Shy Cohen's WebLog : Personal

Familiar faces on the TechEd Europe homepage

ShyCohen — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:52:00 GMT

I was looking at the TechEd Europe Developers homepage when a picture I saw on the rotating image control caught my attention - were those familiar faces that I saw there? A closer look showed my friends Rafal, Christian, Steve, Michele, and Omri. Cool!

Adventures on the way BACK from TechEd: The Problem with Falling Doors

ShyCohen — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 07:48:00 GMT

The way back was mostly uneventful. Since I did not sleep at all the night before, I was sleepy and dozed through most of the flight time.

On the second flight (Newark to Seattle) I was sitting in the front row in coach, with more legroom than first class, enough room to work comfortably on the laptop (the biggest problem when flying coach), in an isle seat (my favorite seating choice), and with lovely row-mates who would carry a pleasant conversation when you want to talk and keep to themselves when you don’t. The idea was that since I don’t have any luggage to pick up I can get out of the airport within 10 minutes of landing. (Even the TSA did not stop me from taking 3 large pieces of luggage onboard – and it’s not like they didn’t try J) On the downside, my seat was across the mid-plane lavatory, which might actually be convenient if you want to use the lavatory and is also the background of the following story.

One of the passengers, an older, less traveled guy, wanted to use the lavatory. He did not understand that the lavatory was occupied and pushing on the door didn’t help so he tried to pull one of the latches that he saw. That did not work of course, but what he did unhinged the door, so when the poor guy that was inside tried to get out the whole door came out of its place and nearly fell onto him! I got up and helped the poor guy get out by lifting the displaced door, taking it out of the lavatory, and holding it out of the way as he stepped out. I put the door back in its place with some help from a flight attendant and peace (or at least use of the lavatory) was restored.

TechEd Boston – Day Five: The End is Here

ShyCohen — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 18:35:00 GMT

Today at 9am Don and I repeated the Service Factory chalk talk. Since this was fairly early in the morning, and also after the attendee party, we didn’t expect too many folks to show up. We were pleasantly surprised to have about 20 people show up, including good friends like Stuart and Patrick from Corillian. The talk was great (and a little different from the one we did on Wednesday) and the audience gave us very good feedback and some interesting ideas.

Afterwards, Don and I had a design discussion with one of the presentation attendees that revolved around data flow patterns and handling huge query results in interactive multi-tier applications (caching results vs. using indexes, etc.). Later on Beat and I reviewed a diagram for some company’s reference implementation for web-services. The diagram conflated cross cutting infrastructure and implementation details with architecture, which was very interesting since it helped me understand how much more guidance is needed in this area.

There’s a very natural tendency for people who are deep into a subject to forget where the majority of the folks are. You can see this for example in some of the technical tracks we have in Microsoft conferences. Instead of focusing on the basics we sometimes focus on the cool things in the fringes. If you se us doing this please let us know – your feedback matters and helps us better address your needs.

At lunch I talked with Beat about TechEd Europe. I still did not submit my abstracts yet, so let me know if there’s anything in particular that you want me to talk about. Later on we were joined by Hans Verbeek, Mark White from MS UK, Payam and others for a rather random discussion about TechEd Europe.

After lunch I talked some more with attendees, and even got to do some coding to illustrate a WCF feature (I coded WCF on the WF demo machine, but no one caught me J).

Towards the afternoon, the conference quieted down (well, except for the loud cheers from the Architecture track when they did the Iron Architect contest) and that was it – TechEd was over.

Later that night we assembled 11 guys for dinner at Hungry I. As expected, the food and service were great! Actually, everyone met at Cheers beforehand, but I had to stay at the hotel and reconstruct an important document (that I deleted all by myself L) before I forget all the details – don’t you just hate it when these things happen?! After that we took the T to Cambridge, listened to some bluegrass music at one place, had some random conversations with locals in another place, and ended the night at 3am in Chinatown for a second dinner (Robert, I managed to find good spicy food in Boston – thanks for the tip about East Coast Grill though!) and went back to the hotel at 4:30. I guess we really, really didn’t want it to end.

