Conceptual talks vs. coding talks

I am in Frankfurt now, coming from Dubai, going to Tunis. Yesterday I talked about the relevance of contracts and agreement in a Web Services environment and about scalability patterns to use with Enterprise Services at the Microsoft Research "Crash Course" that was organized for professors from all across the Middle East, Eastern Mediterreanean and African regions. This wasn't my first event in the academic space, but certainly the largest so far. And it's a very different audience to address, indeed. In two 55 minute talks I spent less than 5 minutes each highlighting and explaining a couple of product features and the rest of the time was only about underlying concepts and strategy.

I start to think that these types of talks just make more sense to conference attendees than "coding sessions". Everyone can pick up a "how-to" book, read the reference material or poke around in samples at home. For me, an ideal conference inspires, highlight things that are off the beaten path and provides insights into the "why" more than into the "how". Having said that, it's pretty frustrating when you are have given a purely conceptual talk that went really well, you get great feedback from the interested people you talk to afterwards and then you get a comment like "very bad, there was no demo" or simply "more demos" in the written feedback. I should probably start blogging attendee comments and write my comments on comments. I guess I'll do that for TechEd Europe. Beware ;)

Hitting the road again...

I didn't take the notebook and didn't even cheat last week (no Internet Cafes, no hidden PocketPC, etc).

I went to a small sea resort at the Baltic Sea in one of the "new" states in the eastern part of Germany. The average age of the tourists there seemed to be about 65 and hence there was no danger of wild partying, which was indeed a Good Thing. I stayed there for three days and then went to see the sights of some cities "up north" on a lazy two day trip back home (it'd usually take me about 8 hrs of driving). I went to Wismar and Schwerin, places around Lübeck and also did the essential touristy thing in Hamburg by taking a boat tour through the seaport (which is the 2nd largest in Europe). I haven't been too much to our eastern states in recent years and it's great to see how the visible differences between "the East" and "the West" have vanished for the most part and that what's left are just normal regional differences. All in all it was a week that most people would probably call "horribly boring" :)

Today's travel destination is Dubai -- now again with a notebook and using the time on plane to prep for tomorrow's event ;)

Out of here....

I am taking a week off and will drive up north towards the sea. Computer stays behind. I need a break. Will be back on Saturday and then pack up to go to Dubai and Tunis (for the North Africa Developers Conference) and then to Barcelona for TechEd Europe, which is surely going to be the event highlight of the year. I give five talks in Barcelona, including a chalk talk together with my very newtelligent colleagues:

Chalk Talk: Gotchas from porting DNA to .NET (CHT012)
Speakers: Clemens Vasters, Achim Oellers, Joerg Freiberger 
+ 2 July 2003, 08:30h

Microsoft® .NET Web Services Internals : I Didn't Know You Could Do That!  (WEB404) 
+ 2 July 2003, 18:15h

Loose Coupling an Serialization Patterns : The Holy Grail of Service Design  (WEB400)
+ 3 July 2003, 10:00h

Layers and Tiers (DEV387)
+ 3 July 2003, 18:15h

Aspect-Oriented Programming (DEV359)
+ 4 July 2003, 16:00h

SDK

It's neither finished nor perfect, but it's a lot of code and I want to get something out before I leave for my short vacation. A current "daily build" of the newtelligence SDK. May or may not work for you, it does for me. Includes, mostly in source code form, all the base classes I used for the TechEd Demos. Please be advised that everything related to newtelligence.EnterpriseServices.AspectServicedComponent currently breaks with object pooling and leaks lotsa memory in any out-of-process case. Those issues doesn't affect any of the other classes.  Readme, MSI (3.6MB)

It got increasingly difficult to distribute my sample code, because the dependencies on the set of standard libraries that I've built over the past months just keep growing. I fell in the same trap for the "polished" version of the samples for TechEd so that I decided to make a cut and make a whole "SDK" out of this stuff, finally (I think I've written about that a while ago) and simply make it a prerequisite for installing additional demos. That takes away a lot of the repetitive work for building installers over and over again. The MSI file is almost finished and I think I should be able to make a first drop available by tomorrow.

From Monday until the end of the week I will take a desperately needed week of vacation. I'll just get into the car and drive up north to the sea. No computer in the luggage. I won't even try to read email. 

 

Sorry, Testing. Welcome DIPLOMAT, bye bye AMBASSADOR. I just inaugurated a brand new 60GB harddrive for my notebook by installing a new OS and I am finally, finally on Win03 for good. Nothing beats lots of RAM and a fast disk. That notebook is screeeeaaming now.

Ingo has some new guidance around Remoting. While I don't agree with him on giving any "perfectly okay" marks the WAN case in his feature/scenarios matrix, most of the rules make sense to me for a LAN scenario that doesn't need to scale heavily. Still, the "put state into the database" rule is a bit strict and probably needs a little more thought; after all, the database is just another shared service. Also, in a LAN where security doesn't play much of a role, you probably also don't need to scale unexpectedly as it happens on the web and therefore the whole "host in IIS" and "single call only" business seems a bit strict, too.

And if you didn't believe me until now, here's Ingo with some definitive guidance around ASMX, ES and Remoting that I obviously very much agree with:

• If you plan on using SOAP Web Services to integrate different platforms or different companies, I really urge you to look into ASMX (ASP.NET) Web Services instead of Remoting.
• Do not try to fit distributed transactions, security, and such into custom channel sinks. Instead, use Enterprise Services if applicable in your environment.

I summarize his guidance for an old COM guy like myself as:

Whatever was cool with OLE Automation* is cool with Remoting. If the use-case looks much different, look elsewhere. 

*(no security or scalability to worry about, chatty interaction, stateful objects, events, late binding)

Thank you, Patrick

"ServicedComponentEx" broken: The code that I published a year ago here in order to fix the dependency of ServicedComponents on the default appdomain (and its config) no longer works with the Framework 1.1. The reason for that is that the cross-appdomain case of Remoting now explicitly filters calls to IRemoteDispatch and rejects them. The way the proxy attribute of my hack works is that it redirects the activation into a different AppDomain and therefore causes a "double proxy" to be created. The proxy that the ES infrastructure talks to is indeed a cross-appdomain proxy which talks to a transparent serviced component proxy in the target appdomain. If a managed call comes in from a different process, it wants to talk to IRemoteDispatch to circumvent COM/Interop (IRemoteDispatch is where the DCOM tunneled binary serializer packages get dropped in) and that call then gets forwarded into the secondary app domain through the cross-appdomain proxy.

Now, in the 1.1 Framework, any IRemoteDispatch calls through Remoting are explicitly rejected and hence the hack no longer works. Bummer. However, I did expect some things to break and this should be a reminder that any hacks in undocumented territory that you may find anywhere are not guaranteed to work in the next version, even point releases of the Framework. I am poking around to get the functionality restored, but based on what I've figured out so far it doesn't really seem possible without either violating the rules of the game in very horrible ways or moving this functionality into the core framework I built to make aspects work ....