it will be automatically projected on to http://www.microsoft.com/architecture and http://msdn.micosoft.com/architecture in the next days.

What's nice about this Architectural Series is we're using some of the open business architecture Standards which I and a few others worked on at the United Nations for a few years; in my case before joining Microsoft. The Business Architecture standard is called the UMM and it's from the same organization who created UN/CEFACT, the global EDI standard. The UMM is actually the business modeling meta model behind the original ebXML project, years ago but since then ebXML has distanced itself from the UMM. The UMM is technology neutral, so what we did here in Redmond was an exercise to map our own Business Architecture model, a corrected derivitive from the UMM with corrections and a few things missing in the UMM we didn't have time for in the Standards meetings, and map that open business model specicially / prescriptively to the Microsoft products for the purpose of architecturally talking about aligning business with IT for total management.

To my knowledge, I don't think any major technology vendor has ever done a UMM - commerical product mapping like this before. Certainly I haven't seen SAP, IBM or Sun do anything with an Open Business Standard like the UMM like this; and I wouldn't put the ebXML BPSS or WS-BPEL in the same class as the UMM.

Got lots to blog about, and I'll be doing some long business travel soon so I should have some nice dead air time / off line to blog more about all sorts of things people have been asking me about.

/Dave

I think we're getting over the hump here at TechED and people are starting to see the end of the week, tomorrow, but still there's a majority of die hard attendee's showing up before 8:30 in the morning for the first sessions; maybe they were just early for the donouts and expresso coffee's. In general people are settling down, the Speakers Lounge is less frantic, and people are just getting on with business; as compared with Monday when people were showing up, not knowing what they had to do and where they had to go.

Today I managed to get in Ron Jacobs SOA Patterns and Anti-Patterns session, and he seemed to score pretty high marks from the attendees. My main complaint was his sense of fashion.All the MSDN Webcast speakers had to wear a red cape (corney ! like a Superman cape) and the cape looked kinda goofy. Still, anything that seems these days to smell of SOA seems to be able to draw a crowd at least out of curiousity. I know John Evdemon was also supposed to tag team on the SOA Patterns talk but John had to be back in REdmond today for a meeting; so he says - maybe he was just chicken to wear the red cape.

I was going to go to Clemens Vasters session but skipped that one to sit on a repeat session the Office folks were doing on the new Office XML formats they're introducing with the next version of Office; internally code named "Office 12". The concept of saving and fooling around with documents in XML is intuitive, well I think it is, but the Office folks obviously come from a huge background in this space and based on their experience I think they're onto to something that already has a great 'sweet spot'; meaning they've considered a lot of extremely practical uses for the new XML format so anyone can build on Office documents. For more info you probably want to stop by http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview and for a good blog on the new Office XML material check out http://blogs.msdn.com/Brian_Jones

On the lighter side, I had a quick look at the audience evaluation results from all of yesterdays sessions and I liked the fact that a session given on "Internet Safety for Children" scored the highest marks over all the sessions yesterday. There were a lot of great talks, and some really good session marks, but it was just nice to see that topic score.

I also had a nice chat with someone from the Podcast crew - the same guy who crashed Don Boxes session and the scoop on that little stunt was the two guys (Don and the Podcaster) have a running game with each other for a few years; to interup in a friendly way each others talk. It seems, at a last conference, while one speaker was on stage still speaking but running over time - the other speaker just walked on stage and started doing his laptop setup. In return, at the next speaking event, the other speaker did a similar stunt on stage; I'm just not sure who started the 'tradition'.

One thing I also found out from the Podcasters was their Segway's have 3 'electronic keys'; a 3 mph key, a 4 mph key and a 16 mph key. The gripe from the Podcast crew was they were not given the 16 mph key :-)  Wonder why! Seriously I hear there's lots of good traffic to the Postcasts, and I thought they would have close to 100 video's to download by the end of TechED.

Got to clean up my presentation now for tomorrow, and meet the audio crew this evening for a sound check. Max Morris comes in from Seattle later today and plan is for a little dinner after we both get our sound checks done. Max is doing a sister presentation on SOA management (from the Technical view point, while I do a Business view point) right after my SOA Management talk tomorrow.

