[update to some broken links]

A big thanks to all that attended the IrishDev.com event last Wednesday, especially considering the bad weather we had that night and with good footie on the telly.

It was great to see so many new faces at a Irish developer community gig, which proves to me that there is more than enough interest and need out there for Developer usergroups in Ireland and it was great to hear the guys and gals in IrishDev.com outline there plans for the new year. In the new year, I look forward to working with all of the usergroups and helping out organising speakers etc.. .

Many thanks for the feedback, as always much appreciated. It was an interesting talk to give, as it was not aimed at being an intro to Indigo and “Web Services”, but about the intergration capabilities and code migration issues for existing investments in the current and previous versions of the application platform from MS and how Indigo as the V.Next for the (dist.) application platform plays with it predessors.

Afterwards there was some good questions and discussion around, OO, MS technology Vs non-MS technologies, skillsets in the Irish market and about some of the technologies that are in the pipeline. I thought I would follow up with some of the Q&A on this blog entry, as folks may find them useful.

– For more details on VB, COM, COM+, ES and Indigo and how they play together, a while I kicked off a series about this on the blog and you may find it useful, the links are the following, here, here, here, here and here. At the moment the series is not finished (as well as being a little rough around the edges ), but I stopped as I heard about the changes that were coming in Beta 2, so I thought I would wait until they were available (which they are with the latest CTP). Over the next 2 weeks, I may get a chance to either finish the series off and cover the different options or just redo the whole lot and make it a better structured article (I’m not sure which I will do). Some other resources you may find useful is Andy Milligan’s blog, and some of the following blog entries he has here, here and here. 

– about IIS7, folks were curious as to whether there was going to be significant changes to IIS. Well the short answer is yes, as the architecture is going to be completely re-engineered. For a basic overview of the changes, you may find this blog entry useful.

– As to which of the WS standards and what versions is Indigo going to support, this blog entry may help.

– and as to where you can download the last bits, you can get the details over here, which is the download for Nov. CTP (Community Technology Preview) of WinFx.

– also, as some folks wanted a soft copy of the links and resources that were part of the info pack for the session. You can get a copy of this articles and resources at this link

– and finally you can get a copy of the slides at this link.

A big thanks to the folks at IrishDev.com for giving me the opptunity to give the talk at their x-mas party, as well as all of the other usergroups in Ireland, namely Developers.ie and NIMTUG for giving me the oppurtunity to gives talks this year. Phew, 14+ community talks this year!  opps… I guess thats just me, you can’t shut me up!

Ciao,

Paul

ps

Thanks to Andy Milligan et. al. on the Indigo team for their help and for answering my stream of questions and helping me better understand how the pieces fit together.

Sunday, December 11, 2005 7:47:46 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [2] | 

I guess one of the obvious questions that arises when you look at the WS-* specs, the evolution of the specs and WCF (nee “Indigo”);  is what versions of the specs are going to be supported by WCF (nee “Indigo”) and what standards bodies are these specifications with.

As blogged by Omri Gazitt, the Secure, Reliable Messaging and Transaction specs are now all with the OASIS WS-SX TC and the WS-Addressing spec is in W3C.

And as to what specs does WCF (nee “Indigo”) intend to support,

<extract>

(extract taken from Omri’s blog)

Indigo intends to ship with support for the following versions:

• WS-Security 1.1 (OASIS Recommendation)
• WS-SecureConv, Trust, SecPolicy (OASIS submission)
• WS-ReliableMessaging (OASIS Submission)
• WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransaction (OASIS submission)
• WS-Addressing (both the W3C submission "08/04" version, as well as the W3C Rec).

</extract>

hth,

/P

Sunday, December 11, 2005 6:32:13 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

[Via the TechCrunch]

Yahoo has bought del.icio.us.

Community focused properties and Web 2.0 are really cooking now.

I wonder will we see the same trend happen this side of the water? Maybe? But the situtaion with internet access would really want to improve, its become really embarrasing how patchy broadband is in urban areas and the price you have to pay when you can get it

/P

Saturday, December 10, 2005 12:32:37 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

The Q&A session format at yesterday INDA talk worked quite nicely I think, and hearing the feedback I think most folks found it very useful.

