Hi All, 
          for the folks that are interested, just a short note to let you know that the RSS feed is moving to   (click on the RSS button for details).

Many thanks,

/Paul

Monday, January 09, 2006 2:03:09 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Ted Neward has written an excellent article that compares LINQ and its contemporaries.

Enjoy!,

/Paul

Thursday, January 05, 2006 8:45:00 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Microsoft has just released an offical patch for the WMF vulnerability - run WindowsUpdate now to get it!

hth,

/Paul

Thursday, January 05, 2006 8:38:45 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Java Killed The Innovation Of Computer Languages.

Interesting read!

Personally I reckon there is lots coming in the pipeline – and these are long overdue – with the delay  mostly due to the “Dark age” of the dot com bubble and its aftermath.

With hardware innvovation back in full swing, I think the hottest area for Computer Languages is the issue of concurrency management and recovery control, as I certainly don’t see the number of folks that grok multi-threading growing any time soon.

With perception being reality, in 18–24 months it is very easy to envisage that an end-user will perceive a single threaded sync. application as being very slow when compared to a async. concurreny app running on the same hardware kit, with anything up to 8 cores in it.Silcon is no longer cheaper than protien and designing to the clock cycle is no longer valid.

/Paul

Thursday, December 22, 2005 12:04:49 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Well I guess the question is should Indigo (aka WCF) support abstracting “the what” is the message communicated from “the how” is the message is implemented at design time? As it certainly does at runtime, but for those that do their heavylifting using TDD, this can a design time issue, methodology and code difficulty.

A big congrats to Pete McEvoy (an Irish WSDL/XML guru, as well as TDD wonk) for the great find/suggestion that he posted up MSDN productfeedback center! In my view it’s quite a nice find/suggestion and certainly very thought provoking? One for the Irish I reckon

So what do you think?

You can vote on the Suggestion at this link, http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=ed7e25f3-cda4-4fbc-8c7d-03a744e4db5e

Thx,
Paul

ps

Since I have not gotton around to creating a new VPC with the latest bits (and am still scratching my head wondering why MS refuses to ship time-bombed VPC’s to MSDN still amazes me), sorry if this has been changed already, but since the suggestion still has the status of “under review”,  I’m assuming that it is still under review

Thursday, December 22, 2005 11:03:10 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

I guess all of the rumors can be put to Rest :D

Congrats to Clemens Vasters, he is now a blue badge.

No finer man for the job at hand, his excellence in communication and technical skills have made him a true star in the community and this new role is a testament to his skills and abilities, as well as being one of the top shelf thought leaders in this space.

Personally, I’m looking forward to what the distributed systems maestro brings forward in the coming years.

Ciao,

/Paul

 ps

Now, I wonder where his blog is going to be parked?? My money is on PluralSight, what do ya reckon?

Thursday, December 22, 2005 9:50:07 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Looks like BEA are taking (sorry I mean bringing) the Enterprise Service Bus to town () and giving a talk here in Dublin in the new year.

For more details and some lovely prose with all of the latest marketing buzz words  thown in for good measure, you can go to this link for the description, agenda and registration.

I hope they have a slide that shows how SOA is an architecture (LOL!!), has design patterns etc…, covers what is an ESB (btw I’m damned if I know or have seen/heard two answers that are the same, but a re-packaging of MOM + XML + Broker == ESB is one possibility that comes to mind), how SOA or ESB transpose the design, development and implementation of problem/business domain models in distributed software architectures  , how SOA or ESB fulfills the sacred trinity (i.e. make money, save money or be complilant) for the SLA’s, creed and business of IT, and how they are different (and concrete resusable approaches) to the already concrete, proven and successful ways that MOM, Message Orientation, brokers and loosely coupled, asyncronous, versioned communications and interactions, have been successful used in the past (and for the last 20–30 years) – as tools and cross cutting concerns that support the implementation of the architecture of a business need/domain/requirement/process and not the other way around!

Currently, when a hear a vendor mention ESB and their product, all I can hear is them only talking about their product and not about an industry wide/agreed view of ESB, cause there is no industry wide view of what is ESB. And as for SOA, well does it really exist? Personally I don’t think so, and I cannot find anything concrete and agreed across the industry to change my view.