/Dave

Just came from Don Box's session on "Meta Data Soup: Contracts, Models and Types". Without fail, this was one of Don's classic presentations; few slides with ever fewer words on the slides punctutated with a little colorful illustration as Don makes his points, but as audience you always get the 2 or 4 basic messages he's out to convey.

What struck me from Don's talk were a few things. First, he's getting (or rediscovering?) modeling religion and not just IT programming modeling but he's attempting to climb the stack up to the business domain with modeling although I think what he's still to do is change viewpoint from IT to InfoWorker and a whole new world's going to suddenly open to him. Next, Don had really good words about the value of RDF; again he's an XML bigot and with some new modeling religion he can see that RDF (or something like RDF) is a richer 'XML programming model' to express higher form relationships - really he's knocking on 'behavior'. Something else Don was plugging, and I can't remember how many times he mentioned it was BizTalk; as "those guys really have had it for years now". Don was giving the new Domain Languages / Whitehorse work in Visual Studio some good air time, but I think he plugged BTS even more.

One light note of humor, Don's talk was interupted in the middle the Podcast crew (about 5 of them) who came running in from the back of the room with cameras out recording, They came up on stage and provided a bit of light entertainment 'interviewing' Don - if that's possible, so check with today's Podcasts and you might see a little what I saw.

What was really nice though, was to see Don's thinking start to go above the technology infrastructure plumbing space and up level the discussions many of us are having - of showing how business and IT need to align, and how IT can create better value to the core business mission.

/Dave

Everyone is settling down to the routine here in Orlando. I will probably do some Architecture Cabana duty before Friday, and my next event I must go to is a rehearsal Thursday night then first thing Friday morning I speak. So between now and Friday I have time to get some backlogged work out the way and take in some TechED experience.

This morning I enjoyed going to Paul Flesner's keynote on the new BizTalk, new SQLServer, new Visual Studio Team Systems and some 64 bit server stuff. There were some product announcements, but what I enjoyed a lot was the RFID demo they gave. Basically everyone here at TechED randomly got a small sticker with a huge number on it but inside the sticker is an RFID chip. All around the TechED conference are RFID readers picking up signals and on stage in Flesner's keynote we got to see how easy it is to use the new Visual Studio to build a small RFID app. What was also cool was they ran a small prize give away to people in the audience using the RFID signals from the people actually in the audience :-) Sweet !!!

What I really liked though was I was one of the early people in Redmond working to get RFID onto the development agenda, about 3 years ago. Then, Microsoft wasn't doing anything with RFID and it wasn't clear which product team would be the best RFID owner but thru some pretty long discussions we landed on Paul's area and he stepped up to the plate; so it was good today that he got to show some RFID. I was part of a small group that early on waded thru some of the RFID issues, in my case I was on point for RFID standards, but my next door neighbor in Redmond Javed Sikander really was a big driving force that got Microsoft sold on RFID. Javed is still part of my group and back then he put in major time and lobbied super hard to address RFID, crashed a few doors along the way, and now there's a new RFID dev team working hard to get new product out sometime 'next year' (as Paul mentioned in his keynote today).

On a private note, I think I've got the over flow of food here down and I'm making sure to get some good gym time in now every day. My daughter gradutated from school yesterday, she goes to school in Holland, so right now I'm feeling really good.

Looking forward to more TechED, and catching up on some work in between events.

/Dave

Skipped the Archtecture Strategy party last night, plus the Regional Directors 2 parties, and probably a few more parties but made it to the manditory Microsoft pre conference briefing last night; which is my excuse for not going to any of the many parties. Got to pace myself, as there's more parties than you could go to.

Ran into Simon Guest and John Evdemon this morning in the hotel. Both were here all wekend speaking at the TechED Academic conference at one of the local Universities, something that happens before TechED - and it turned out they also didn't show to the Architecture party so I feel like I'm in good company.

At last nights pre conference briefing besides even more food (from all the essential food groups - pizza, beer and twinkies) there was some interesting facts given out like today there's 30+ new Microsoft and Partner press announcements, and Tuesday 30+ more announcements. I didn't know that about 20% of the attendees called themselves 'architects', more than I think most people used to developers and IT managers audiences had realized.

