mszCool's thoughts and cents revealed : Whitepapers - Publications

3rd Interoperability Council on November 5th

mszCool — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:07:14 GMT

Last week, on November 5th 2009, we had our 3rd Interoperability Council in the Microsoft Innovation Center in Vienna. The council is an independent group of technology experts that discusses current interoperability-challenges between the Microsoft platform and other platforms.

Of course a special focus of this group are local and regional standards as global standards are mostly addressed by the Microsoft corporation, itself. During the meetings we typically discuss current issues and try to identify ways (processes, approaches etc.) for solving these problems together. We are really running this in a very pragmatic way – as soon as the council identifies benefits for all parties (customers, partners, Microsoft), we try to find ways for taking on the challenges.

Results from the council of the previous months

The council was founded with his first meeting on February 10th 2009. In this first meeting we also identified a few potential challenges. For two of them we organized what we call interoperability labs, for one I’ve written an article and published it on my blog last week.

In a lab we typically setup 2-3 workshops of 1-2 days with a small sub-group of the council and experts the members of the council are brining into the game. During these labs we either really work on concrete concepts or even source code (depending on the type of the lab) to solve a certain, strategically important challenge. The idea is really to bring together a group of bright people in a very pragmatic way and try to find ways for dealing with interop-challenges identified by the council. If we come up with concrete results then it’s a success, if not, then we know at least, which further actions we would need to take for dealing with a challenge, how big the necessary investment would be and whether driving further investigations is worthwhile or not! Fortunately with the previous labs we were successful. The results of our council are remarkable:

e-card Interop-Lab

Published Open Source Components
Published a business-article (German) on our team-blog
Published a technical article of the results on my blog

e-Government Portal-Connection-Protocol

Published Open Source Components
Whitepaper on supporting this Austrian eGovernment standard

Identity Interoperability

Article on Identity Interoperability (incl. PoC with Metro/WSIT)

If you are interested, then just read on our team-blog on the council (German, only). Now were going into the next phase and looking for further, important interop-challenges. Let’s see what happens and what the council will come up with in the next months!

Cheers
Mario

Presentation at Microsoft TechReady in the US on Always Responsive Applications and Services with samples using CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) as well as .NET 4.0 Task Parallel Library

mszCool — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:00:40 GMT

Today in the morning I gave a presentation at Microsoft’s largest internal conference for employees in Seattle, WA (called TechReady, about 5000-6000 Micorsoft employees are there on technical education).

The presentation I gave is essentially based on the whitepaper I’ve written and we’ve published a few weeks ago together with Frequenits AG on always responsive and scalable apps and services. You can find more details as well as the paper for download here.

While the presentation is strictly confidential, I can publish the demo scenarios. Therefore click the link below if you are interested in a complete scenario that shows asynchronous processing within clients and services as well as across services… of course I do not cover all possible “exceptions”, but it’s a starting point.

Click here to download the demo
(for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, only, I will provide a VS 2008 version with CCR-only implementations soon)

The demo scenario supports a few arguments discussed in my whitepaper as well as the presentation:

Performance comparison between Peer-2-Peer and Service-bus based communication metaphors.
Base classes for implementing the Command/Job/Queue patterns discussed in the whitepaper.
And finally – a mapping of these patterns to .NET Framework technologies that definitely help implementing the patterns themselves. I include two implementations, one that uses the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime from the Microsoft Robotics Studio and another one that uses the .NET Framework Task Parallel Library that we are going to publish with the .NET Framework 4.0. To switch between those two implementations, just modify the JobManagerFactory in the AsyncDemo.JobLibrary project to use one or the other implementation.

The project with Frequentis definitely showed me, that Asynchronous programming and thinking is not just for the sake of performance, it’s also for “responsiveness” and “availability”. The neat thing is, that simply by keeping a few things in mind, these things can go hand-in-hand.

Nevertheless, it was very special for me delivering this session at TechReady. Seven years ago, right before I started working for Microsoft in October 2002, Seattle was the place where I attended the first Microsoft conference of my life (and the first conference in the US, at all). And it was in the very same location as TechReady this year – in the Washington State and Convention Center, in the Sheraton Hotel and Hyatt Hotel in Seattle.

My session was in one of the Grand Ball Rooms in the Sheraton with about 100 attendees… and back in August 2002 I had my room in the Sheraton at the Windows .NET Server 2003 conference… at that time I would have never thought that I will hold a session in the same location at any time:) So this was special for me! And I hope it was not for the last time!