SO, see ya at the back of the Bus (oh, I know, my bad!! Mea Culpa)

But seriously, BYOP (bring your own peanuts)! Ask them “How Do I Do SOA?” For me, its a bit like asking someone from a tech. plumbing company (and works in sales and marketing) how should I run my business, right? Or how should I analyse my business proccesses? Granted there are valid points for discussion within the cacophony of defintions for SOA and ESB, but overall the subjectivity in which SOA and ESB get used is not about Architectures or is even an objective discussion about the challenges of business process analysis, capability mapping or designing software architecture to support them, but in the vast majority of cases is a tagline de jour for the SOA Product that is the magic bullet that solves all woes.

In my view, the sooner SOA product marketing fad fades away and the tech stack bake off abates, the sooner there can be some interesting and insighful discussions across the industry about successful and proven better (aka best) practices and patterns for analysing and solving business needs, problems and domains; implementing and connecting them with software – making them composable, agile and adaptable - and ultimately leading to better software architecutures being designed and better servicing business needs (and the folks that sign the cheques )

Ciao,

/Paul

ps

Well thats my healthy dose of scarsam and cynicism over and done with for today! Back to work with me! and less *ranting*! 

Wednesday, December 21, 2005 7:35:12 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

I spent this morning digging around the SCA specs (as the curiousity was just killing me) and I must say the heavy borrowing of ideas from WCF is very noticable.

David Chappell has written an article on “Foundations for Service-Oriented Applications: Comparing WCF and SCA” and I must say it is spot on.

David has highlighted many very interesting points in his comparsion of WCF and SCA, many of which I found especially interesting.

Firstly, the similarities between the two is very noticable, with SCA borrowing heaviliy from WCF, but yet it still is very early in the development cycle for SCA spec, there is much work to be done and it faces a heck of a lot of challenges, with such a diverse range of participants and such variations in the app containers they sell.

Also, the fact that SCA is not going through the JCP is very interesting in my view (with Sun out in the cold or at least they are for the moment), but irrspecive of that, the real issue is will all of the vested parties in the spec be able to push this spec all the way through in a reasonible time, if at all; and heaven knows if the implmentations will maintain fidelity, but this is way too early to call at this stage. The fact that the WS-* specs took so long to bed down and SCA is taking a similar’ish type of approach, does not bode well for this fledgling spec.

The one hope I have from all of this, is that it might get us all agreed that there is a SO and not a SOA; and if that happens we might be able to get out of wading through all of this SOA marketing BS and focus on more interesting matters, such as Service Capability Mapping, Service Analysis and Design, and perhaps even (heaven forbid ) best practices for distributed systems and (inter-Connected) distributed systems  design patterns.

Also, it might get some discussion going on whether SO is CO (Component Orientation) revisted and improved, or is SO the more interesting messaging and endpoints or is it both!! I certainly wish the big house would do some more Service Oriented Thinking and stopped hanging around waiting for the others to catch up! I thought they were in the right magic quadrant after all and leading this space?

anyway, i would highly recommend having a read of David Chappell’s article.

It looks like the next 10 yrs will be about WCF vs SCA, as the .NET vs J2EE debate fades away.

Enjoy!,

Paul 

Wednesday, December 21, 2005 7:30:32 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

The December CTP of WinFX is now available to download and this version of the CTP includes Visual Designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Cider).

The WinFx Dec. CTP downloads are available at this link.

<extract>

The most recent release of these technologies is called the December CTP and includes the following:

• WinFX Runtime Components (RTC) - WinFX redistributables (runtime binaries) for executing WinFX applications
• Windows SDK - Includes the header files, libraries and help documentation for developing the next generation of Windows applications. Note that this release (and all future releases of the Windows SDK includes the WinFX SDK).
• Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" CTP WinFX Development Tools - provides developers with support for building WinFX applications using the final released version of Visual Studio 2005. This support includes XAML Intellisense support through schema extensions for the editor, project templates for the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Communication Foundation, and WinFX SDK documentation integration. New to this CTP is a preview of the Visual Designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (code name "Cider").
• Windows Vista - substantial advance in Windows with significant innovations in the developer platform. Combining Windows Vista and the Windows SDK makes it easier than ever before to build applications that are more secure, reliable, and manageable.

</extract>

enjoy!

Paul

Monday, December 19, 2005 9:16:41 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

It looks like BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase are getting together to write a language neutral for building applications and systems under a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

I guess the specs will be something to chew on over the x-mas, when I get tired of chewing on turkey!