Caught Steve Balmer's opening Keynote this morning and it was Steve's classic high energy delivery of where we're going with our new products, across the board. He really made a lot of announcements, too many to list , so if you get a chance to see a recorded repeat of it I think you'll get a pretty good total view of all the new products up for delivery in the next year to 18 months. Well worth the hour or so to sit through.

I saw a couple of the Podcast people here this morning, running around on their Segways, but I have yet to enter the main halls with the Cabana's for people to get 1 on 1 with the Microsoft staff, and the Partner exhibition area; oh yes and the games area. I wonder if they've got a new Xbox 360 around :-)

Gotta run, put in an appearance at the Architecture Cabana.

/Dave

It's Sunday today and TechED starts tomorrow. I got into Orlando yesterday morning then took the shuttle ride from hell to the hotel. Our driver ran on 230 v while we cruse 120. A nice enough guy, just he like to 'command' his passengers and he probably heard 'voices' on route! Anyway, made it to my room, grabbed a snack then instead of doing my TechReady deck (a Microsoft event in August) I crashed for 16 hours straight.

This morning TechED registration started at 10:00, and there was already a massive lineup by 9:40. On the way over to the conference center I missed a photo op (camera was out of power) when I ran into the TechED Podcast crew getting lessons on their Segways. The doors opened right at 10 and the whole linup was gone in 15 - 20 minutes. The conference center (Orange County Convention Center) is massive, and the TechED organizing staff are really good; they'd better be with 11,000 people expected during the week. Anyway, picked up my TechED bag stuffed with a ton of swag, and made a dash to the speakers lounge to make a quick change to my presentation deck. Overheard some of the other speakers talk about what will be shown this week, terms like 'wall of fire' and 'battle bots' were raised and if you have been watching some of the earlier Microsoft events you should start to get an image that this TechED the folks from Redmond are out to put on a big show. 

Only thing I need to do today is attend some manditory speakers session with the organizers later this afternoon, and drop by some bash my group (Arch Strategy) are hosting somewhere around here.

/Dave

I first saw the pre announcement final briefing last weekend, and in the past few months I've been in some meetings including some with Jean Paoli where the topic was an open format for Office. The following ZDnet article http://news.com.com/IT+giants+accused+of+exploiting+open+source/2100-7344_3-5726714.html also caught my eye yesterday, just reinforcing the 'no free lunch' theorum but I'd really not like to turn this blog into some marketecture spiel which is what some companies have based their standards engagement strategy on; including patent / IP management blurring the boundaries between open source & open standards but see my earlier blogs for what I think about that. Personally, I think the user community / customers are smart enough to see what is really going on and with time the real truth always comes out so I can comfortably wait and see.

Anyway I'm glad to see the new 'Office 12' XML news finally came out BUT what this all keeps reminding me about is the general topic of 'open standards' and what different platform vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, ...) and independent solution vendors (SAP, ...) do to leverage standards.

Starting off with no one should ever immediately jump to the conclusion that any standard has everything in it by design, to fully make a complete professional product in the commerical market space; rather a lot of standards these days are designed for 'interop' and not 'product features'. Think about it - a commercial product fully based on an open (community) standard; nothing more than what's in the free spec is in all of the commercial products. Sounds like the cart (a standard really meant for interop) is getting in front of the horse (a compeitive market place of new innovate products and services). Standards for standards sake? Doesn't even make for good text book material!

For anyone who has ever sat in standards development meetings, you must have noticed the different viewpoint in the discussions around what goes (and usually with a little emotion added in the meeting what does not go) into a new standards spec. Usually what makes it into a standards meeting is driven by those who physically manage to make it to the meetings, and what drops off the spec is a reflection of who didn't manage to make it to the meetings.  When we talk about 'open and transparent standards procedures' the real goal should be to have the widest possible audience involved (for max interop), and if you want to try something interesting have a look at some standards which seem to have been in development for years but not much market acceptance - and have a look over time on who actually went to all those standards meetings and who wrote the standards spec; and who votted the standards spec from draft to 'adopted'.