As blogged by others, the current question on many folks lips, was about the RTM version of VS2005 and some of the plus/minus feedback that has been on the blogosphere. You can read others comments, here, here, here and here.

I thought it was great to have a open discussion and a sharing of views.

I guess the big take away was while most of the attendees had experienced some problem with VS2005, but no one was prepared to roll back and everyone was prepared to push through the odd thing that crops up, as many of the features are just too useful and the framework is rock solid and without problems.

I guess for myself this is very much how I view things and I very much agree with the views shared. The one big lesson I have learnt since the RTM, is that most versions of the IDE (btw Pro seems to be the most stable within a VPC, in my experience) do not seem to like to be used within VPC (i.e. I don’t want WinFX CTP madness on my machine/host OS), which is a big pain for me, but this maynot be a problem for most folks (as I have 6+ development environments in VPC for different pieces of work). The most recurring problem I have had to date (outside of VPC and on a fresh machine), is the IDE just disappearing for no reason (i.e. crashes, but with no dialog box and/or “Send Debug report to Microsoft” dialog) – which is a double annonyance, as I cannot nail the reason for the crash (as it happens with different project types and  I know that no info is going back to MS to figure out why it crashes.

But overall, the benefits outweigh the little annonynances that can occassionaliy crop up.

The big thing in my view to bear in mind when first adopting VS2005 and the new version of the FX, is to be patient and learn the new ways of thinking about common notions we have seen in the previous versions of Visual Studio, such as project files, new additions to the Framework, new IDE enhancements (such as design time validation) and reusuable components (such as provider model etc). My advise would be learn about the visual feedback features, such as design time validation/compilation and intellisense, both of these are in my view the best and most intuitive ways of seeing whats available within a particular context of your code and provides a nice way for you to easily discover the new additions to the Framework, while getting about the task of writing code and getting the job done.

hth,

/Paul

Friday, December 02, 2005 8:48:11 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [1] | 

Hi All,

          just a reminder about Robert Scoble giving a talk tomorrow night, at the next INDA talk, and you can register for the session at http://www.developers.ie/session.aspx?s=32

Also, Robert, Nick, Kieran and I will be hosting a Q&A session afterwards, so keep the questions coming in.

You can send your questions to the Contact Us page. http://www.developers.ie/contact.aspx.

We have lots of questions already, but we are keen to get more! e.g. Anyone for more info on Indigo, ASMX etc…..

And oh, before I forget, we are going to have a flip chart there.

Hope to see you there,

Slan go foill,

/P

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 6:35:04 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

HP Plunges Into SOA Consulting

/Paul

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 2:29:49 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

I just spotted that the folks in INDA have referenced my talk with IrishDev, which is about Indigo for the COM, COM+ and MSMQ Developer.

Ah, now the pressure is on to give a good talk! and I better deliver?

A big thanks for the reference folks,

/P

 [update]

My bad!

I should have pointed to the cross referencing of events across all of the Irish developer usergroups, namely NIMTUG and IrishDev

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:51:43 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [2] | 

You can read more at this link.

All I can is, maybe its not the proclaimed *Web 2.0* but its beginning to feel a lot like *DOT COM* – Lite.

/P

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:15:42 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [2] | 

David Campbell, a GM on the SQL Server team, has written a excellent article called “Service Oriented Database Architecture: App Server-Lite?”

David gives a great overview on why there is SQLCLR, SSB, XML Web Services etc.. in SQL Server 2005.

Well worth a read,

/Paul

ps

if you do a lot of MOM, then have a peek at the conversational group locking mechanasism in SSB, I think it is an extremely clever feature, very useful and has been badly wanted in a messaging technology (as I have not seen any other product tackle the issue of correlation automatically in the plumbing).

Thursday, November 24, 2005 4:39:46 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Registration for the IrishDev.com x-mas session is now open.

For further details on the description on what the session is going to cover, you can go here as well as the registration page.

Hope to see you there,

Ciao,

Paul

Thursday, November 24, 2005 1:05:40 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Based on the RTM bits of .NET 2.0, the WinFX Runtime Components November CTP has been released!

• WinFX Runtime Components (Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation) 
• WinFX SDK (documentation and command-line tools)
• VS2005 Extensions for WinFX Runtime Components (templates and IntelliSense for WPF and WCF in Visual Studio 2005)
• VS2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (templates and IntelliSense for WF in Visual Studio 2005)
• WinFX RC Nov CTP “Readme” (general notes and warnings)

Enjoy!!

