The Liquidator : SOA

Model Driven Development – Microsoft joins OMG

Mark.Carroll — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:33:00 GMT

Object Management Group (OMG) are a modelling standards group.

Last week at Tech-ed 2008 I gave a talk that included, amongst other things, a quick demo of the UML designers in the April CTP of Rosario (the next version of Visual Studio Team System). Lots of people have asked since what is our direction on modelling. Questions such as ‘What is the future for Domain Specific Langugaes (DSL) going to be ?”; “Are we going to go with a full ‘round trip’ code vision with this ?”

The answer is ‘watch this space’ and watch for developments in products, product previews *1, standards and standards group memberships / participation. One such move has just happened today – Bob Muglia Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Server and Tools business has just announced that Microsoft is joining OMG. Here is the announcement. Now this has happened my own personal opinion is that I think it is a pretty safe bet that UML has a strong future on the MS platform and inside Visual Studio Team system.

The next ‘marker post’ along this road will be the next CTP release for Rosario, likely to be later this month. The moment it shows up I will post the link to this blog.

*1: Rosario CTP’s are currently prime source of information for those working on the Microsoft Platform;

Twenty one words for Services

Mark.Carroll — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:34:00 GMT

Off the back of Gianpaolo Carraro's tour of New Zealand NZ ARCast has just released this interview of Gianpaolo Carraro by Lukas Svobda taken when Gianpaolo was here on his last day in Auckland. One of the gems in the interview is Gianpaolo's pronouncement that "Services is an overloaded term" - he then links this to the fact that Eskimo's have 21 words for SNOW and right now we are somewhat stuck in our vocabulary and labelling a lot of different patterns and approaches with the one label of SERVICES.

I would like to take that snow analogy a little further - right now there is a lot of talk about 'Services this' and 'Services that' but much of that talk is as about as useful and structured as a heap of snow. (Yes I know snow flakes are beautiful and unique but heap them up and they are still unstructured )

If we disregard the IT environments that businesses have already invested in and now rely on, if we ignore the fact that many devices and desktops already offer capabilities far beyond those of a simple broweser, if we ignore the fact that businesses and government have very real concerns about others hosting their data then we are talking SNOW.

The Software plus Services (S+S) model helps address those issues and there is already some very clear thinking about how it can be created, hosted and consumed. Do check out the interview with Gianpaolo Carraro and other references including the Microsoft Architect Journal to which Gianpaolo Carraro and others have contributed to significantly.

No SNOW - honest.

Microsoft Saas and S+S Architect Director coming to New Zealand

Mark.Carroll — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:32:00 GMT

Read it first on NZ ARCast.

Further to this entry on NZ ARCast I am delighted that Gianpaolo Carraro (GP), Director, DPE, Platform Architecture is coming down to New Zealand to give a series of talks on Saas and Software plus Services (S+S).

He will be talking to Independent Software Vendors, Hosters and Architects.

About ‘GP’

GP, as Gianpaolo is better known by us non-Italian speakers, describes himself on his blog as a dotcom refugee happily expatriated at Microsoft. He has recently contributed to both the Microsoft Architecture Journal Volume 12 and the MSDN architecture centre as well as speaking at numerous industry events. GP will be speaking in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland on December 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively.

The Enterprise Framework Factory (the EFx Factory) - an architectural-guidance software factory - Jezz Santos

Mark.Carroll — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 04:13:00 GMT

Jezz Santos used to be based here at the Wellington office of Microsoft NZ. He has a reputation for designing and building robust solutions that are reliable and fault tolerant - two critical attributes for building distributed systems.

Now based in Finland Jezz has continued with his software factory work and has produced this excellent paper on the EFx Factory which he describes as follows..

"The Enterprise Framework Factory (the EFx Factory) is an architectural-guidance software factory. It provides Microsoft partners with a software-factory implementation of the Microsoft Distributed Architecture for .NET Applications for building applications and services on the .NET platform."

Jezz's paper can be found here.

When to WF versus When to Biztalk & BPEL

Mark.Carroll — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 05:07:00 GMT

Speaking of SOA and implementing open standards on the MS platform I probably get quizzed once a week about Biztalk versus WF.