The other comment I have noticed about 'open and transparent' standards development is the tendancy by some standards work groups to not clearly publish their mandate scope / charter clearly at the beginning of their work - and more importantly stick to the charter. Tendency of some standards work groups / teams is to deviate, expand / contract scope of their work as they get deeper into writing up the spec - which is all part of the natural process so that's a good thing BUT the problem is some work groups then produce a new spec which doesn't match their original advertised charter to the surprise of many people. What's wrong with that? Well, if you are aware that a new group is starting up and you take the time to review their charter to see if you want to join but you think the scope of what they say they want to do is not what you want to work on - only to find out to your surprise that months later the work group actually changes their work program, and didn't publicly communiate their new program - you might have had a 2nd thoughts about joining them! How 'transparent and open' is that standards development process, when you are really getting excluded from the development process. False advertising?

But back to implementing a 'standard' in products, a standard often becomes just one input to making a new product work and typically product development concentrates on creating a positive commerical competitive difference in the market so 100% of all product features naturally tend to go beyond the scope of a standard. As I mentioned, a standard usually tends to promote 'interop' and not 'product features'.

Back to the new Office 12 news, having Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents all saved as xml (as opposed to .doc or .ppt) should really give everyone benefits including smoother data interoperability, improved security and error recovery, and my favorite - reduced files sizes. Looking into the technical specs I even see some very promising extensibility capabilities in the document container for ancilliary business purposes to what one normally does with Office products. This whole Office 12 announcement probably best can be seen as following on the New World of Work (NWOW) vision laid out by Bill G at the CEO Summit a couple of weeks ago here in Redmond.  I fully expect more words to be said about this at TechEd next week, but wait and see.

/Dave

Back again in the blog space, and looking forward to blogging again after so many months of being off line. Actually, because of day job work I wanted to put the blog aside to concentrate on a few other things. Anyway, back here again.

So, catching up on very recent events ... last week I was speaking at a few places, one of them was the Enterprise Architects Summit in Miami set up by the Fawcett Technical Publishing people who always put on a great show.

http://www.ftponline.com/channels/arch/reports/eas/2005/panel/

It was a pretty cool conference, the weather and location were great - so they tell me - I spoke most of Tuesday then had to fly out to Chicago that evening but I was stuck in my hotel room all the Monday before getting a Microsoft Technology Roadmap presentation material ready for a Wednesday speach. I never knew there was so much going on with all of our products. Lots of exciting news on all fronts for the rest of 2005 and into 2006 and beyond. 

Anyway what was cool about the Miami Conference was how many people attending recognized that 'SOA' was not a product but more of a marketectural buzz word for what I guess I would call 'Service Think'. A lot of people in Miami mentioned that 'business' was probably more comfortable with the service notion, maybe a slightly different definition of 'service' that SOAP/WSDL, and that one of the big challenges was/still is for IT to understand the language of business; i.e. diffrent "units of work" in business like a 'business transaction' than the comparible IT concept of a 'transaction' where there may be a few of technical transactions to make 1 business transaction. So this all let me introduce a nice little story op explain the complimentary and different viewpoints in the enterprise architectural space 'Business is from Mars, IT is from Venus' :-)

All of this week I'm in Redmond, taking care of business and next week I'll be at TechED in Orlando - actually all week, speaking next Friday (June 10) in the morning on something called 'Managing Connected Systems' but this won't be your normal IT Service Level Management talk but a very new approach to modeling legally binding business processes in the language of business and using that as the driving architectural force to dynamically configuring and managing enterprise managing Web services. This is a vastly simpler approach than past efforts like ebXML, which I helped author years ago, and some business standards like UN/CEFACT UMM, in a way that more than aligns but but really connects a business viewpoint with the IT viewpoint in the enterprise architectural space. In this approach we take a fresh, organic view to enterprise architecture and we've managed to greatly simplify and even cut entire layers of some standards thinking out of the real world implementation process. More of that in a few seperate blogs, plus we've got some DVD with demo code and InfoPath business modeling forms in production which anyone can freely use for their own enterprise problems.

