Jürgen writes...

This week I was doing just another Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) board in Dubai. I'm delighted to see that the process how we assess the competencies of the candidates is mature and repeatable. All the boards I've served on as a board member in the last 2 years had a consistent quality level and metrics. It's just amazing to see how the different boards - they  always had different members - can provide such a consistency. Kudos to the program management and the board of directors for their strategy to find that mix of experienced and newer board members. That keeps the whole thing so interesting for me, because you not only have the opportunity to see several candidates a week, each presenting and defending very interesting enterprise level architectures, but you always also meet fellow MCAs, some you know already and some you've heard of but never met them.

So this week I was again on a board with Jim Wilt - Chief Software Architect at Metrics Reporting in the USA - (my 3rd time with him), Max Poliashenko - VP at Bank of America in the USA (my 2nd time with him), Pervez Kazmi - Principal Technical Architect at Infosys in Australia (my 1st time with him), Ramnish Singh - IT Advisor for Microsoft in India (my 1st time with him), and last but not least my fellow German compatriot Thorsten Wujek - CIO at Stein-IT in Germany. I'm especially happy to see another German on the board.

So this week I had the pleasure to have a 1-1 dinner with Pervez, who at his time at Microsoft co-authored the Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF) process model. And it was very interesting to hear from him how Infosys lives CMMI and achieves a mindblowing rate of  projects that succeed in time and budget (above 92%, more here). I also was delighted to see their great adoption of Team Foundation Server and VSTS in their  Windows practices.

Here is just a nice picture of the board just before lunch in the Al Qasr Hotel.

Left to Right: Max, Ramnish, Pervez, Jim, Thorsten, Jürgen

This holidays I'm migrating my server from W2k3 R2 32-Bit to 64-Bit. I did it the usual way: I've a secondary DC as a VM on my workstation, and I assigned all the master roles to it. Then demoted my server and did a fresh install for the 64-Bit OS. I promoted it to become a DC again, took back all the roles and started to install services like NIS, NFS etc. The server has multiple disks, and by the reinstall of course only drive C: got reformatted, the other drives where then just mounted back. I brought up all my VMs again running in Virtual Server (VMs for MOSS, Exchange, TFS, Linux etc.) and overall all my services where running again, except: NFS.

The situation was this: on my various server drives I've NFS shares that my virtual Linux machine is mounting (for Backup and other things). This no longer worked and I got errors in the system event log from nfssvc with Event ID 1066, which normally means two things: your drive isn't NTFS, or you have some unspecified low level error. My drives are of course NTFS, so it must be low level errors, but which? There where no further details in the event logs, and searching the Web for a few hours didn't help:-(

So, last resort was to look into the registry. Under HKLM in the CurrentControlSet for nfssvr I realized that for any drive having a NFS share there was an entry, and some key pointed to a hidden "._nfs" directory on that drive. Just out of curiosity I looked into these directories and realized, that some of the files where the original ones created when I shared the directories on that drive for NFS running in 32-Bit mode. The purpose of these files seems to be to manage locks and to simulate inodes. My guess is, that the 64-Bit processes have problems to handle some of these files created in 32-Bit mode. So I did the following:

1. Unshared all the NFS shares on that drive
2. Deleted the ._nfs directory on that drive
3. Created the shares for NFS again, resulting in a newly created ._nfs directory by the NFS service

I'm happy to say, that was the trick!

Since a while I'm of course on VS2008 Betas and RCs and now on RTM, but my Home pseudo-production environment was still on TFS2005. Last night I migrated that to TFS2008 and the whole thing went very smooth. I upgraded the whole thing to Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0, and after some little tweaks the system is running smoothly, close to zero red flags in the event log:-)

I also installed the CTP of Web Access for TFS2008 and also that went very well. I can now again access all my demo projects while I'm travelling or in the office.

I'm now waiting on version 2 of Scrum for Team System, my favourite agile process model for the little stuff I'm doing.

The downside of the whole action is, that I better should have gone to bed earlier, because the cold I'm struggling with took the challenge and stroke back. So for today at least I can't make much use of my new system, I need to take a rest...

Look here for more details about the just released sample application. It is demonstrating how to apply many of the architecture principles published by my colleagues Gianpaolo Carraro and Fred Chong.

Our competitors seems to get a bit nervous about Microsoft supporting the ECMA-376 standard becoming an ISO standard. They filed complaints against this move.

ECMA-376 represents decades of experience with document processing and a large number of engineers putting efforts into compiling this standard. Novell announced to put support for ECMA-376 into Open Office for Linux, and Corel announced to put ECMA-376 support into their products. Together with Microsoft they represent a large market share in document processing (I guess some 99% or so :-))

Technically and market wise, ECMA-376 is far superior to ODF. Current implementations of ODF aren't interoperable, they even can't represent formulas in spreadsheets (!!!) and show numerous other deficiencies.

 Miguel de Icaza has a nice and extensive blog entry about why our competitors are wrong.

To me it is quite obvious: if you can't compete technically, you have to move the game to non technical grounds. It's clear that they put their own interests over those of the customers and the public.  

This week I was on a roundtrip to Stockholm - to deliver just another SaaS Architects Forum - and to Madrid for a meeting. My flight back yesterday evening boarded exactly as scheduled, but then they grounded us for two hours in Madrid because air traffic control imposed restrictions due to storm Kyrill. The flight then was quite smooth, just until 30 minutes before landing, when they started to descend towards Frankfurt Airport. Only a few funfair attractions can give you that experience, and none of them for sure half an hour in a row.

