"...by the way my colleague on the shit project at work said today it might be easier if we just killed the customer."
Arvindra Sehmi, who is “Senior Architect” at Microsoft EMEA, is indeed one of the most brilliant architects I know and also happens to be the project manager and “owner” of the project I am working on as the lead architect at the moment (I’ve hinted at it here and here) has finally allowed me to say bit more about what we’re up to.
The goal of this project, code-named “FABRIQ”, is to create a special-purpose, high-performance, service-oriented, one-way messaging infrastructure for queuing networks, agents and agile computing. It’s not a Microsoft product. It’s an architecture blue-print backed by code that we write so that customers don’t need to – at least that’s the plan.
In case that doesn’t tell you anything, I’ll try to give you a little bit of an idea (It’s long, but it’s hopefully worth it) ....
I am very much looking forward to the “EMEA Microsoft Longhorn Developer Preview Tour” that’s going to happen in a very dense 3 week stretch in late January / early February 2004. I feel honored to have been invited again to present the highlights of the PDC on a speaking tour throughout Europe (as in 2002) with David Chappell and an excellent group of Microsoft EMEA technical evangelists (Lester Madden, Nigel Watling, and Hans Verbeeck). We are going to be in 13 countries within 3 weeks – or 15 workdays. I will post links to the individual country’s event sites as I learn about them. In one day, we’ll take you through the best of Longhorn, WinFS, Avalon, the Visual Studio Whidbey release and Indigo (my part). If you weren’t at PDC, you should go. If you were at PDC, you should still go just to hear David speak. 
Here’s the first event I know the official site of. The Developer and ITPro days in Belgium are, however, much bigger than “just” our tour. We’ll be there on the second day (Feb 11th), but there’s a very exciting program on the first day already and the array of speakers is nothing less than impressive. (I just wonder why some of the speakers look like lizards right now)
Developer and ITPro Days 2004. February 10th-11th 2004, Ghent, Belgium. I’ll be there.
I'll put together the v1.5 build version of dasBlog next week. The v1.4 "PDC build" proved to be "true to the spirit of PDC bits" and turned out to have a couple of problems with the new "dasBlog" theme and some other inconveniences that v1.5 will fix. The true heroes of v1.5 are Omar and the many other frequent contributors to the workspace; I just didn't have enough time to add features recently.
As I blogged last week, I am very busily involved in a exciting (mind that I use the word not as carelessly as some marketing types) infrastructure project on service-oriented architectures, automnomous computing an agile machines. I wrote some 50 pages of very dense technical specification and a lot of "proof of concept" code in the past two weeks and we're in the process of handing this off to the development team. I am having a great time and a lot of fun, but because the schedule is insanely tight for a variety of reasons (I am not complaining, I signed it knowingly), I've been on 16 hour days for most of the past two weeks. In some ways, this is also an Indigo project, because I am loosely aligning some of my core architecture with a few fundamentals from the Indigo connector architecture published at PDC to that we can take full advantage of Indigo once it's ready. The Indigo idea of keeping the Message body in an XmlReader is an ingenious idea for what I am doing here. In essence, if you only need to look at the headers inside an intermediary in a one-way messaging infrastructure like the one I am building right now, you may never even need to look anything from the body until you push the resulting message out again. So why suck it into a DOM? Just map the input stream to the output stream and hand the body through as you get it. That way and under certain circumstances, my bits may already be forwarding a message to the next hop when it hasn't even fully arrived yet.
One of the "innovative approaches" (for me, at least) is that within this infrastructure, which has a freely composable, nestable pipeline of "aspects", I am using my lightweight transaction manager to coordinate the failure management of such independently developed components. The difficulty of that and the absence of an "atomic" property of a composite pipeline activity are two things that bugged me most about aspects. There's a lot more potential in this approach, for instance enforcement of composition rules. It works great in theory and in the prototype code and I am curious how that turns out once it hits a real life use-case. We're getting there soon. (My first loud thinking about something like this is was at the very bottom of this rant here.) I'll keep you posted.
In unrelated news: Because I know that I'll be doing a lot of Longhorn work and demos in the upcoming months (my Jan/Feb/Mar schedule looks like I am going to visit every EMEA software developer personally), I've meanwhile figured that my loyal and reliable digital comrade (a Dell Inspiron 8100) will be retired. Its successor will have a green chassis.
No, I didn’t
give up blogging. I am working on a project. I am writing lots of specification
and a big prototype. Has to do with SOA, Queuing Networks, Agents, Agile
Machines and even a little bit with Indigo. I am pretty excited about this. If
all works well, the result is going to be public very early next year. I am
just too busy to blog at the moment. I am the critical path. Excuse the
continued silence. 
While most of the newtelligence events are currently held in German (such as www.TornadoCamp.net), there's actually one that you can attend that's held in English - and it happens in one of the most beautiful little countries in Europe: Slovenia.
(The area around the event location is so cute, you might think Disney had something to do with it - I've been assured that they didn't)
CodeWeek runs a full week (7 days!), from December 1 through December 7 in Bled and I've been told that they've got one or two seats left, so if you're interested (or know someone who is) and act quickly, you may still be able to grab one.
I am using shared networking in my Longhorn VPC and I could browse the web and connect to the network. So to make working on the network a bit easier (and to try some more features) I thought it may make sense to add the Longhorn Virtual PC on my box to our domain. Setting this up worked.
Now, if I boot up Longhorn and my box is connected to the network, I get to see "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to begin." and right after that, the VPC reboots. If I am quick enough to get to the logon screen, Longhorn reboots right after accepting the password. If I disconnect my machine from the network I can log into local LH accounts just fine.
“Package load failure”. Package ‘VSCorePackage’ has failed to load properly ( GUID={7494682B-37A0-11D2-A273-00C04F8EF4FF} ). Please contact package vendor for assistance.
Uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, problem sticks. :-(
Update: Apparently this error isn't really a sign of complete failure of the development environment, but rather a result of project file corruption. Before the problem occured, the C# compiler in VS tanked and obviously trashed the project file. New projects still work as expected, but the project that causes this failure is broken.
Joe Long, the Product Unit Manager for XML Enterprise Services at Microsoft, talks about the Indigo migration story in this recorded presentation on MSDN. If you weren't at Joe's PDC talk and think you don't have 37 minutes time for this, you can still not afford to miss listening to the prescriptive guidance section starting at slide 60, if you ever have or will cross an application domain boundary with a Remoting, Enterprise Services or Web service call on the current stacks. And now leave here and go there.
Because most teams at Microsoft seem already a milestone or two ahead of what the Longhorn and Whidbey PDC builds reflect, how much is it worth to report bugs?
Hello? Redmond? Comments?
This article here hints at XBox Next running on PowerPC. Of course, the kids over at Slashdot call such a potential move bad names, but that's of course, because they weren't grown up enough when PowerPC was indeed a hot topic for Microsoft and Windows NT. In fact, I may still have a vintage Windows NT/PPC CD somewhere around here.
- Reminder #1: the NT kernel runs on Itanium, AMD64 and x86 and if Microsoft really, really wants, they can certainly make it go on PPC (again).
- Reminder #2: Windows NT was born and created on the Intel i860 and MIPS R3000 Risc processors and went to x86; not the other way around.
- Reminder #3: Xbox runs an NT kernel - stripped down to what's exactly necessary. There is processor dependent code in Windows, but I would assume that the stuff "down there" is a relatively clean place.
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