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Showing posts from April, 2007

SOA Overhyped!

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This year I became member of Software Developer Network , which is mostly Dutch group (network) of developers. As a member one receives their magazine called SDN Magazine and is legible for attending a couple of conference they organize through the year in Holland. Yesterday I received their 93th issue of the magazine. It contained a nice article of SOA called: Semantic Coupling; the Elephant in the SOA room. You can get electronic copy of it later this month through the above link. It’s a great article to agree or disagree about its content (I agree with some parts, but not all). It is starting off with SOA being the current and continuing industry fad. Where SOA continues along the hype curve (Gartner, see link to have this explained in a critical manner) and not being the silver bullet or a replacement for n-tier client/server or object-orientation (which he likes, see his site ). He explains that SOA will fall into the pit of disillusion (not seen in curve shown here). In San Fran

BizTalk Tips and Tricks and more ...

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Marty Wasznicky and Scott Zimmerman wrote an article in MSDN, where they lined out a couple tips and tricks for programming in BizTalk (best practices). In the article they write about: · Always Use Multi-Part Message Types; · Always Try to Design Orchestrations with Direct-Bound Ports; · Always Use Separate Internal and External Schemas; · Never Expose Your Internal Schemas Directly in WSDL; · Always Optimize the BizTalk Registry for Web Services; · Always Set the Assembly Key File with a Relative Path; · Never Overlook Free Sample Code; · Debug XSLT in Visual Studio. Besides best practices for programming there is also a BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer to use for deployment of the product in high availability, security, management and performance scenarios. There also logging possibilities for BizTalk to use log4net, see Scott Colestock's blog for this. One can also generate a CHM file containing summaries of all your BizTalk artifacts (and relationships), plus busine

Training Sharepoint Services 3.0 and MOSS 2007

T oday attended a SharePoint training. The speaker was Bart Gunneman and he spoke about SharePoint, explaining the free part SharePoint Services 3.0 in the morning and the licensed MOSS 2007 in the afternoon. SharePoint Services provide in document collaboration, information sharing and enhancing productivity in for instance software developer teams (at least I used SharePoint Services a lot in software development projects in the past). SharePoint Services 3.0 delivers new functionality like: · Document collaboration (check-in/out, versioning, metadata); · Wikis, · Blogs, · RSS, · Discussions; · Project task tracking; · Contacts, calendars and tasks; · E-mail integration; · Directory integration; · Integration with rich clients through protocols and API’s; · Integration with smart clients like Outlook 2007. These functionalities were a demoed by Bart. Next MOSS 2007, the benefits buying a license are the features like: · Search; · Audiences; · Content targeting; · My Site; · Enhanced

WCF Messaging

Excellent article about WCF messaging by Aaron Skonnard. I stumbled over it today. It's about some key messaging features in WCF: XML Representation; Message Class; Message Versions; Reading and Writing Messages; Typed Message Bodies; Message lifetime; Message Headers and Properties; Mapping Messages to Methods; Endpoint and bindings. Good stuff....

What is SOA?

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D ay before yesterday I was participating in a discussion about SOA in a meeting with architects with different technology backgrounds. These backgrounds include Oracle, Microsoft, IT Infrastructure (Windows, UNIX and Linux), IBM and SAP. Generally the discussion was about what is SOA, or what worked and did not work design, implementing a SOA. Questions were raised like does SOA fulfill promises like business agility and reuse for instance? Well last week in San Francisco I heard Rob Daigneau say business agility is a bogus claim, because of it is not quick or easy. I agreed on this so entered this remark into the discussion with an Oracle architect, who answered he disagreed with me hence his practical experience at a customer showed it can be quick and easy. Since I do not have that much experience with SOA in practice other than one project at local government organization so to speak, I could only bring in that experience, where it did take a long time and was not easy at all. So

VS Live San Francisco 2007 Resumé

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H ere you can see me with Bird Rock in the background. VS Live has come to an end and before I went home I enjoyed one more day in sunny northern California. I went on a daytrip from San Francisco to Monterey Bay, 17-mile drive with a stop at the Bird Rock. This stately landmark is home to countless shorebirds and groups of harbor seals and sea lions. It ended in an hour stop at Carmel by the sea; just awesome. VS Live conference was a bit different than the one I went to six months ago in October 2006. In Redmond the focus a clearly on SOA, BPM and BizTalk. Whereas this conference was more for developers, with subjects like ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Vista,.NET best practices, Visual Studio Team System and the upcoming (or already here) .NET 3.0 framework. For me the .NET 3.0 was most interesting and that's where all my attention went to. There was not allot of SOA in the .NET 3.0 Sessions, although it was mentioned in the title, talks around WCF and SOA were more about best pr