Let's see, on the standards front there's not a lot of paparazzi news to report on over the last few months. More and more standards groups are addressing their IP and governance operating rules, finally, to offer a better working environment - but to be honest I think the traditional standards groups move too slow; even Oasis and W3C. I'd like to see more people try out things like Wiki software as a more efficient way to do real time virtual standards developments, but new collaboration software is only part of the challenge. There is a real need for fresh ideas and new blood in some of the standards community work and also a more realistic set of governance operating procedures which really do promote a transparent standards development process. Unfortunately a lot of standards groups are just re-inventing EDI in pointy brackets, which really doesn't really "move the ball" for the end user! 

On the company standards front, Microsoft is really taking the effort to listen and studying what is happening around the world with open standards. I think we as putting serious effort into thinking a lot on how we do better commuity engagements in some new ways and I think everyone will see us opening up a lot of our internal standards to the general community in ways, when you look at it, have all of the exact same essential conditions of open use as other open standards organizations, but more to come shortly I imagine!

On the Web services front I see more industry communities starting to do some real adoption of the new Web services specs, and I see more of the WS specs getting out to the development workshop process and into the more traditional standards accreditation processes; some day later I'll try and do a dump and see how much time it took to do the WS standards and try to measure what market adoption effect standards groups contributed; or not.

Finally, my group has been working to change their image. Check out the new architectecture web sites we're hosting, starting with the new http://www.microsoft.com/architecture and http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/ and expect to see a lot of non-Microsoft architects contributing a lot of great new content there in the future; hey, they're on RSS feeds so you can always add them to your blog favorites.   

Good to be back blogging again.

/Dave

Did anyone notice?

Details are here http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/wsd/2004wsdindex.html and this year's theme was "Standards Connect the World" - which seems to line up with the thinking that we do live in a 'connected world'. Past annual themes have included 'Standards in Daily Life', 'Trade', 'Services', and 'Transportation'.

Ok, I see ISO and ITU (which is in the UN system) and IEC - but no UN itself or UN/CEFACT on the poster? Here is the Press Release the THREE international standards bodies came out with:

"From the simple to the complex, from the minute to the massive, from the local to the global, international standards are omnipresent in products and services and in the components of the global supply chains for which they provide the backbone.

The international standardization system that comprises ISO, IEC and ITU transforms qualities like efficiency, effectiveness, economy, quality, ecology, safety, reliability, compatibility and interoperability into concrete characteristics of products and services for implementation in their manufacture, supply or utilization. The three organizations thus develop workable solutions to technical and economic challenges faced by business, government and society and publish them as international standards.

The products and services shaped by international standards need to be transported, delivered, transferred or otherwise exchanged between suppliers and their customers or end users. Exchange necessitates connections and interfaces. International standards harmonize the connections and facilitate exchange by ensuring smoother, swifter, safer and more economical delivery.

The variety of exchange where standards overcome challenges is considerable: examples are getting food from farm to kitchen table, raw materials to processing plants and on to industrial users, products to distributors and shops and then to consumers, power from generating plants to industry and the home, messages that pass between telecommunication networks and computer systems.

The connections and interfaces that standardization renders more efficient and more effective are just as varied. They may be mechanical, electrical or computer-based - or combinations. They range from pipes and couplings, to lifting and handling gear, pallets,freight containers, switches, cables and connectors, computer hardware and software, to transport, power and information and communications technology (ICT) networks.

In turn, the scale of standardization ranges from point to point (be they next door or on opposite sides of the globe), to whole countries (as in the case of power grids), to worldwide (such as ICT networks).

In addition to connecting markets, international standards connect developing countries and transition economies to state-of-the-art technological know-how enabling them to increase their export capability and competitiveness.

Beyond the technical and economic benefits of international standards, participating in their development enhances human connectedness. It is a matter for pride and optimism that thousands of men and women of different political and religious beliefs, national and racial origins and cultural backgrounds come together within ISO, IEC and ITU to cooperate effectively on the task of achieving international consensus on standards that make a positive difference to our world.

Standards provide solutions, get the job done, connect people. Standards connect the world."

I just got back from the annual SWIFT conference, this year in Atlanta. Some 5,500 delegates from around the world showed up to the conference and vendor exhibition; and of course SWIFT had the event perfectly organized as only SWIFT knows how to do.