That’s it – TechEd is over. And now back to our regular scheduled program J

TechEd Boston - Day Four: Modeling and Sea Levels

ShyCohen — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 01:45:00 GMT

Today I had no speaking “duties” (L), which meant that I had more time to talk with folks (J). I started the day discussing modeling and tooling techniques and mechanisms for architecting services (an approach not too different from the Service Factory in principle, only a lot more graphic).

Writing software is just too hard. The systems that we’re building today are more complex, tie in more moving pieces, and we’re expected to deliver them at a more rapid pace than ever. WF is (among other things) bridges the gap between the business process person and the software person. Other modeling techniques will eventually help us write software that is easier to architect, understand, develop, and most importantly - maintain. DSL is one building block, and there are others, but as an industry we need to embrace modeling and bring it to the mainstream. I am not talking about modeling in the UML sense of the word, where the model and the implementation are 2 separate disjoint languages and in most cases you can only translate one-way between them. We need the model to be the solution, and to have high fidelity correlation between the visual representation of the solution and the solution itself – just like we do with WF. Now, don’t go telling me about particular tools that do the job today with UML and the like. The fact is that they are not mainstream, and many folks that I talked with said that they were simply too hard to learn and use.

After lunch I met with 2 guys from a financial institution for an impromptu whiteboard design session for a scalable, reliable, transacted, load-adaptable, client-presence-aware, pub-sub system using MSMQ and WCF. We also discussed optimization technique for minimizing latency, mechanisms to transition clients off a system that needs servicing, and other things. I have to tell you– some days I just feel like I have the best job in the world! (Shh… don’t tell my management I said that, I like to keep them on their toes J)

I went back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. A large group went into the elevator and every person pressed a different button. Vadim suggested they add a new button to the elevator – Select All J

I had dinner with Iain and Alex, 2 blokes from one of WCF’s early-adopter-partners, at Legal Sea Food. The food was superb and the service excellent, but the company was even better. Iain even managed to find a white wine that I liked. We had a jolly good time (they are British J) and I learned that due to the way that the water flow around that island off of the coast of France where Terry Pratchett lives, the see level (high and low tide-lines) is not the same all around the island.

We had so much fun that I completely missed the Train concert (people said it was fun). I got into Fenway Park just as the band was playing the last notes of the last song. Oh well, I still got to walk on field (but not on the grass – the picture should explain why J). After that Vadim and I met up with a group of WCF folks at Westin’s Bar 10 but I ended up spending the evening with a group of brokers who were there for a conference – you cannot believe how entertaining these guys can be once in the right mood! J

TechEd Boston – Day Three: 2 chalk talks and 2 fun guys

ShyCohen — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 07:34:00 GMT

The morning started with a discussion on Reliable Messaging with one of the attendees. Over the last year I’ve spoken to literally hundreds of folks (customers, partners, conference attendees, etc.) and it’s interesting to see the same questions come up again and again, and people coming up with the same solutions, often making the same mistakes. The well designed solutions to these common problems exist out there, but they are often not well documented and what we do have out there is not very discoverable. We should do something about that as an industry, share more, and broadcast that knowledge.

The first chalk talk was about Service Oriented Design Patterns (SODP). SODP is a huge space and I deliberately provided a somewhat vague abstract. For me, talks are always about the audience and what they want to hear, so in the days before the talk I asked many folks what they want to hear about. The topic of choice was pub-sub, and so I gave a talk on that.

The talk was a runaway success! About 45-50 people huddled in our 20-people chalk-talk theater, sitting on chairs, sitting on the floor, standing in the back, and even standing outside the theater. Check out the picture that Nic posted on this blog, which us BTW a great blog to read. Given the interest in this topic I will try to make this a “proper talk” (ok, breakout session J) in future events.

30 minutes later I gave a chalk talk w/ Don Smith from the Patterns & Practices group. Don is a great, funny, smart guy and we just “click” well. When doing a “duo” presentation you have several choices. If the speakers do not know each other well they need to segment the presentation, with the speakers taking turns on stage (like you’d see in most keynotes that include demos). Another alternative in that situation is to rehearse the presentation down to the smallest detail. However, when the speakers do know each other there is room for an additional style which includes “improvisation”, humor, and most importantly audience participation. Since we wanted to field questions from the audience we went with the “improvised” style and it was great. The talk was well attended, with about 40 people who were very engaged, asked questions, and gave us great feedback.

