Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

I have been a subscriber for a long time now for Visual Studio Magazine, even when they were Visual Basic Programmers Journal. In March I visited VSLive in San Francisco, where I had the pleasure to meet Patrick Meader the Editor in Chief. The Magazine is all around Visual Studio .NET and related technologies. So if you have not heard of this magazine. Check it out or go to their site . Technorati: Visual Studio Magazine VSLive

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...

Final day at VS Live in San Francisco. I following today the post conference about introduction (gentle) into workflow by Ken Getz and Robert Green. This lasted all day and went through what workflow is, creating one for the first time (this was demoed already a couple of times during conference, so nothing new here), and how to host one (see my previous post with WF Runtime Architecture). Next subject was handling conditions and Exceptions, where they went through a couple of activities like IfElse, While, ConditionedActivityGroup, Replicator Activity and finally Exception handling. After this they discussed and demoed more activities like delay, handling properties, listen, suspend and terminate, parallel, synchronizeScope and handling cancellation. This was not the end of it, because more activities coming up, like ones used when dealing with rules, Policy Activity (see there’s a lot of them, more than in BizTalk Orchestration). Rules in workflow are somewhat the same as in Business...

Day 4 at VS Live in San Francisco. Today I went to a WPF talk done by Billis Hollis, a great speaker who I have seen a couple of times of the years. He showed some cool demo's and I am amazed what one can do with WPF. Notes about this one I refer again to Jan van de Pol , who is more a UI expert than I am and does a very good job of making notes of this one on the technical side of things. Next one up is more my cup of thea, workflow. It's second part of introduction of workflow and a followup one the one done yesterday. The slides are here . Goal today with his talk today is how to build workflows with WinWF. Three basic patterns, out of the box, others can be customized. (1) Sequential Synchronous ASynchrounous Natural Sequence of operations Workflow is in control (dictates what comes next) (2) State Machine Control outside workflow Workflow restricts choices Simpler than sequential (3) Rule based workflow pattern No natural sequence Rules model relationships independent of t...

Oke third day here at VS Live in San Francisco. Today went to a couple of .Net 3.0 talks. To start things of I went to Rob Daigneau's talk about Implementing SOA design Patterns with WCF. Well it was more on SOA and little about WCF. He wanted to show the web service softeware factory in the end, but it didn't work. Talk about SOA was good though. He kicked off with SOA myths, where he claims business agilty is a bogus claim, hence it is not quick or easy; both are true in my view. Than he went on reuse, where message and data types are the ones that can be resued at best (well that's on lowest dominator and resue on micro-level). Finally he got to versioning and demo extension to exsisting interfaces, which in my humble opinion is not versioning but modifying interfaces the way it was done with COM+ without breaking it. Next talk about WPF for Windows Forms Developers, but I am not one of them. Nevertheless its out there in .NET 3.0 and I wanted to see more of it. And it w...

Well second day at VS Live in San-Francisco. Today met some interesting guys from my home country Holland working for Bergson . So that's nice and there are excellent people, so I am not lonely. Oke .Net Focus day bringing us a chat from Prashant Sridharan about Vista, 2007 Office system and Asp.net AJAX with a great demo about Fabrikam (haven't we heard or seen that one before) using Exhange 2007, SharePoint 2007 and WPF. Top notch. This talk was followed with a Vista feature talk not very interesting, with a speaker who messed everything up big time. This guy did a similar job later on that day about Vista for managed code. After this session the talks improved a lot, see blog Jan van de Pol . So I don't have to repeat it here.

I will be attending VS Live Conference end of march in San Francisco. VSLive! returns to San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center West March 25-29, 2007 with more than 160 hours of hard-hitting technical content. Over five action-packed days, VSLive! San Francisco will provide a depth of resources and perspectives to help you be productive now and prepare for the near future. Attend sessions featuring practical techniques for writing software with today’s tools. From Ajax and data binding, to VB, C# and the .NET Framework, we have you covered. Our speakers have years of experience mastering the tools you need to get your job done. This will be the agenda: So I am looking forward to this event and hope to learn as much as my previous experience at Redmond during the SOA & BPM Conference. I also am excited to meet new people and have lots of interesting discussions.