This year, for the first time apprently, there was a serperate "Standards Forum" launched; to talk about the financial industry and general cross industry standards issues. I was invited to speak at the Forum opening launch, together with an extremely distinguished panel including Renato Polo who has been on the SWIFT Board for 15 years and knows more about SWIFT than probably anyone, Richard Soley who is the OMG CEO, Nourrredine Yous the Chair of ISO TC68 SC4 who have just approved the new ISO 20022 spec for Universal Financial Messaging - and myself.

Just to rat hole on the new ISO spec; cause it's nice to go vertical industry and face some industry reality. International Standard ISO 20022 - UNIFI (previously called the second, XML edition of ISO 15022) is composed of 5 parts: two International Standards and three Technical Specifications that will be published by ISO in 2004.

(side note for those not familiar with ISO work - the only *true* ISO standards are called 'International Standards' and to get them you need to go the whole loooong standards route with all the countries voting. ISO *also* has something called a 'Technical Specification' which is really what a lot of people on the street would know as a 'White Paper', which you still need to buy from ISO and "they are not with the ISO Gold Star" as someone commented to me over lunch at SIBOS. The Oasis ebXML specs in ISO are only TS's and not ISO Information Standards, as another example, where none of that spec work is done in ISO - so pure spec marketing leveraging the ISO brand name)

"ISO 20022 parts 1 and 2 cover a general explanation of the concepts that are used for the definition of ISO 20022 compliant standards. The explanation gives a high level description of the business-centric standards design methodology and the rationale behind this methodology and a description of the input that is required when submitting a request for the registration of an ISO 20022 compliant standard to the ISO 20022 Registration Authority, i.e. SWIFT."
 
The "Three Technical Specifications of ISO 20022 parts 3, 4 and 5 are ISO documents that give more detailed information regarding technical aspects of the standard including Modeling guidelines for development of syntax-independent business standard XML design rules, and Reverse engineering approach for existing non-compliant messages."

Microsoft had an exhibition stand at the SIBOS conference and together with SWIFT's exhibition stand there was a working demo of the new 20022 messages for Corporate to Bank payment processes between the Microsoft stand and the SWIFT stand; on the Microsoft side using the newly SWIFT certified BizTalk adapter for SWIFT. InfoPath was also part of the demo scenario and I gathered a lot of people found the whole demo very powerful in that it showed how simple it can be to use XML, 20022, web services and the Internet with SWIFT all together. (and if you haven't seen the new service pack release for InfoPath, it almost programs itself with anyone's XML. You can even get away from a lot of JScript programming in multiform apps) For web services we were just using the WSE 2.0 bits.

What stuck in my memory from the show, and knowing SWIFT for a while, was that they really have put into practice a sort of a mini software factory concept to produce their new XML based standards. In their case they managed to make some UML work for them using financial services industry concepts they know better than anyone else. SWIFT also have some software that converts XMI ('injecting in' the SWIFT 'core components' pre-defined XML structures) into a final XML message that works for their industry.

I'm not exactly sure how much they used their new approach to help create ISO 20022 but SWIFT have been all over 20022 for some time now and I heard some internal study numbers from SWIFT about how much more efficent in general they have become with their new modeling approach to internal standards development; something a lot of the SWIFT user community would like SWIFT to be much quicker on.

I also had a nice long chat with Richard Soley on UML, Domain Specific Languages (DSL), Software Factories in general and I believe he acknowledges that DSL/Software Factories is a good long term strategy; and I'd venture a guess that a lot of the 'original UML folks' would agree too. I think the public question about what is "long term" around this space or is the space "closer than you think", will become a lot clearer at OOPSLA when that community meets for their annual event; which is in just a week (Oct 25 - 28 in Vancouver Canada)

This morning during the Microsoft Architects Forum, I followed a presentation given by Simon Guest on Interop & Integration, where Simon talked about the difference between Web Service stacks between Microsoft products and our competing vendor products; following WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 and WS-* interoperability guidance. If you check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/interop you'll basically find all the material Simon presented, but Simon also gave us a heads up on what's coming up soon including more interop content for vertical industries using web services and more technical content around WS-Security and guidance for RSA, BEA and others; plus other cool stuff. Also if you've interested in more material on interop, you'll probably want to check out Simon's book on .NET and J2EE interop.