There was a remarkable silence in the plane during the landing approach, and just minutes before touchdown at exactly 11pm my mobile gave a loud alarm - I'd forgotten to switch off the sound. The people around me were scared by that and stared at me, so I quickly silenced the device.

Next week I've a roundtrip to Oslo and Istanbul and for sure I hope not to repeat that experience.

Visit http://www.microsoft.com/saas, the new top level place if you want to learn what Microsoft is doing in the SaaS space. 

Last week on our way back from a team offsite in Davos we stopped in a small village whose name really deserved a stop and a snapshot:-)

Ron Jacobs compiled a great series of five ARCast episodes with a company doing a SaaS (Software as a Service) application. Have a look!

ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Overview
ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Architecture Overview
ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Architecture Drilldown on Workflow and Services
ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend User Experience
ARCast TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Database Architecture

Last week (15-Nov) in Vilnius/Lithuania and yesterday in Athens/Greek we delivered our first two Architects Forums explaining and discussing the concepts and challenges of Software as a Service (SaaS). The events had good attendence and we received very positive feedback.

The architects especially seems to like the "Long Tail" aspect, and my guess is that the ones in the audience who are from ISVs like that approach because that means to open up new business with new customers who otherwise were out of reach. And for some reason "new business" is more attractive than moving exisiting - hopefully satisfied - customers to a new delivery model.

In the One-Day forum we delivered four 75-Min talks:

1. SaaS - An Overview
2. Building SaaS Solutions
3. SaaS in the Enterprise
4. SaaS - Implications for your infrastructure

In Lithuania I took the challenge to deliver all four talks - even the infrastructure one - and happily survived that challenge as a solution architect:-) In Athens my colleague Kevin Sangwell took the fourth talk and I happily could concentrate on my domain.

I've published my slides here (Kevin will publish his talk on his own blog).

After yesterdays event I was interviewd by the local Greek DotNet usergroup. They were interested in what it means to be a "Certified Architect". So I tried to explain the value proposition of the certification, what kind of competencies are required and how the process looks like. I hope that some Greek guys feel challenged and go for it.

Even in the dinner events around the Lithuanian forum the MCA was a topic that the attendees actively asked me to explain. For me this is a good sign: the architects certification really seems to be of interest.

David Chappel has an interesting entry in his Opinari newsletter about SOA and the Reality of Reuse. Worth a read.

You're like me and don't like all those Web-Controls allowing you to edit HTML inside the browser? Lost text sometimes? Not really high fidelity? So finally there might be a cure: Windows Live Writer is here.

This is of course my first posting using Writer, and I already discovered some very nice features:

• I like the "Web Preview" mode
• Check spelling in the editor

So hope you like it too.

I'm actually now starting with a new role inside Microsoft, working as an Architect Evangelist (AE) for the EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) Headquarter of Microsoft. I'm working there for Arvindra Sehmi's team, my AE colleagues are Beat Schwegler and Kevin Sangwell.

From a content perspective I'll concentrate on important aspects of our Web initiatives, a special focus will be on SaaS (Software as a Service). I'll talk about that topic on the next TechEd in Barcelona early in November this year, so I hope to see you there sitting in my talk:-) Otherwise I'll be on several tours and events in this fiscal year throughout our geography, so maybe you'll join my colleagues and me there and have discussions about hot architectural topics.

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This week was one of the rare opportunities where I was in a situation to write real code for a real customer. I got the permission of my manager to do a Proof-of-Concept to get hands on experience with WCF.

The scenario was a customer who has a TANDEM (aka HP Nonstop) application system written in COBOL running under Pathway, and this should be connected to a Windows platform using .NET 2.0 and WCF. The TANDEM runs an UNIX subsystem (OSS) and on that a Webserver integrating with the NSSOAP V3 Webservice software, that can talk to Pathway servers running under the original TANDEM OS.

I discovered very quickly that NSSOAP V3 stack has some issues with compliance to some of the Webservices standards and that iterop wouldn't be there out of the box. Honestly, that was what I expected, and why I asked to be on that PoC. Just to get a real world interop pain experience:-)

Finally, the WCF extensibility model helped me to solve the issues. What's nice about that is, the application programming wasn't affected at all. Even when the NSSOAP stack emerges towards better compliance in forthcoming versions, only changes to the config files of the WCF applications will be necessary.

I had to extend the WCF stack in two areas. I implemented a custom client message interceptor to transform the message into a XML that was understandable by the TANDEM site. The TANDEM site was sensible to formatting of the XML document, so we had to make sure that WCF emits a document that gets accepted by the XML parser on the TANDEM site. Another problem was, that the TANDEM - although announcing an UTF-8 encoding in the headers and prologues of the SOAP response - delivered characters that were not valid UTF-8 encoded (I guess they use some ISO-8859 variant and just send that over the wire). So I had to implement a custom message encoder that fixed the broken encoding coming from the TANDEM. Finally all that then worked quite stable.

WCF is about implementing WS-* and to be interoperable on the base of standards. But it is good to know that the guys implementing WCF are realistic about interop issues and did built in all that extensibility to allow you to adapt to nearly any scenario you can imagine. This is true design for interop! The WS world will be a better place if all that will be released - and documented properly;-) 

If you need details, send me an email.

and maybe you want to participate in one of the events where some of the most influential individuals and Microsoft illuminates discuss how the Web of the future might look like? Bringing together geeks as well as business professionals will create a hopefully creative athmosphere to exchange ideas in a 72 hour LIVE conversation. And maybe you'll get some inspiration out of the One-To-One with Tim O'Reilly and Bill Gates.

Don't miss the MIX06 conference, http://www.mix06.com