LEAP 2008 Redmond Recap

LEAP 2008 has ended and I am back home. Dik Bijl and all people involved in organizing this event have done an excellent job. It was an exciting trip to Redmond and great environment to extend my network and learn new interesting things like Volta, hear from concepts like ‘New World of Work’ and today’s technology like OBA’s.









I brought home some interesting literature like:

A whole new mind from Daniel Pink
We are smarter than Me from Barry Libert, Jon Spector and a lot of contributers





















And I ordered some more:

The world is flat by Thomas Friedman
The Change Function by Pip Coburn
Wikinomics by Don Tapscott


So now I have something to read and a chance to sharpen my views on web 2.0 concepts/technology, future, and way to do business.















The Last day before I went home some of LEAP goers and I went for a trip to Snoqualmie Falls and Mt Rainier. We (I, Michel, Victor, Ronald, Willem and Linma) had a lot of fun and drove around in a big white SUV Chevrolet Tahoe. LEAP 2008 was a tremendous experience.


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Enterprise Information Integration ?

I recently got in touch with Nilay Parikh through linkedin and he did a excellent post this week about Enterprise Information Integration (EII). Why is it good? Well I was not yet familiar with it, so having someone explaining it in context with other E-technologies (EAI, ETL) and a Microsoft product like BizTalk Server is great. I do not yet have a good insight in this material, but I have found some more background information.

There is a column written a few years ago by JT Taylor for DMReview.com, Wikipedia (so I not going to create or figure out my own definition of what it is), article at ebiz done by Beth Gold-Bernstein, and Computerworld article by Russell Kay. Also there is a book by JP Morgenthal called ‘Enterprise Information Integration: A Pragmatic Approach’.

This is just something I liked to share and gives me more pressure to start to look into this and see if I can learn a new way to use BizTalk in let’s say an EII solution.

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LEAP 2008 Software Factories Workshop

Last day at LEAP 2008 in Redmond I first enjoyed breakfirst and then went to workshop Software Factories done by Jack Greenfield. He is author of the book Software Factories. The workshop goes into the theory of Software Factories. If you are new to this subject or do not exactly where to start I suggest you go to Edward Bakker blog site. He recently did a post about where to start with Software Factories. So go check it out.

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Second Day LEAP 2008 Redmond Part II

Afternoon sessions were Office Business Applications Overview with demo's. Overview can be downloaded from Microsoft. Demo's can be found at codeplex.

Last session was one by Pat Helland 'The irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects'. This was similar to one given at Teched in Barcelona.

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Second Day LEAP 2008 Redmond

Second day LEAP 2008 in Redmond on Microsoft Campus inside their Conference Center. It kicked off with Dan Rasmus, director of Information Work Vision about 'The new World of Work'. He is a futurist and you will information about his on windows live. His session went into four central themes; One world of business, Always on, always connected, transparent organizations, and workforce evolution. Book one might like read around the subject is Daniel Pink's 'A whole new mind'. I am not going to delve into the themes here, because that will lead to a very lengthy post. So there I suggest to visit Dan's live space or get Daniel pink's book. Another thing to look at is people ready info at Microsoft.

Next session Kim Cameron Architect of Identity with 'Why claims will change everything'. He is an authority on identity at Microsoft and in the world. His talk about identity is comparable of one I found on the internet. Kim did a inspiring talk and makes one think about identity. If you browse on the internet more can be found if you search on 'Why claims will change everything’. For me it gave me more background knowledge about Cardspace too and looking back to a presentation given by Erik van de Ven during DevDays 2007. Here you see Willem Boere having a discussion with Kim about what makes a human unique, since it can have more roles (or faces). Rest of the day you will find in my next post.

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First Day LEAP 2008 Redmond

Yesterday I arrived at Redmond in the afternoon together with lots of other LEAP 2008 participants. A couple of them joined together and went to Seattle Needle and downtown. We had a nice meal at P F Changs and did some shopping.

Today here in Redmond LEAP started with a look into the future. A couple of sessions are setup ranging from architecture to technology. Most information is classified so I am not able to divulge that information. What I can tell is that most session are around new evolving technologies like DSP (automation of deploying server product like SQL Server and so on), Volta or Internet Service Bus. Latter one is already present as preview on http://labs.biztalk.net/ and presented during SOA & BPM Conference last November 2007 or have a look at this webcast on channel 9.























Tonight will have a nice evening with food, drink and playing billiards at House of Billiards in Bellevue.