Later on in the day there was an interesting talk by Pat Helland on some new messaging transaction features coming up in SQLServer 2005, and every time Pat speaks on something like transaction processing (which he knows intimately) you are always assured of a very 'lively presentation' that leaves you with a clear sense of "gee, why didn't I think of that?".

What was more interesting perhaps was a follow-up session Pat pulled together for a joint discussion by the Indigo, BizTalk and SQL Server team Program / Product Managers on 'messaging'; with folks like Don Box from Indigo. So when it comes to 'messaging' and Microsoft - we basically had all the key Redmond 'minds' at one time in the room. It was nice to see how far we've come from function calls, through components and now how we're clearly heading for SOA & services (loose coupling, async communications, independent deployment, managed communications, ...) It is nice to see how the various product teams are thinking about the broad subject of messaging across all the product lines with things like: Indigo providing the new Service Programming Model and Channel Architecture, BizTalk with integration and business process server, ... and the discussion also had a couple of implementation scenarios thrown in for good measure for the teams to validate.

We're having a week long meeting for the Microsoft Architects from around the world, this week, and the first sessions started today; Sunday. I'll be speaking on Monday, then off to the SWIFT annual SIBOS conference to talk about convergence of Industry Standards, then back by then end of the week to sit in on the annual Microsoft Architectural Advisary Board.

This afternoon though I took in Jack Greenfield's talk on Domain Specific Languages (DSL) and Software Factories. Jack has been around this type of design space for a while, in fact he used to be the chief architect at Rational so he has seen the (sometimes not so pretty) inside of things like UML. Actually at Microsoft, working with Jack are folks like Keith Short, Steve Cook (formerly an IBM Distinguished Engineer and a major contributor to UML and UML2), and Stuart Kent who "knows his UML"; amongst many others on the Visual Studio team who are trying to make software architecture easier to do.

Anyway Jack was giving a great review of DSL's and Software Factories. Basically a DSL is a modeling language which models concepts found in a specific domain. A well defined DSL is a powerful implementation language, providing much greater rigor than a general purpose modeling language than UML. Now, before anyone starts ranting "another plot to not do standards", Jack and Steve and others were some of the key people who gave you UML! They know what UML really is and everyone agrees that UML has some good drawing tools (like class diagrams) but what these guys are talking about is more than UML. If anyone is going to OOPSLA in a few weeks, besides seeing a pretty large Microsoft contingent (and it wouldn't surprise me to see some announcements) you'll want to take in a couple of the sessions like the Tuesday afternoon Panel Discussion on Model Driven Architecture (MDA a Year Later) with Steve Cook on the panel, and the Thursday afternoon session "Panel: The Great J2EE vs. Microsoft .NET Shootout".

Back to Jack's presentation this afternoon, and the concept of Software Factories. A Software Factory is "a configuration of languages, patterns, frameworks, and tools that can be used to rapidly and cheaply produce an open-ended set of unique variants of a archetypical product. Software factories are not just about automating software development within an individual organization, however. Broad adoption of Software Factories will promote the formation of supply chains, distributing cost and risk across networks of specialized, and interdependent suppliers. It will also promote software mass customization by increasing value chain integration within each supplier." which is a direct quote from Jack and Keith's new book on Software Factories. It's a very complete book covering DSLs, an in depth review of UML and the total concept of Software Factories. This is a book you'll want on your shelf if you're trying to do more than simply produce some nice diagrams.

It's been a few weeks since I've blogged. I've just been too busy, heads down with day job work which I can't talk about just yet, but I thought I'd just get back into the blogging rhythm here a few of the things from the past few weeks; to catch up on the news.

In any order.

There was the recent announcement of WS-Addressing work group set up in W3C and the WS-Management 'coming out' the other day regarding a joint Microsoft - AMD - DELL - Intel - SUN submission of WS-Management to the DMTF folks.

I first got a glimpse at WS-Management about a month ago and I'd expected the spec to already be out, but better a little late than never. WS-Management is a nice spec to setup instrumentation monitoring, which is going to become very important around observing the operational behavior of running services. Don't underestimate how it's going to fit into a bigger picture.

