Yesterday, at the Microsoft EMEA Architect Forum in Portugal, I found out yet again that writing slide decks that work for all of Europe is a bit challenging. To make a point about some of the benefits of using an EAI/B2B tool, I was citing some points from a BizTalk case study talking about how the Swedish company Svenska Foder implemented their B2B infrastructure. Guess what? "Foder" isn't something you use to feed animals in Portuguese; it's rather a pretty strong word describing what people do when they're trying (or not trying) to make babies.
Die Harald Schmidt Show wird eingestellt. Höchste Zeit, SAT.1 von der Fernbedienung zu verbannen. Mensch, das versaut einem doch direkt den ganzen Wochenablauf. "Freiwillige Bildschirmpause"; dass ich nicht lache.
„Software architecture is a tough thing - a vast, interesting and
largely unexplored subject area. And of course everyone has something to say
about it!”
Go, get and read the first issue of the Microsoft EMEA Architect’s JOURNAL. You will be surprised
in many ways.
*(I wrote an article on blogging in general and dasBlog in particular for
this issue. Here’s the shortcut.)
The Releases section over at the GotDotNet workspace has three variants of v1.5:
"Source ZIP" with the code, "Web Files" with the runtime files (to update existing installs and do manual installs) and "Web Setup" which is an MSI to install the web site. Because the feature list keep growing, but we haven't done a language update for the various local languages, yet, updates to the string tables are welcome in the workspace source control system. And before you update: make a backup.
I am running v1.5 here without any problems. Let us know in the GotDotNet workspace message boards if you find any. I likely won't be able to answer any support questions this or next week.
Please note that you must not have the Whidbey Alpha version of ASP.NET mapped to the web into which you install this version; it can be present on the box, but not on the web for dasBlog. Otherwise you will get all sorts of assertions and error messages that aren't my fault ;)
I had too little time today to make the necessary corrections on the few install issues that I found due to the workspace fellows not adding the files where they need to be (It's tricky so not necessarily their fault). The problem is not fixing, the problem is testing: Install the source MSI, build, find problem. Go back to original version, fix, full build, install source MSI ... you get the picture.
I think I am done with v1.5 of dasBlog. However, experience tells me that I'll usually find a tiny problem just after I've packaged it all up and posted it, so I'll keep the source tree checked out and the files sitting here for another 24 hours until I am sure that it works well here.
Omar and Harry have done a fantastic job cleaning up some of my mess and they've added some cool new things.
We've got a simple search facility now, comments can be deleted, the administrator UI got a bit better organized, a bunch of annoying little bugs were fixed, the stylish "dasBlog" theme does work now and is the default, you can finally change your password through the UI, a corrupt login-cookie won't crash the site anymore, comments now show up in the correct time zone, the SMTP server settings for notifications can now be tested, we have a plugin for NewsGator, etc.
"...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.
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