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Showing posts from October, 2008

M at PDC

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I ran into Shoshanna Budzianowski today at PDC. She and I hooked through linked in after a post about OSLO months ago. She is Product Unit Manager, Repository and Modeling at Microsoft Corporation and involved in M. We had a nice talk not just about M, but also kids and so on. She also introduced me to Don Box who even autographed a OLSO Model Language book for me. I have got two copies now of the book, so if anybody not attending PDC is interested I will send it to you. I been to a couple of OSLO sessions now and I got to tell you it is awesome. You can see sessions about on channel 9 and PDC . Tonight I am going with some BizTalk People and Microsoft Netherlands (thanks Michiel Rozema) to LA Lakers game againt LA Clippers. I leave my colleague Edward behind at 'Ask The Experts'. Technorati: PDC 2008

PDC So far

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I keep appearing in some ones blogs constantly everyday. I do not know the guy . Look at blog posts of Robert Jan who does describe the experience here at PDC very well. Today PDC will kick off with a key note by Rick Rashid from Microsoft Research. I keep you posted. Technorati: PDC 2008

Cloud Computing

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At PDC I bought this book called 'Cloud Computing Web-based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online'. I read two chapters before I went to the first keynote on monday. Concept of cloud computing Ray Ozzie explained just really falls in place with content in first two chapters. This book is focused on 'Cloud Computing' in general looking at Microsoft, Amazons and Google's efforts. Azure is mentioned in here. I do thing that Microsoft is taking Cloud Computing futher that Amazon with it's elastic computing or Google's services. Azure is going to be more open and flexible to the community of users on one end and developers on the other. It is a platform for the Next Revolution like Steve Ballmer puts it in a memo I found in my mail box: During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It's a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our

Microsoft OSLO available

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Finally I can witness one of the first sessions about OSLO at PDC; now I and rest of world get to actually see it. There will be another frenzy and plethora of blog posts being shed next couple of hours. OLSO is M, Quadrant and Repository; language, tools and store/share models. More than 150 Dutch people are here and some already blogged about OSLO, therefore I am going to be lazy and refer to them. So here you go Paul , Dennis and Alex . Technorati: PDC 2008 Microsoft OSLO

The Keynote

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I will be short since there will be a blog frenzy over Microsoft Azure . During keynote this cloud windows platform new name was announced. So Windows Cloud OS is now: Azure.   Available only PDC attendees for now, but later on for general public. Technorati: Microsoft Azure PDC 2008

WCF History Lesson

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Pre-conference session of Microsoft Software Legend Juval Lowy today seems more a history lesson of WCF than something completely new. All stuff that was shown and demoed was .NET 3.0. If you read his book WCF Programming than you have a the knowledge all attendees got today during this pre-conference session. For me it was/is history repeats it-self and story about WCF and origins is the same. In my point of view there was not much added value here. His book about Programming WCF Services will be updated shortly to a second version available soon through O’Reilly. I think here you could speak about ‘power of repeating’. It must say though that his session was presented in an understandable way and his jokes about VB for instance where very funny. Technorati: WCF PDC 2008

Touch down in LA

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I have arrived in LA as you can see on the pictures. Impressive view from the plane on LA when we landed. I had a taxi trip to hotel with Edward and some old colleagues from him Robert Jan en Rutger. All of us went for a nice meal at Mexican Grill downtown. Today I will attend pre-conference WCF.

Ready for take-off

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Just came back home after a few days with the family in Limburg. I packed my bags and am ready to leave to Los Angeles to attend PDC. Sunday I kick off with pre-conference; WCF. Monday to Thursday I will focus on OSLO, SSDS, Windows Cloud and Dublin . See you there . Technorati: PDC 2008

Microsoft 2.0 continued

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Y esterday I received Microsoft 2.0 book by Mary Jo Foley . I have already read half the book by now and I do not think it will be the book be reading on my way to LA. Book starts a bit slow on why it was written and she was not able to talk to big shots at Microsoft like Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer and so on about which way Microsoft I heading in the future. After first pages it started to get interesting and I liked bits about people inside Microsoft, one in charge mainly and why for instance Ray came on board. A lot of information has already made available on the web through her blog or sources like businessweek , eweek , Microsoft (presspass) and blogs at zdnet . It is a good read to get to know Microsoft better and I think people not living close to Redmond or abroad and read (local)news, zdnet, eweek it is an eye opener. For me at least I know some background now about Bob Muglia, Steven Sinofsky and Rick Rashid and their role inside Microsoft. Technorati: PDC 2008

SOA and cost reduction

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Will SOA lead to cost reduction? Recently I followed this discussion (answers on the question) amongst some of my colleagues. Well on the long-run this may be one of the drivers to adopt SOA, but an enterprise will need to invest upfront. In adaption of SOA investments in legacy systems are not down the drain. SOA is not applied inside enterprises to rip and replace all legacy systems. Functionality inside legacy systems can be exposed and there is a plethora of technology available today to do it. Eventually hard maintainable legacy can be replaced gradually, not instantly. This will take some time and is not done overnight. In long run this could mean reduction of costs having modernized, easy maintainable systems. One needs to invest to adopt SOA, therefore it is probably better to speak in terms of return of investment than of cost reduction. In past I have read many article and blog posts where ROI in SOA is hard to assess. If it is hard to assess, than how will SOA lead to cost

Microsoft codename Dublin: you want to know some more !