After the presentation someone came to me with the classic “we’ve been working on our enterprise schema for 4 months and are not making progress” problem. I described and explained scenario spaces and per-scenario schemas, and how those relate to scenarios. As Beat said later – to achieve schema reuse you need at least 1 one person to adopt the schema J This is such an important topic and talking with folks about this one-on-one or presenting about it at conferences just doesn’t scale, so I plan to write a whitepaper on this in the near future. Together with the Service Taxonomy paper that’s 2 that I owe you J

Later that evening I went to the TechEd Influentials' Party at Ned Devine's Irish Pub in the Fanueil Hall Marketplace at the Quincy Market Building. This is a great venue, with 3 great halls in a row, connected by wide passageways. Scott Henselman was standing next to the entrance, so I recorded an audio segment for Henselminutes site. A while later, Steve Maine, Ami Vora, Richard Turner and Payam Shodjay joined us at the party.

After making the rounds, hooking up people whom I thought should know each other, and bringing world peace (well, not quite J) I hooked up with Mark Minsai and Steve Riley and we spent the rest of the evening talking about everything in the world. These guys are really fun!

TechEd Boston – Day Two: A scary tale with a good ending and 2 back-to-back parties

ShyCohen — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:46:00 GMT

This morning I gave my talk. I was working on the demos and slides until late last night, completely ignoring the first rule of presentations: get a good night’s rest before your presentation. With ruby red eyes I managed to drag myself out of bed in the morning, go through the morning routine, and by the time I got to the conference center things were going much better … or so I thought. I got to room 109AB 30 minutes before my talk, hooked everything up, and was ready to go, except for the small issue that my laptop would not project to the screen which means no demos. OMG! The technician who came in to solve the problem recommended installing new display drivers. Installing anything on your laptop, and especially display drivers, 5 minutes before your presentation is the speakers’ equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot and hoping you’d miss J. Luckily things went very smoothly and I was ready to rock on time.

After the talk I had a quick lunch w/ Riyaz Pishori (a great guy who deserve more visibility, see minute 16 of this video) and one of the attendees. If you see me at lunch and want to talk about anything, feel free to stop by and say Hi. From there I hurried to record an ARCast with Ron and Don but we had to postpone it until later in the afternoon. Instead, I went to see Beat’s talk titles Architecting Applications for a Service Oriented World. I love Beat’s pragmatic approach to the topic, and I was pleased to see my scenario-focused approach taking hold with others. I will write more about this topic in the future.

Later that day Steve Maine, Clemens and I were sitting and coming up with fake Web 2.0 verbs for Steve’s presentation (the demo is awesome, check it out!!!). Clemens came up with a killer one that got us rolling on the floor.

The ArcCast was lots of fun (as usual). Ron interviewed Don and I about the Service Factory and WCF. We started out with a crowd of 2, so I turned more towards Ron and Don, and when I looked back to the crowd area I was amazed to see the all crowd we have pulled in. If you want to learn more about the Service Factory check out the website or come to the chalk talks on Wed or Fri.

After the recording I got to talk with one of the attendees about one of my favorite topics, designing enterprise schemas. Their organization had run into the “classic” problem of trying to define the uber-schema. I described my scenario oriented approach and how to think about scenario spaces, and that resonated well with him. I will write more about this topic as well.

That evening I joined The Microsoft Regional Director Annual Party and Award Dinner that took place in Jake Ivory’s. On the way there I got to hear a joke from Michelle that I cannot repeat on a Microsoft blog but it had to do with 3 supermodels and a plane crash J. At the RD Talent Show, or as some called it “The RD Show” (because talent was not guaranteed J) Michelle sang Smelly Cat for us, and Alexander Wechsler completely rocked the house with his singing and blues harmonica. The RDs showed that you can be a geek with IQ shooting through the roof, and still be funny and talented in many ways. Mauro won the RD of the Year award.