– Paul

Friday, November 18, 2005 8:34:20 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

For the IrishDev.com x-mas Party, I’m going to be giving a session on Indigo (aka WCF) for the VB6, COM, COM+ and MSMQ developer.

The IrishDev.com x-mas party is on the 7th of december and will be at the very cool Morgan hotel in Temple bar. Registration will be open/available tomorrow (i.e. Friday).

As I’m going to be writing the deck this evening, and some of the demos; tomorrow I’ll blog in more detail about what the session is going to cover. But in the mean time, the aim is to be very focused on VB6,VC++, COM and COM+/Enterprise Services and talk about the different intergation and interop scenarios for VB6, COM(/+), ES code-bases be they only 10 days old or 10 years old (i.e. based on MTS and NT option pack) and how they can play in the Indigo world, with no code changes and/or if desired with code changes. I’ll also cover some real world approaches to future-proofing current investments in ES/COM+ MSMQ etc…. i.e. what current features and techniques/styles play well in the Indigo world and what does not.

All suggestions welcome.

/Paul

Thursday, November 17, 2005 5:15:34 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Looks like LRT might be taking a back seat in Windows Workflow Foundation, which is a good thing in my view.

Long running compensating activities has a crisper feel to it.

hhmmmm now I have to play a little more with the bits and see if I can *easily* change the instancing and threading behavior in the Runtime Services extensibility points and create a set of custom “batch” activities for “batch” processing patterns of large volumes of data, leveraging all of the Sys.Tx goodness  i.e. create mini-batches within a uber batch, where mini-batches represents units-of-work done in-memory for large volumes of custom entities and the persistence and instancing behavior gives me the ability to durably store the results of 000’s of transactions or compensate for a fault in the processing of ‘000’s of transactions – à la mainframe style flip-flop tables etc… but  ‘0000’s of times faster

– Paul

Thursday, November 17, 2005 3:58:42 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [2] | 

Yesterday was a big day for the 64bit space and for those that need the extra head room for their solutions and where 32bit just does not cut it.

Microsoft announced the 1st wave of products that will be only available on the 64bit platform. The products include, Exchange 12, Longhorn R2, Centro (codename for the mid-range SKU’s and product line) and small-business Longhorn Edition.

Ahhhh, sweet stuff. Vista R2 will be 64bit only.

– Paul 

Wednesday, November 16, 2005 1:06:02 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

INDA's December Session is with Robert Scoble as the guest speaker and registration is now open.

Also as part of the event, Robert Scoble, Nick Grattan, Kieran Lynam and I will be hosting a Q&A session on  Microsoft technologies, specifically in the areas of .NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Security and XML “Web” Services. To facilitate the session, you can submit your questions in advance by using the Contact Us page on the developers.ie site.

All questions welcome, the more the merrier.

/Paul

Sunday, November 13, 2005 7:59:16 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Are there more ways that INETA could help the Irish .NET (i.e. <insert all MS developer technologies here>) Developer community?

btw, I’m just throwing this question out there? and I seriously want to hear feedback, so please do so!

For those of you that don’t know, I have accepted the volunteer position of INETA liasion/lead for Ireland.

If you are not familar with INETA, please have a look at http://www.ineta.org/DesktopDefault.aspx

As the website describes,

<extract>
The International .NET Association (INETA) provides structured, peer-based organizational, educational, and promotional support to the growing worldwide community of Microsoft® .NET user groups. Our mission is to offer assistance and resources to community groups that promote and educate their membership in Microsoft's .NET technologies. INETA welcomes all facets of the .NET user community, from developers and architects to project managers and IT professionals. Members can be user groups or special interest groups that:

• Focus on a single aspect of .NET, such as C#
• Target the entire .NET platform
• Concentrate on other development technologies but are also interested in .NET

INETA is <edited out marketing fluff> a user group communities – a non-profit, independent organization, chartered with supporting all user groups interested in the Microsoft .NET platform. INETA is run by a board of user group leaders, elected by their peers, and supported by Microsoft Corporation and other sponsors.
</extract>

Now, I think it is important to call out that this is all a volunteer effort, in that folks with common interests in the .NET (i.e. Windows application) platform are very interested in attending usergroups and interacting with communities that focus on topics that apply to the development of software on the Microsoft application platform.