Well thanks to Guy Burstein I now have an excellent reference piece here http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/bursteg/archive/2007/03/20/10607.aspx

Guy lists 4 simple questions you need to ask yourself when considering both – also don’t forget you can use WF and Biztalk and future plans will see parts of Biztalk become identical with or very similar to WF. Thats great news in terms of skills reuse and a bunch of other things. The plan is that WF and Biztalk Server vNext (Built on top of WF) will implement OASIS BPEL 2.0 standard, but in the meanwhile the March CTP for WF implements BPEL for Web Services Version 1.1.

Here is the download page for the March CTP of WF, I mentioned this in my IT architecture summit talk last week.

IT Architecture summit - Auckland NZ - 15 thru 16 March 2007

Mark.Carroll — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:25:00 GMT

I presented on Web services specification developments, mainly W3C Oasis based, at the IT Architecture summit in Auckland last week. Thanks to Brighstar for doing a great job in organising this conference.

Two of the key questions people kept asking me were

1. Is this 'stuff' (WS-*) for real now - are people actually using it productively in NZ ?: The answer to this question is YES absolutely – this Kiwibank case study is a great example of Web services standards implementations being used effectively;

2. Are there any good examples / SDK’s / Toolkits etc of doing this stuff using Microsoft’s WCF and WF ? The answer is YES again – I have put some links below.

One of the key things I noticed this year was the increased interest in Enterprise architecture as a discipline, I felt that last years summit was more solutions architecture focused and it is good to see the different architectural disciplines (Enterprise/Strategic, Solutions, Infrastructure) being represented at these types of events here in New Zealand.

Useful WCF / WF links;

Basic WCF programming : http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731067.aspx

WCF and Cardspace samples : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0043041F-95D6-4EB7-966A-C21A737E193A&displaylang=en

Excellent article Jeremy Boyd, Wellington based Architect / Developer and principal of Mindscape:

An article on MSDN by Jeremy Boyd provides an overview of how workflows that are built by using Windows Workflow Foundation can be hosted inside services that have been created by using Windows Communication Foundation. The article also describes how we can make use of some of the broad capabilities that are provided by WCF to facilitate client-event callbacks by making use of a duplex channel.

If you are currently using WCF and WF or considering doing it in the near future - this article can be very useful.

The .NET Framework 3.0 training kit for WF, WCF, and CardSpace

This includes a set of hands-on-labs, demos, and presentations. The content was originally designed as part of the Windows Server Ascend training and has been used several times for training classes. Consequently, the content is organized into a four day agenda. You can also browse this content by technology.

To use the training kit:

Download the training kit.
Run the downloaded application to extract the files to your local machine.
View the additional setup steps on the default page in the training kit. This page should be displayed automatically after extracting the files.

Note: If you do not use the default path when extracting the files, then some of the demos will need to be changed to utilize the new path.

Kiwibank - Using .NET 3.0 to quietly get on with it

Mark.Carroll — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:13:00 GMT

Last year, along with Jeremy Boyd and chief architect - Bohdan Szymanik, I had the pleasure of working with rapidly growing Kiwibank who had a common problem experienced by most larger organisations - just how do you link and leverage a whole bunch of different systems on different platforms and move them from being a bunch of disparate systems to becoming an integrated platform focused on meeting the organisations business requirements.

To put it another way - How do you move from a bunch of point solutions to a fully integrated environment? By integrated I mean integrated at the process level not just at the information sharing level.

There is no silver bullet or big bang approach to do this - Kiwibank have embarked on a programme to integrate their systems using a SOA approach based on open standards. They have chosen the .NET 3.0 technologies WCF (to leverage WS-* implementations) and WF (Workflow) as core technologies to implement their programme and are already seeing some early benefits.

I'm delighted that Kiwibank have decided to share their experiences via this case study > http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200491

The case study is worth a look and it is great to see what is becoming known as a great 'Kiwi battler' taking on the market using a clever, well thought out, set of strategies and technologies. Instead of announcing some great huge expensive project these folk are just quietly getting on with it – that’s the Kiwi spirit !