After that a group of us went and “crashed” the “by invitation only” MSDN party at Boston Billiards. The facility is very nice, it has a lot of tables, and despite the fact that there were a LOT of people there it was not hard finding an open table. Brian proved to be a great player and kicked our butts (ours means Julie and me) in cutthroat. I also learned that Kerry Gates (Publisher of MSDN Magazine & TechNet Magazine) is getting married next week. This is a true Microsoft marriage – they met at PDC 2 years ago, got together at the following TechEd, and the bachelor’s party is at this year’s TechEd J This may be funny, but it goes to show something that is not very obvious for attendees or even Microsoft folks; for many people TechEd is a time to get together with their worldwide peers, make new friends, reconnect with old ones, create new business opportunities, and create that vibrant community that we call the Microsoft ecosystem.

At the party I got to chat with Zach Jason and Alisa Lawyer about PM-ing at Microsoft and other things, and eventually shared a cab with Ami and others back to the hotel. The cab driver noted that Boston was empty this time of year with all the students being away. I guess it makes the morning ride to the conference center a little better J

TechEd Boston - Day One: Familiar faces and cool customer stories

ShyCohen — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 04:31:00 GMT

The first "real" day of the conference was great!

This morning started out pretty nicely. I am staying on the 15ht floor at the Boston Park Plaza, which is a “hotel within a hotel” with its own concierge and lounge, so breakfast was just a few steps away from my hotel room. Now that’s what I call convenient J

Today I took the shuttle to the conference. I had an interesting conversation on the bus with one of the attendees about choosing between SSB and BTS and the cost and pain of running an IT shop. Later that day I talked with a VP of IT at a large multinational institution who told me that his company saves over $20M a year on infrastructure and installlation cost by using Virtual Server. He also mentioned that the real savings are yet to be seen because another company he knows was saving over $100M a year with server virtualization in electricity alone. Impressive!

My first stop of the day was at the speakers’ room, where I ran into Juval Lowy from IDesign who gave me a box of his WCF Resource CDs. These are credit-card sized CDs full of WCF goodies, demos, sample book chapters, and more. I’ll be handing some of those babies out at the conference, so if you want one come and ask me for it.

After lunch Clemens and I had a really fun session w/ a groups of RDs (Regional Directors). We knew a lot of the people there (not to mention that Clemens actually comes from that group) and it was great to reconnect, “share the love”, answer questions, and most of all share “stories from the inside”. I also got to meet Mauro again, tell the rescue story to the RDs, and even demonstrate the Heimlich manouver on Clemens (well, not really do it, but rather explain how to do it).

I spent the hour after that talking with a that VP guy and hearing his overwhelmingly positive feedback on WCF and WF. I’s always fun to hear your costomers getting excited about your product, but more importantly it’s an indication that we’ve gotten it right. Building software that adds value to our customers is one thing. Doing it in a way that’s easy, efficient, and even fun to use is another thing altogether.

My focus in these events is on talking with customers and partners, hearing feedback, and answering questions, which unfortunately means that I don’t get to attend any of the other talks. However, I did go to John Justice’s introduction talk and at the end some of us WCF speakers got on stage and did in improvised “experts panel” which was a very cool idea. On my way to John’s Intro to WCF talk I ran into Stuart Celarier, a great guy and an old time buddy of the WCF team (back from when it was called “Indigo”). Stuart did not paint his goatee Indigo this time around (he did so for all the previous events we’ve met at) so he was hard to recognize J. Here at TechEd he’s running the Birds of Feather (BOF) sessions, so if you enjoyed these you now know who the man behind the curtain is.

After the Expo Hall Reception and talking with some more folks I went to hand in my slides for tomorrow, and went back to the hotel. This is my only night this week with no scheduled activities after 9pm, which is great since I want to get som rest before my talk tomorrow. The motto for tomorrow is “fewer slides, more demos”, so tonight I'll be busy making sure that all my demos run smoothly. BTW, many speaker (me included) agree that the hardest part of creating a presentation is deciding what to leave out. The first draft is almost always too long, and letting go of slides is hard. Tweak time is over - it's showtime (well, tomorrow morning that is).