Project with the Medical Association in Austria, a Pragmatic Services Architecture with .NET 3.5 and SQL Server 2005/2008

mszCool — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:46:50 GMT

Hint: technical presentations about this project as download in the link list at the end of this post!!

This year the Austrian medical association together with the medical associations of the different federal states in Austria as well as one of our Gold-certified partners, Anecon Software Design und Beratung GmbH., completed a project we (Microsoft Austria) started together on the country-wide management of data for medical practitioners and their ordinations.

The management of this data is prescribed by the Austrian law and is used for several scenarios such as sponsorships of medical practitioners, promotions, payments, traceability or even for support in lawsuits and is therefore mission-critical!

Attached to this blog-entry you will find two presentations with technical information on how we architected the solution. While the first presentation (Part1.pdf) contains shows some of the most important requirements within the environment, usage-scenarios of technologies as well as some really cool screen-shots of parts of the application, the second presentation (Part2.pdf) is based on an architectural specification I’ve written for the project on where and how-to apply which technologies of the .NET Framework 3.x in the application architecture.

Understanding the political and technical environment

Austria’s health care environment is one of the most complex political environments in Europe – and the most complex political environment in the country itself. The environment is organized in a federal way, that means each federal state of Austria (we have 9 of them) is treated as an autonomous unit.

Therefore each federal state has its own state-medical association with its own responsibilities and duties. Many of these responsibilities and duties are self-managed by these medical associations for a federal state, but on the other hand many of them are prescribed by a country-wide medical association which is the Austrian medical association.

Having these autonomous associations’ leads to the fact that each association manages both, a common set of information on medical practitioners which is prescribed by the Austrian medical association as well as its own, additional set of information they want to and need to manage for the federal state they’re acting in. That means that the application of discussion of this web blog as well as the attached presentations need to be deployed in each federal association with their own data storage, their own service instances and client applications while on the other hand they need to synchronize the common set of data between the federal associations to be able to manage and process data on medical practitioners having ordinations in multiple federal states.

Finally that means we are talking about federated data and federated services from a technical point-of-view with medical associations in the states within Austria as well as one overall organization which is the Austrian medical association. Technologies such as workflows for synchronization using SQL Server Service broker for data-synchronization transactions with “transformation”-rules in between are core in the application architecture.

The role of the medical association, Anecon and Microsoft in the project

Requirements as well as the underlying data model haven been defined by a working group defined by the Austrian medical association that consisted of several representatives of the different medical associations from the federal states. Our partner, Anecon, was responsible for the design, implementation and test of the overall solution based on latest Microsoft technologies. We from Microsoft acted as a trusted advisor for the Austrian Medical association: Robert John, our business development manager ensured getting the right support from the Area and Microsoft Corp. while I helped creating the overall architecture for the system together with Anecon and the representatives of the medical association.

Download the presentation

Requirements, usage-scenarios of technologies and screen-shots from Anecon

Core technical architecture recommendations from Microsoft / Mario Szpuszta

Involved technologies, links and further resources

.NET Framework 3.5 (incl. Service Pack 1)

Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Workflow Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation

SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 (for newer deployments)

SQL Server Service Broker

Microsoft Patterns & Practices Home

Microsoft Patterns & Practices Application Architecture Blueprint

Whitepaper – Always Responsive Clients and Services with WPF and WCF – Frequentis AG Tracking & Tracing Logbook for Maritime Communications

mszCool — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:45:00 GMT

I am delighted to publish a whitepaper of one of the most interesting engagements I’ve been part of so far – together with Frequentis AG.

Together with the architects from Frequentis, Ulrich Hüttinger and Stefan Domnanovits, we’ve been writing this whitepaper I am publishing now with this blog-entry. In this paper you can read about some of the most important (not all!!) architectural approaches and design decisions Frequentis made for building always responsive clients and services in the mission critical area of ship-vessel traffic management.

Download the paper by clicking here…

Frequentis is building the newest applications in this area with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, primarily Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Topics we’ll cover in this paper are:

Understanding the environment of the tracking and tracing solution and its technical requirements.
Discussing some decisions Frequentis had to make on their message bus infrastructure based on these requirements.
Implementing a reliable message bus infrastructure for smaller havens/ports and large havens/ports with WCF at the same time.
Putting job-, queue- and command-patterns together for always responsive applications on clients and in services.
Combining patterns such as the presentation model pattern on the front-end in WPF and understanding the communication-flow between the presentation model and the business logic that uses queues, commands and jobs on the backend.

I hope you find this paper interesting and the information in it useful!