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Today I found some interesting posts about Dublin. Very interesting one comparison of BizTalk and Dublin. Another one by Darren Jefford quote: ‘BizTalk is by no means dead’. And last but not least this one by Damir Dobric. In less than two weeks more information during PDC will be available. Technorati: PDC 2008

Microsoft 2.0

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As PDC is coming closer I noticed that Mary-Jo Foley blog all about Microsoft is a good resource to track to news about PDC and coming announcements (like Windows Cloud ). She also wrote a book a book called ‘Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era’, which I recently ordered through Amazon . Notice 2.0 version like web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and so; everything seems to be 2.0 these days. But anyways I hope to get copy of the book, before I will leave to US and have something to read during eleven hour flight to LA. Technorati: PDC 2008

WSCF Blue

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WSCF.Blue has recently been made public ( available ) on Codeplex. My colleague Edward Bakker is project leader on this project and I am happy to join in his conquest to make this a better tool. Together with Buddhike de Silva, Benjamin Santosh and hopefully some other developers I hope to make this a very useful tool as Christian Weyer states in his blog post . He is the 'father' of this project. I must say I like this challenge, since I am very fond of WCF as technology. Technorati: SOA DSL Tools WCF

Platform as a Service: PaaS

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Today I received an message through LinkedIn from a BizTalk colleague in the field Jonathan Gurevich about Cloud Platforms. I got this message from him concerning my blog post Window Cloud . David Chappell has written a whitepaper 'A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms'. In this paper I saw terms like on-demand platform and platform as a service (PaaS). Last one a new acronym to be added to a already existing long list. I looked at Wikipedia and it is defined there: Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an outgrowth of the Software as a Service application delivery model. The PaaS model makes all of the facilities required to support the end-to-end life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users. It's also known as cloudware. And of course there are people that like to define it themselves and/or explain it very well too like Alex Barnet

OLSO CTP

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At PDC a mere two weeks away attendees will get a first-hand look at OLSO through a CTP. Three technologies that will make up OSLO will be in it: • A language – codenamed “M” – that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and data models • A relational repository – that makes models available to both tools and platform components • A tool – codenamed “Quadrant” – that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner So some more codename’s, but at least I know what to expect. This CTP will probably reside on a 160 Gb external hard disk every attendee will receive. Technorati: PDC 2008

Windows Cloud

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I recently found something interesting while browsing through the web. Something called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). What is this ? Well it is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Ok and it seems that one is able to use Amazon EC2 to host highly scalable ASP.NET sites, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, media transcoders, SQL Server, and more. You can run Visual Studio (or another development environment) on your desktop and run the finished code in the Amazon cloud. That is impressive and what will Microsoft answer be on this development? Microsoft will announce a new operating system, codenamed “Windows Cloud”, at the forthcoming Professional Developers Conference end of this month. And Steve Ballmer even said :” By the time we finish our Professional Developers Conference this month, I think you’ll have to say, that there is nobody out there with as wider range o

First SharePoint Services 3.0 HOL Experience

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In my previous post I downloaded a VPC from Microsoft ‘Developing with SharePoint Services 3.0 and visual studio 2008’ together with some hands on labs. On my laptop containing a Vista OS I did the following: 1) Deploy VPC 2) Start WSS-July2008-V7 3) Install Office On VPC (Plus version MSDN) 4) Unpack HOL 5) Start VS 2008 and exercise I created a web part through HOL called HelloWorld, deployed it and added to a already created SharePoint site. Works like a charm. Downloaded HOL are already updated to VS2008. Al in all very straight forward, took me few minutes to set things up and 15 minutes for first exercise. I am going to try some more exercises coming days. Technorati: Sharepoint Services 3.0

Developing with sharepoint services 3.0 and visual studio 2008

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VS 2008 has been released for some while and same accounts for SharePoint Services 3.0. As a developer or experienced .NET Architect and so on you might want to know how to develop with SharePoint Services. I am interested how and therefore I downloaded a time limited VHD (30th September 2009) containing Windows SharePoint Services SP1, Visual Studio 2008. I also wanted some Hands-on Labs to with it and found Developing Applications on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with VS 2005 though, but that should not be problem (maybe challenging). The hands on labs contain a set of 10 Hands on Labs for Developing Applications for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005. These labs are provided in C# and VB.NET languages. Each Hands on Lab is expected to take 60 minutes to complete and no SharePoint development experience is required. Participants are expected to have .NET development experience. The download includes lab manuals, completed lab exercises and any resource files

PDC Dublin and .NET 4.0

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I survived yet again another edition of Munich Oktoberfest. Now it is back to life and hard work. PDC is next trip I will make and I read some new announcements of .NET 4.0 and that there will preview of this with something called Dublin. Nice codename, I visited Dublin last year I must say a great town. Connect new technology to such a codename must promise something. Dublin as it is stated on Microsoft .NET site involves enhancements on Windows Server that will offer greater scalability and easier manageability. You can read all about it in a document (introduction) that can be downloaded . Other resource is Steve martin’s blog post or Brain Loesgen post . Technorati: PDC 2008