TechEd Boston - Day Zero

ShyCohen — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 19:31:00 GMT

Well, opening on Sunday was an interesting idea. I’m not sure I’m thrilled by it.

Since I had a lot of time this morning until the conference started, I decided to walk from my hotel to the convention center, and stop at a restaurant in China Town to have lunch. I ate at Chau Chow and although the hotel recommended it and on the walls they have a lot of local awards and even a Zagat rating plaque, the food was very disappointing. It was lacking in flavor, aroma, color, texture and spiciness. I ordered a dish that was marked “hot” but I had to order hot sauce on the side and eventually used it all on the food to add some “kick” to it. Later on that day I discovered that “hot” here in New England is not really spicy, but being blunt was just one out of the faults of their food.

When I was registering at the speakers’ registration room I met up with David Chapel. I really enjoy talking to David. David is talking at the Gartner conference next week on the topic of ESB. We had an interesting conversation on the notion of the ESB, what ESB really means, and what the components of an ESB are, and then ventured off to other topics like Discovery and how people see it. It turned out we have somewhat different (though not necessarily opposing) experiences when Discovery is concerned. David sees people not caring too much about it (i.e. Discovery is not important since everything is pre-configured anyway) and I see people falling into 2 camps – the “don’t care” folks that never even mention the topic and the “must have” folks who say that without an ESB SOA become large-scale spaghetti code. We did agree that most organizations come to a point when they look into Discovery.

The keynote was OK. Ray Ozzie talked about his personal history, which closely follows the history of innovation in computing. I was fairly interesting and set the ground for his vision of what’s coming up next, the next disruptive change: Client-Service-Services. The demos were good and short. The only problem was that they were targeting a too diverse audience, and so some demos were addressing the IT Pro community (virtualization, improvements in deployment, etc.) and some targeted developers (using Expressions to design the app, VS to do the code behind, and ClickOnce to deploy). Overall, the message sounded a little mixed and unfocused.

They got Mary Lynn Rajskub who plays Chloe O'Brian on the TV show 24 to come on stage and liven things up a bit. Bob announced her to be The IT Goddess J. Too bad I don’t follow TV, or I’m sure I would have appreciated this even more (I’m told that 24 is a great show). She was pretty good and kept tings light and somewhat funny. At some point she brought 3 developers from the audience to the stage, held hands with them, and publicly apologized for making things look so easy on TV and setting unrealistic expectations J She also said that the slogan “Do More with Less” should be changed to “Do More with More” – more resources, bigger budgets, faster computers J. They even ended 10 minutes BEFORE the specified time, which is pretty impressive.

As it turns out, most of my fellow speakers are at a difference (far away) hotel so after calling Don Smith to find about dinner I decided to eat at my hotel. I went into McCormick & Schmick here at the hotel for dinner and had a wonderful “spicy” blackened Halibut on rice and Jambalaya. I met Mark and Bryan from Crowe Chizek and Company and we had an interesting discussion about strategies for smart client connectivity, followed by a discussion on the differences between the US and Israeli army experience. An interesting thing about Crowe Chizek and Company is that their business cards do not have a title on them. Mark explained that since titles mean nothing outside of the company, there’s no point in putting them on the cards. They do have their certifications noted on the card so we decided to come up with certifications with interesting acronyms that they can put on their cards, like Distributed Unified Development Evangelist - hey, that's what I do J.

That was yesterday - today the real deal is starting. I can't wait!

Adventures on the way to TechEd

ShyCohen — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 08:13:00 GMT

Boston. The Cradle of Liberty. Home of TechEd 2006. The city that’s far, far away from Redmond J

Someone had a brilliant idea to start TechEd on Sunday afternoon, which given travel time and time-zone differences meant that I needed to travel on Saturday to get there. Oh well.