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LEAP 2008 Redmond

Coming week I am going to Redmond for final of LEAP program. Together with over a hundred fellow Dutch architects or soon to be architects we are going to do a four day program of sessions, workshops, fun tour, evening programs and leisure. The sessions will be held in Microsoft Conference Center on their campus in Kodak and Cascade rooms. Subjects will be (I will mention a few):

The Architectural Last Mile by Norm Judah
Software + Services: The Next Operational Challenge by Ulrich Homann
Internet Service Bus by Clemens Vasters
New World of Work by Dan Rasmus
Digital Identity by Kim Cameron
Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects by Pat Helland

All in all good sessions I think with interesting speakers. Something to look forward too.

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Web 2.0: Social Networking

Last couple of weeks I beefed up my connections in LinkedIn. I hooked up with a lot of old colleagues, friends and new people sharing same interest as me in SOA, BizTalk, .NET, networking and so on. Some of them also have blogs around these subjects like Nilay Parikh, Dick Dijkstra, Wouter Goedvriend, James McGorvern and Erik Westermann.

Having a large social network one can share ideas, insights, referrals etcetera. Interactivity achieved through social networking is new for me and probably for lot of linkedin users. I find it a great tool to connect to people I know or not know personally and share my interests, ideas and so on with. Other great features of linked are the ability to ask questions in general al linkedin user can answer or look at answers people one knows have given. Joining groups is another feature I like; one can join a group of interest like SOA interest group and hookup with people who are also member directly or through introduction. I must say if you are not using it yet, try it out or ask people you know if they like it. There are also familiar tools present like Plaxo, XING and Ryze. Also have a look at wikipedia to have get some background information about Social Networking and Social Software

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Thinking about SOA defintions

Today I was going through some posts in past I have written about SOA and some posts in other blogs like John Evdemon. In one of his posts I came across his definition of SOA. His definition is:

SOA is a loosely-coupled architecture designed to meet the business needs of the organization using services.

Last bit of using services I added as one of the commenter’s said it make the definition complete. His definition is not far off, what me and a couple of architects with different backgrounds/technologies (IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft) came up. Our definition, freely translated came to this:

A Service Oriented Architecture is a structural style to establish information needs of a organization based on services.

Some nuances are in place here. Both definitions more or less say it is an style ; loosely-coupled (which is a characteristic) versus structural style (architectural style would be better). There is difference here in business needs versus information needs, which is not quite the same. Business need can be having insight in how business is running in total or being flexible (agile) in running business processes. Information need can also be insight in how business is run in total and having services to provide this.

Other thing I came across too was this quote: “SOA is an enterprise architecture style, not an application architecture style.” by Anne Thomas Manes from Burton group. SOA is an architecture style, definitions above are right. I myself self also believe/feel it is a architecture style, where services play an important role, hence they are the building blocks to create a SOA. To this style of architecture or any other principles apply. Through design (principle) characteristics of a SOA are seen during its realization.

There is a lot that has been written about principles and characteristics of SOA. So I am not going to mention them here. At Inter Access where I work we have come a long way in figuring out what SOA is, what its principles are and creating a framework. Another colleague Mike van Alst has started blogging too last September 2007. He is an Oracle ACE , works with me in Inter Access architect board around SOA. Check his blog too.

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Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk

Well my vacation is almost over and ready to start the New Year with some interesting projects. In my previous post I mentioned Visual Studio 2008, which will have my attention this year. Why, because I moving around a lot in BizTalk, Integration and SOA. Visual Studio plays an important role in developing orchestrations. It delivers templates for orchestrations, mapping, pipelines and schema’s. One can also program custom pipelines, adapters and logic to be applied inside an orchestration or business rule engine. So it is a very flexible tool and valuable in creating BizTalk solutions. Although BizTalk Server 2006 and Visual Studio 2008 are not ready to use together; it will be possible in the future with the next release of BizTalk or sooner if Microsoft finds a way to allow the install routine to target the new version of Visual Studio.


Another reason to start with Visual Studio is it will be a lot of new stuff like JavaScript IntelliSense, type interface and debugging, nested master Web Pages, C# 3.0 and VB9 enhancements, and Windows Communication Foundation’s (WCF) self hosted services. Not everything is interesting to me or fellow application integrators/BizTalk professionals, but WCF is. WCF Adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 are a new feature and one can develop its own custom WCF adapter. To build your own WCF Adapter you will need Visual Studio 2005.


So in one way to explore Visual Studio you will need a environment to do so and doing BizTalk Server 2006 (R2) development you need a different other environment . Virtualization will be very handy and having a laptop with 4 Gb Memory on board, a lot of hard disk space (internal or external) and some processor power will help. Another way to get you up to speed is books, blogs and magazines. I have a subscription to Visual Studio Magazine with its January issue completely dedicated to VS 2008. APRESS and other publishers have release some books already. Happy exploring!!!

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