By all means feel free to drop comment below or shot me an email (see contact me on the left of this blogs site).

So please spread the word, I think that all that has become involved in the .NET community have found it useful and rewarding, so please let others know.

When it comes to communities, it only really works when it is the more the merrier; and this goes for volunteering areas of interest to you and/or being a volunteer and helping out with the .NET community in Ireland.

– Paul

Thursday, November 10, 2005 1:56:11 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [4] | 

Confused, I won’t blame ya! but anyway!

We have lots of folks from the Irish .NET developer community giving sessions tomorow at the Offical MS Ireland launch for VS2005.

These include:

• A Design Challenge - Securing An ASP.NET v2.0 Web App – Eamon O'Tuathail
• Delivering Business Insight with SQL Server 2005 –  Cathal Connolly
• BizTalk 2006: First impressions (from the trenches) – Gar Mac Criosta
• The New XML features in SQL Server 2005 – Nick Grattan
• Performance and scalability enhancements for data access and Transactions in .NET 2.0 – Paul Fallon
• Developing Portal applications with Dotnetnuke and the Microsoft Express range – Cathal Connolly

and oh yeah, there are a few folks from MS talking as well

– Paul

Wednesday, November 09, 2005 10:45:57 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Hi all,

         just a quick reminder about the INDA and IrishDev joint community launch for VS2005 and .NET 2.0

hope to see you there,

Paul

Wednesday, November 09, 2005 9:45:30 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Juval’s second article on the Transacted goodness that is the .NET 2.0 Fx has been published.

On a slight tangent, after you read Juval’s article have a look at my initial thoughts on *Transactions* in Windows Workflow Foundation, and perhaps it might shine a better light on why I think the whole abstraction (i.e. shape, aka activity) for Transactions is way out of whak with this whole space.

The software Transaction has a very particular meaning and pattern in my view and hinges on the “I” (and subsequent discussion about 2–Phase, coordination, context, state, boundaries etc..). While the LRT has been a higher level abstraction that has been in the industry for nearly as long as Transactions – as a means to define composable, reusable patterns of activity – it is the nominator and approach that LRT == Transactions => Atomic Transactions is a subset, is what I cannot fully appreciate or understand right now.

With WF being a framework upon which patterns of activity can be composed, why pollut the purity of the activity abstraction with the oxmoron that is LRT, when its isolation and context (btw pun intended) is that of coordination of outcome and composabiliy (over time) and not the ACID properties ? For certain both have quite a lot in common, but also have quite a lot of differences and it is the differences I think that need to be called out in the activity abstractions used in WF.  The different levels/areas of complexity and onus of responsibility are too diverse (and powerful) to have simplifed into one all encompassing abstraction, and overall are just too confusing.

– Paul

Wednesday, November 09, 2005 9:33:12 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Many thanks to all that attended the Waterford Academic and INDA Community Launches of VS2005 that both Nick Grattan and I delivered on tuesday. It was great to see so many folks attend and by all means spread the word about the .NET developer community, the usergroup talks and the community Web sites, e.g. http://developers.ie and http://IrishDev.com.

Nick Grattan – the grand master and wizard for all things .NET but especially SQL Server – gave some great talks on SQL Server 2005 and its capabilities, and you can download the slides from here and here.

Many thanks for the feedback and emails, I’m glad that folks enjoyed boths sessions and were ok with the fact that I had a somewhat *marketing* kind of hat for a few slides in the presentation. I think its important that folks get an appreciation as to what .NET 2.0 really means going forward and the watershed it means for the Microsoft Application platform.

Also I was delighted to hear many folks share some of the same views that I have about Smart Client and this was one of the reasons that I decided to specifically spent some time talking through some of the scenarios and use cases for the technologies. Sorry about the fact that my laptop tanked and could not show some of the demos, but I think that me hacking on Nick’s demos was enough to show the power and capabilities on offer and anyway I got Nick to show off some off more Demos of SQL Server as a result  and made him overrun

My deck is at the link,

A big thanks to Brian Delahunty, et. al. for all of the effort and assistance.

Ciao,

Paul

Wednesday, November 09, 2005 2:02:46 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] |