On Friday a friend and I had a heated discussion on SOA taxonomy, software architectures composition models, and the separation of error handling from the main-path flow of the business logic. As those things usually go, we started arguing ... I mean discussing this at midnight and talked until 4am, so I got no sleep at all before my 7:50am flight. This meant that the 5 hours flight from Seattle to Newark was mostly doze-off time. Easy J

When I got to Newark I leisurely made my way to my connecting flight from the far-most end of Concourse C to my connection at Concourse A. When traveling between terminals you need to exit Security and re-enter. I had ample time and so when I saw the thing I’m going to tell you about next at the Security checkpoint for Concourse A I could not resist checking it out J

SENTINAL II is the most Sci-Fi security device I’ve ever seen. I chose to walk through it just for fun. There were 2 lanes with no one in line, one through the device and the other bypassing it, and my geek instincts made the choice very clear. The best way to describe this device is “a high-tech security walk-through booth”. You step inside, put your feet on the 2 yellow “stand here” markings on the floor and a female voice says something like “commencing scan”. Little jets of air shoot out from multiple nozzles positioned on the curved inner walls of the booth, “brushing” you from top to bottom. The machine then analyzes the air for traces of dangerous chemicals while a little head-high mounted screen counts down the few seconds required for the analysis. When you are done, a little gate in front of you opens and lets you go through. Call me a geek, but that was pretty cool! J

Obviously, the machine “found something wrong” with my scan and I got “the full experience”. A small built-in printer plotted out a chart for the security person, and I was taken to the additional-screening area where I got a pat-down and had all of my belongings swabbed and checked with the higher-accuracy machine only to find that there’s nothing wrong. The security person conducting the examination was very nice and we even got to chat a little (could have been part of the screening, but it was very genuine), which made the whole experience a pleasant (as opposed to annoying) one. They are still working out the kinks in those systems, but this sure does seem like the future of airline security. Watch for more of those popping up in an airport near you.

While I was waiting I got to see something interesting in terms of Security. Someone was delivering a cart full of water bottles and magazines to one of the shops in the terminal and needed to pass through the screening gate. All the bottles of water (24 per carton) and shrink wrapped bundles of magazines went through the x-ray machine to be scanned, the guy went through the metal detector, but the cart itself was obviously too large and so they let it pass through. Now, I might have seen too many action movies (and apparently the security woman who let the cart through didn’t see enough) but if someone was trying to get a something through security it would probably be taped to the bottom of that cart. What’s my recommendation here? Mandatory action-movie training for TSA employees J

This little adventure (and the inter-concourse travel time) brought me to the gate a few minutes prior to boarding time. I then got on the fairly empty flight to Boston and wrote the rest of this post while waiting for 16 connecting passengers that did not make the departure time. One of the reasons for waiting for them was that one of them was the plane’s captain J.

I guess that this delay, combined with some weather issues in Boston resulted in us waiting on the tarmac for over 30 minutes, making wait time longer than actual flight time. Talk about “hurry up and wait”. Well, when life gives you lemons you make lemonade. I guess I can always use more email time J

Eventually we took off, caught a great aerial view of all the New York landmarks on this clear, brisk day, and 40 short minutes later we landed in cloudy, rainy Boston. A short cab drive under the city (it’s all tunnels here) got me to my hotel and after a 45 minute discussion with the concierge (40 of them were about Salsa dancing, and the history and value of art – the guy is an Art History student and a Salsa dancer) Roger Wolter and I went to have dinner at Bar Lola (try the Solomillo al Cabrales – it’s phenomenal).

That’s it for one day. See you at TechEd tomorrow!!!

Windows Transaction Foundation? I think not :-)

ShyCohen — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 20:51:00 GMT

Let's see:

Windows Communication Foundation = WCF
Windows Presentation Foundation = FPF
Windows Workflow Foundation = WWF
Windows Transaction Foundation = WTF... hmm... I don't think they'll let this one through :-)

Scott drinks the TechEd KoolAid

ShyCohen — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 07:07:00 GMT

Don't miss this hilarious video of Rory, Dan Fernandez, Becky Dias, Simon Guest, Richard Turner, Rory's Girlfriend, Jay Roxe and yours truly helping Scott Hanselman see the light and drink the TechEd KoolAid.

TechEd Israel 2004

ShyCohen — Mon, 10 May 2004 23:56:00 GMT

Just came back from TechEd Israel 2004 where I met with a lot of cool folks.

Here's a picture of Jackie Goldstein, Hans Verbeek, Clement Vasters, Myself, and Yosi Taguri.

And here is a picture of me with Juval Lowy.