It's nice to see SUN Corporate take on more of the web service standards with us. That might not make much paparazzi press but the customers will benefit at the end of the day, and it's clear now that at the very top Executive level that SUN is going with web services; and clearly moved the corporation past their earlier efforts like ebXML.

Speaking of web service standards, it should be obvious by now that what's happening around standardizing the many web service specs is that the web service concept covers a broad range of technical infrastructure. You have to grok that scope issue first before moving to the next step of understanding where the standards are going. There's been some traffic in the press / blogs by some 'XML names' about 'WS-complexity', and that the world doesn't need all the web service specs. Well if all you want to do is move a file, like a biz document from point A to B, and you don't care about a bunch of other things then there is ftp today; go for it! It all depends on how far you want to go, and that context gives these new specs their inherent technical value.

So, since web service specs are reaching out to address a broad scope and as it's a fact that no one standards organization can realistically claim to have all the working domain expertise over such a broad range of technology - what is really going on with the standards process is an effort to gather together the leading industry domain experts and openly collaborate on making the new web service specs as real world as possible. The litmus test on the specs is by taking them thru the workshop process (which I blogged on earlier). The basic idea on standardizing the web service specs is to end up with a real world working spec which already has major industry buy in.

The next step in standardizing the work is taking the 'post workshop process' specs from the industry experts into those open standards bodies which today closest align the industry practice in that particular domain of activities. Oh yes, to create open and royalty free web service standards.

I've heard some people make side comments that this particular standards development process breaks the normal 'committee driven' 'life unto its own' 'politically charged' conventional standards process. Well ... YES I hope so. We all know making standards is not a quick process and it also doesn't have the greatest track record; sometimes.

Going into the traditional standards committee process you probably can't really say what the committee will really produce as a final standard (and you are not always sure you have all the relevant domain experts - but you've probably got some great 'professional standards technocrats'). I mean, there's so many easy political ways to steer or stall a standards committee, irrespective of what the people who actually do the standards work want; like only show up with a gang of 'friends' for a vote to block any new work - then the 'gang' leaves after the vote or doesn't do any work.

Coming out of the traditional standards committee political process, in practice you still have to go at least another round with starting up the 'industry interop workshops' and 'vendor plugfests' only to discover probably that the original spec has 'a few technical holes' - so wait for version 3! (or worse - the spec is out of sync with leading industry thinking and developments)

Time will tell how well the new standards process proves itself with customers, but I'm an optimist; and when you've got that much industry push behind it and all those thousands of people working towards a common vision - something good is bound to come out (sooner or later).

Elsewhere in the past few weeks, it seems there's been a lot more 'press' about our competitors than us; which is nice - thank you very much :-)

There's a new Web Services Architecture paper just up on on MSDN and its a good introduction to some of the higher level architectural concepts behind the many Web Service specifications which are becoming open standards right now. The nice thing about this paper is that it is largely co-authored by many of the actual Microsoft Indigo developers, so you're getting a first hand account at a high level of what's behind some of the design ideas around the new Web Service specs.

It's a bit of a long paper, but it is a good read.

I've also gotten some comments that there is also a need for more papers to go with this one, but more focused to the business modeler type of audience (who aren't programmers) on how vertical industry business processes fit around the technical web services architecture. Things more to the business standards person like showing how legally binding business transactions relate to technical based web service transaction compositions. 

If you have any comments about what you'd like to see in any more papers we produce, that might go along with with this one, please drop me a comment and I'll see what I can do.

Enjoy the read.

A message via via from onStrategies just passed my way and it had to do with a new piece that should be out on Friday Sept 17th called "The Myth of Open Systems". Before going any further this is not trying to slam Open Source.

The author Tony Baer wrote a nice small piece to introduce the article "After attending a panel session convened by the NY Software Industry Association, comprising representatives from IBM, Microsoft, CA, Information Builders, and Oracle, we concluded that debate about open systems is growing increasingly meaningless. Everybody claims their system is open but uses different definitions. ... While we're tired of the term open systems, we believe in openness."

The actual copy of the article I saw was a nice easy and entertaining read and it concluded with "Forget about "open."Everybody's products are open to a point. Instead, think interoperability, which is exactly why vendors are coalescing around web services."

Check it out, I enjoyed it.