Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

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...

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...