Mario

Architecture Journal - Article about Federated Identity in the Health Care

mszCool — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:08:59 GMT

Last week, just one week after my vacation, I had it in my inbox - the announcement that Issue 16 of the Architecture Journal about Identity and Access Management has been published.

In this issue of the journal you will find an article I've written about federated identity architectures in health care. This article is about a project that I have been involved in within the whole last winter-season and where Emmanuel Mesas from the Microsoft Innovation Center and I helped the Austrian Medical Association in Austria building a prototype. With that project and this prototype my extreme interest in the Identity Meta System Vision was born. Since then I really believe in the concepts of Kim Cameron's vision.

A brief history: a little more than a year ago the Austrian Medical Association asked us for helping them in providing additional concepts to the Electronic Health Care Records system which was planned in Austria. The primary challenge there was, that the health care environment is (a) a politically complex environment and (b) has extreme security-requirements due to the strong data protection law in Austria.

While having several Architectural Design Sessions and finally a prototyping session with the Microsoft Innovation Center Copenhagen we came up with a solution which really leveraged some primary concepts of the Identity Meta System vision.

The primary benefit - separation of concerns in the identity world

When taking a look at the concepts of the identity meta system it really proposes a clear separation of roles:

The identity provider (IP) is responsible for issuing, validating and proofing the validity of identities. By proofing statements about an identity the provider can definitely influence authorization - but he is not doing all the authorization by himself.
Authorization is done by the relying party (RP). The RP finally accepts identity tokens with statements about an identity proofed by the IP. Other than in classic architectures where each application authenticates and authorizes a user at their facade layer (such as a web service that authenticates each and every request), the application (which is the RP in this scenario) accepts a digitally signed security token from an IP as proof for an identity and just does the authorization and business logic part.
And of course finally we have the user who can be authenticated by an IP while accessing an RP through a variety of mechanisms.

This separation of concerns really allowed us to deal with the technically and politically heterogeneous and complex environment. Also due the flexible support of different standards such as SAML, Kerberos or X.509 it is much easier to build a security environment in heterogeneous environments that include .NET, Java or any other technology you could imagine. If you are interested in more details, read on here.

Btw. Cardspace was not part of the project, we were just talking about Security Token Services and Claims-based Web Services and Clients in the scope of this system.

My Personal Thoughts

This project really helped me understanding the primary advantages of claims-based and federated identity concepts. Since that I strongly... strongly believe in the Identity Meta System as a whole!! I've also given several presentations during the past 12 months on that topic... and more presentations will follow!

Currently I am working on a presentation on using federated and claims-based security in heterogeneous environments including building a bridge between .NET and Java using DigitalMe and Eclipse Higgins... we'll see what's coming out there;)

In any case I recommend reading the last journal issue and, of course, my article about how we leveraged the identity meta system's concept to support the Austrian Medical Association and the Austrian Electronic Health Care Records system for the future about a year ago:)

Click here to read the article;)

derStandard.at - White-paper about a Silverlight InfoScreen application

mszCool — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:06:30 GMT

I am especially proud to announce this next technical paper: during the past months we've been working with www.derStandard.at on designing and implementing a Silverlight-based application platform for building InfoScreen applications.

Special thanks goes to our developer evangelist, Max Knor, for this project - he helped making the first prototype a success with is great, in-depth Silverlight know-how.

Max and I have written a technical white-paper together for developers and architects where we describe the basic architectural approaches as well as some Silverlight-implementation approaches that we've been working on together with the team from derStandard.at.

Check out Max' blog-entry which also contains the download of the paper by clicking here.

HP banqpro/ - Technical paper about a WPF Smart Client Project with WF Integration

mszCool — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As announced in the previous blog, publishing technical papers about interesting architectural concepts from customer and partner engagements is going to be a focus for me from this time forward.

Click here for downloading this first paper in the series!

This is the first paper in this series since my personal blog.restart() and it is about a WPF Smart Client enterprise project we've been working on in the past couple of months.

HP banqpro/ is one of the most well-known banking products here in Austria and it is used by several large customers across the country. The banqpro/-team is currently working on a new front-end experience based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the .NET Framework 3.x.

The white-paper I have attached to this blog describes the architectural concepts we've applied for building this WPF-based smart client. The paper especially emphasizes on motivations and architectural concepts for integrating workflows into Smart Clients of this category. It was one of the primary future requirements for banqpro/.

Note that this is an architectural paper - it talks about concepts and strategies, not about coding details!

Click here for downloading the paper!