The Hogg Blog : Service Factory

Released: Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition

Jason Hogg — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:56:00 GMT

I just saw an announcement from Don that the P&P folks have just released the third version of the Web Service Software Factory - entitled The Web Service Software Factory Modeling Edition. I know these guys have been working hard on this for along time now so this is really great news... And you know what they say about it taking Microsoft three attempts to get things right... Well, based on how good v2 of the Service Factory was - this thing should really kick ass! More information from here.

The Great Debate: Patterns vs Tooling

Jason Hogg — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:39:00 GMT

With well over 250 attendees this years P&P Summit is the best attended I have seen so far. I was fortunate to participate in two presentations - the first talk was on SecPAL which I believe was well received, and the second was a discussion with myself, Dragos Manolescu, Wojtek Kozaczynski and Ade Miller on the future of patterns.

As you may recall the 4 of us worked on a paper called “The Growing Divide in the Patterns World” for an IEEE special on design patterns. Our article summarized results from a survey about the relevance of patterns for several hundred developers. One of the not surprising (or perhaps not unsurprising) results that we saw from the paper was that for many people simply with including patterns in tooling was sufficient and that they did not see significant value in traditional narrative based patterns.

So, with our goal being to find a controversial subject that would encourage audience participation (and perhaps more importantly) provide feedback that will drive P&P's future investments in the pattern space we decided to use the P&P Summit as a forum for discussion about the extent to which P&P should share patterns via books or Pattern Share - or whether they should focus purely on including patterns inside factories.

Myself and Dragos were in the red corner, advocating that patterns should first be written in the narrative form, whilst Wojtek and Ade took the blue corner arguing that this format is irrelevant and that the majority of non-academic folk only care about productivity and tooling. The discussion started off with a curve ball. I had expected Dragos to have a strong opening statement that would incite hatred amongst much of the audience, instead he punted to me - leaving me to take the rubber bullets from the audience (Keith Please had armed the audience with toy guns so as to shoot people that they disagreed with).

Rather than making Wojtek and Ade's job way too easy, I decided to argue that tooling should only be based on patterns, and that tooling based on patterns was inevitable. As such I argued that it was critical not to lose site for the need for crisp architectural guidance articulated in pattern form that can be shared in books, web pages and hopefully organized dynamically on resources such as Pattern share.

I have to say that the discussion was fantastic mainly because the audience got so involved in the discussion. We had advocates on both sides of the audience. Some common themes discussed (liberal paraphrasing) included:

Many enterprise developers do not care about design patterns - they just want to do their job
Enterprise architects have a hard time communicating the value in patterns to their development teams
Patterns do in fact play a critical role in application architecture and P&P should continue to create and publish patterns independently of tooling
People do not want to have to download factories to determine if there are patterns that are relevant to their problem
Patterns should be consistent across programming platforms
and much, much more...

I have some additional thoughts on the subject which I will share in the coming days as well - but first I wanted to see if we can't get some additional discussion going.

So, if you were in the discussion, feel free to post additional thoughts, or if you weren't there it would be great to hear your thoughts on this very important topic... To what extent should P&P invest in publishing patterns independently of tooling such as Factories - and would you like to see a reincarnation of the Pattern Share repository (friendlier UI etc)?

Swiss Army Knife of X.509 Certificate Tools

Jason Hogg — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:31:00 GMT

Anyone who has dealt with X.509 certificates when trying to design, test and deploy secure Web services will know what an ordeal it can be to locate certificates in various cert stores using different cert identifiers, modify security properties of the private key to allow services accounts to sign or decrypt messages and all the other messing around that is associated with X.509 certificates. I happened to bump into Christian Geuer-Pollmann from the European Microsoft Innovation Center last week - and he showed me an awesome tool they have built to greatly simplify such challenges. This tool is available for download from here.

Extending Visual Studio - Made Easy

Jason Hogg — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:00:00 GMT

One thing that always amazes me as I talk to scientists and researchers at shows like the recent Open Grid Forum or the last Super Computing conference is the extent to which they have managed to extend Eclipse to provide intuitive interfaces to their work. Up until very recently similar extensions for Visual Studio has required a significant investment in time to learn the VSIP extension API's which many researchers just don't have time to spare, however Pablo Galiano (Pablo has worked on many P&P projects including most recently the Service Factory) has changed that with the release of his VSIP Factory.

At the highest level, the VSIP Factory supports authoring, testing, and deploying (using WIX or standard VS setup projects) VSIP extensions. I sat in on a demo of this work last week and I guarantee you will be impressed. In less than one hour Pablo demonstrated how to create a brand new VSIP package, including several custom forms, wiring them up to menu's and appropriate events within VS, integrating them into the existing VS toolbars (including supporting docking behavior) and even modifying the VS splash screen, all using self-explanatory wizards. Then for the creme de la creme Pablo also shows how to build a similar package using a DSL based designer that he has worked on...

As anyone who has tried to do this with Visual Studio using the VSIP extensions surely knows - this is amazing stuff. So for anyone that is interested in extending Visual Studio I definitely recommend you take a look at Pablo's latest CTP. Enjoy....

ASMX Web Service Software Factory - Now Available!

Jason Hogg — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 02:34:00 GMT

As you may already know we have spent the last couple of weeks (or was it months?) with our heads down polishing our first Web Service Software Factory for release - and last Friday it was finally released. Click here to download.

This Web Service Software Factory is the first in a series of Service Factory releases, initially targeting current .Net 2.0 technologies, with a second release planned for late Q406 to incorporate guidance for WCF and .Net 3.0 and culminating with the release of the Service Factory that will accompany the next version of Visual Studio (currently code named Orcas).

The Q406 release has also been in development since the Service Factory program was initiated and a CTP release is also available at the Service Factory Community. The Q406 CTP release already incorporates significant guidance for designing secure and interoperable WCF based services based on the Feb CTP of WCF.

Over the next couple of weeks we are migrating the WCF Factory to the latest public CTP of WCF and will also start working on additional guidance covering topics like versioning and messaging. Don is also working on some hands on labs for the community workspace and Lonnie is also going to demonstrate how our layered architecture simplifies the process of migrating from ASMX to WCF. So if you haven't already provided feedback on the community site please join the community and let us know where you think we should be providing guidance...

ASMX Web Service Software Factory CTP Available

Jason Hogg — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 03:24:00 GMT

Over the last couple of months you have seen us talking about the work we are doing for the Service Software Factories for WCF. One overwhelming piece of feedback that we received was that this initiative was going to be great for when you started developing your WCF applications but many of you are still developing ASMX based applications.

Furthermore many people asked if it was possible to encourage a similar message based design to ASMX applications as we are advocating for WCF. As a result of the feedback we have created an ASMX Guidance Package. A CTP is now available at http://practices.gotdotnet.com/svcfactory.

We are currently writing documentation that will describe how services designed using this Factory can be migrated onto WCF in the future and a whole lot of other architrectural documentation that will tie it all together.

We are working hard to get a final version of this ASMX based solution out within a month or so allowing you to start designing your applications for ASMX with a sense of how to migrate them to WCF in the future... In the mean time please download a copy and post your thoughts on to our message board...