Going by an initial glance at this article on the IBM site, it looks to me like SCA is aimed as a facade *goo*  for the application containers, products etc… and seems to be based on an approach where SOA can be fulfilled in tech plumbing by skinning facades into subsystems and components? In essence, as I currently see it (with more digging around required), it appears to be based on a new explicit entry point (explicit interface/contract) system that is more flexible/agile and uses WS-* to grease up the interactions between components in a previously tight coupled environment.

Pity it’s so focused on Components and not endpoints! Or perhaps thats the point!

For me – and from what I have read so far – , it gives the impression that WS-* is just a better IIOP and RMI and therefore == SOA

/Paul 

ps,

you can get a copy of the specs at this link on Big Blue’s web site.

pps

I guess this is the response to Indigo, et. al. ?

Monday, December 19, 2005 6:21:07 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

My good friends at In Home Entertainment, who are based here in Ireland, have relauched their web site and its very cool! You can visit the site at www.inhome-entertainment.com

Congrats to Clem, et. al. Guys, I think it is one of the best Irish site I have seen this year! I’m looking forward to the upcoming product launches, especially the “The Smart House”, it sounds very cool!

So if you have a x-mas itch to pimp out your house, I would highly recommend the folks at In Home Entertainment.

/Paul

ps

Not sure if mentioning that you found out about them through my blog will get you a discount, but you can always try !

Thursday, December 15, 2005 9:32:49 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

You can more details on WCF (nee Indigo) Breaking change list over at Omri Gazitt’s  and Ed Pinto’s blog. Thanks folks.

/Paul

Thursday, December 15, 2005 2:24:29 PM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is part of the stream of effort by the folks in MSR (Microsoft research) on the areas of Concurrency management and recovery control.

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a lightweight port-based concurrency library for C# 2.0. While it is not directly about Tx (STM fits that space), reading up on the material it seems to provide a rather clean and crisp way of providing concurrency constructs.

For more info on CCR,

– Channel9 Wiki on CCR

– Channel9 Video on CCR 

– OOPSLA/SCOOL paper on the CCR

Can’t wait to get the Framework (afaik it will be released in H1 of 06), going by what I have read and hear so far, its more inline with what I’m trying to do with WF and Sys.Tx.

/Paul

Thursday, December 15, 2005 9:00:07 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Up until recently, the licensing model for Microsoft’s W2K3 has had one particular annoying aspect to it (actually I lie, the licensing has had many, many annoying aspects to it over the years, but anyhoo), which was that the license was tied to the bit’ness of the version/edition of the W2K3 SKU you purchased.

Now considering all of the great strides and agility MS have been making in leading the area in how the next generation of hardware gets incorporated into licensing models, i.e.licensing by processor die was a good example of this; the one area that has been a royal pain in the ass, has been licensing tied to the bit’ness of the SKU.

Anyway, this has thankfully been changed with the licensing of W2K R2, for more details you can have a read at this link. The basic skinny is that now a license == edition of W2K3 R2 and not what we had in the past, which was a license == “x” bit version of edition of W2K3 (i.e. the SKU).

/Paul

Ps

Also at this same link, you can get details on how the base licensee rights have been expanded to include more virtualization scenarios, namely on EE (or greater) you can run up to four instances of a virtualized OS environment. Sweet stuff! :D

Tuesday, December 13, 2005 9:07:54 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

Clemens is back and to kick things off he has blogged about how WCF (nee Indigo) supports REST/POX.

Enjoy,

Paul

Monday, December 12, 2005 11:40:42 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

[found via Scarbones]

Windows Server 2003 R2 has RTM’ed.

For more info:

• Launch Page: Launch keynote, demos, web casts
• What’s New in R2: High-level overview of Windows Server 2003 R2
• Trial software: Download site for Evaluation software
• Reviewer’s Guide: Deeper technical Windows Server 2003 R2 content
• What’s New in R2 Licensing: Updates to the new R2 licensing model
• R2 FAQ: Commonly asked questions
• R2 Case Studies: Showcase of customers who have already experienced benefits of R2
• Enterprise Edition: Dedicated section to EE
• R2 Partners: Showcase of industry partners supporting Windows Server 2003 R2

/P

Monday, December 12, 2005 9:00:00 AM UTC |  | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | 

[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] |