The Scobleizer stopped by the Microsoft ISV Chalk Talk booth and had a great on camera discussion on a number of issues in and out of the blogosphere. You can check out the video interview at my new blog location: http://isvchalktalk.com
- Doc Holladay
I've moved my blog over to a new server and URL http://isvchalktalk.com - this new site will give me expanded community capabilities including forums, membership, videos, podcasts, etc. Drop by, bookmark the new site and let me know your thoughts!
- Doc Holladay
David Golds passed along the following link to a Windows Server 2003 R2 DFS white paper:
From the download page:
Overview
As organizations expand to include more users and servers—whether they are located in one site or in geographically distributed sites—administrators find it increasingly difficult to provide users with intuitive, fast access to the files they need. Administrators who manage remote or branch offices face additional challenges, such as limiting network traffic over slow WAN connections, ensuring the availability of files during WAN outages or server failures, and ensuring that branch servers are backed up correctly. To help administrators address these challenges, the Distributed File System solution in Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2 provides two technologies, DFS Namespaces and DFS Replication, which, when used together, offer simplified, fault-tolerant access to files and WAN-friendly replication.
thanks David!
Alright! Windows Server R2 is adding a federated single sign-on (SSO) service called Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). This allows your Windows credentials to be federated and used across organizational boundaries. There are so many user scenarios where this is vital. One very common scenario that I heard time and again when I worked on the SharePoint Portal Server team is allowing the ability to create an extranet SharePoint site and giving access to multiple users in different organizations. For a truely secure setup and one not fraught with user management headaches, you usually have to implement a third party Web SSO product or add user's to your Active Directory (yeah right). (did I just use the word fraught???)
With ADFS you can trust or federate other organization's user credentials instead! In the SharePoint example I can use my regular Windows credentials and logon to someone's else's SharePoint server if they are using ADFS and we've established a federated relationship. A demo showed this working with SharePoint (part of Windows) - I wonder when Portal Server will do the integration work? This is a much needed an requested feature. Question to you: will ADFS make the team sharing capabilities of SharePoint more useful for you now that it is easier to implement cross-companies?
If you get a chance, check out the new Windows Server R2 distributed file system (DFS). Bob Muglia had a demo in his Windows session showing a 25Mb PowerPoint file being copied and used by a branch office and another office with and without DFS. The traffic over the WAN without DFS was the typical experience today - a long wait time and lots of data being copied. With DFS enabled, the file is replicated and cached locally (obviously, this is done at a pre-determined time) so the experience of bringing up the PowerPoint is pretty fast. This offers a good experience for the initial load, but what about making changes and replicating the changed copy? The DFS also has a differential replication protocol called RDC that only replicates the changes over the WAN no matter what the file type! The demo showed the WAN traffice of copying the full file (non DFS) and then the file via RDC - huge savings in the traffice over the wire.
This has the potential to be a very useful technology for connecting many servers over a WAN and accessing common file. It's been a very common request of all our products, especially Exchange and Outlook, to offer low bandwidth solutions. It will be interesting to see how DFS and RDC can apply across many of the common customer requests in this area. RDC is worth checking out in more depth if you haven't seen it.
Ari just gave a number of demos using Media Center and interesting TV viewing/shopping scenarios. One demo showed an application that alerts his PocketPC phone when his son sits down to watch Jerry Springer. He can then send a message back saying "you're busted" and change it to SpongeBob Square Pants. Never thought I'd see both Jerry and SpongeBob in the same demo (or any demo!) He went on to show a number of other shopping type demos using Amazon.com Web services. The reset of the demos were done in hurried fashion and not with the same impact. I'm sure it's hard to come up with a set of demos for Indigo that keep you on the edge of your seat - Ari has done a good job but it might be useful to either cut some of the last demos or slow down and let them sink in. Thanks does go to Ari for filling in for Charles who is out with a broken hip (likely story ha!)
Some dates of interest for Indigo:
2005:
Biztalk - adaptor for WSE 2.0
SQL - dedicated SQL to SQL channel
2006:
BizTalk - adaptor for Indigo
SQL - indigo transport channel
Beyond:
Both natively use make use of Indigo - this will need some elaboration in a future post.
RTM: Indigo ships in 2006 along with Longhorn.
Ari is giving a demo where he is building a peer-to-peer chat application using Indigo from scratch (almost from scratch). He created a chat app using something called "Peer Channel" (a feature of Indigo) that enables you to easily create peer-to-peer communications. He made three apps, each being run using a different user name and was able to type a simple message (CMD prompt based) and have it appear on the other chat apps. The code (about 25 lines) was entered by hand in less that five minutes. For specific apps, I can see creating them much quicker using Indigo! Now, if it were available on many different platforms when it ships...
Some interesting stats - how much code does it reduce by using Indigo? Below are how many lines required to write an application that provides secure, reliable, transacted messaging before and after Indigo:
Lines of code without Indigo today:
Security: 20,379 lines
Reliable messaging: 5,988 lines
Transactions: 25,507 lines
Infrastructure: 4,442 lines
Using WSE 2.0:
Security: 10 lines
Reliable messaging: 1804 lines
Transactions: 25,507 lines
Total: 27,321 lines
Using Indigo:
Security: 1 line
Reliable messaging: 1 line
Transactions: 1 line
Total: 3 lines!
3 Lines of code to implement a secure, reliable and transacted application - unreal if this proves to be true! I wonder if the Indigo team will publish a paper that gives the details of the above study/application and how it was implemented.
Robert Hurlbut mentioned a SQL book he found at the TechEd store that he says is a valuable find. I also found something nice at the TechEd store that's worth mentioning. I'm a gadget guy so I look for the latest/smallest gadgets and at the TechEd store is a USB 2.0 travel hub (four ports) selling for $14 - nice. It's black with a Microsoft logo on the top and very portable. Worth checking out if you are looking for more USB 2.0 ports in a portable form factor.
I'm sitting in the audience for the Connected Systems talk. It was just announced that Charles Fitzgerald fell and broke his hip a couple of days ago so he won't be here to give the talk, instead there is a talk titled "An Early Look at Indigo". I've heard Charels give his connected systems talk before so I'm not too worried about it being replaced - it's good but a little too high level for what I'm looking for. Personally, I would rather hear more meat about the specifics of Connected Systems (such as Indigo), so this talk is actually a pleasant suprise for me. Ari Bixhorn is presenting and he's usually pretty articulate. Disclaimer: Charles, Ari and myself all work in the same org at MSFT called Developer and Platform Evangelism - I am a Developer Evangelist focusing on the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) ecosystem as well as starting some of our community efforts (more to come later.) More as the session gets started...
Today I start coverage of TechEd 2005 in Orlando, FL. I'm going to be looking for an interesting way to cover the event so that these post don't get lost in the plethora of posts (pOp) on TechEd. Hmmm... What would be the most interesting, original and possibly controversial way to cover this event - something completely different... If you have any thoughts on this, drop me a comment. By the end of day, I should a strategy in place!
