Wrapping up the FABRIQ

Achim and myself are currently in a series of very quick rev-cycles for the first public release of the Microsoft/newtelligence FABRIQ project that we did with and for Microsoft EMEA HQ and that was conceived, driven and brillantly managed by my architect colleague Arvindra Sehmi, who gave me the lead architect role for this project.

[Reminder/Disclaimer: this is not a product, but rather a pretty elaborate "how-to" architecture example that comes with an implementation. Hence it's not a supported Microsoft or newtelligence "framework" or an attempt at some general, definitive guidance on how to write services. FABRIQ is an optimized architecture for fast, one-way, message processing within network-distributed nodes consisting of sequences of dynamically composed primitive processing steps. This isn't even trying to get anywhere near the guidance aspirations of Shadowfax, or let alone all the guidance we're getting from the Indigo team or even the parallel work I've been doing for MS by building Proseware.]

We've settled on build 1.0.4173 (yesterday) to be the TechEd version, but we still found a last minute issue where we weren't using WSE 2.0 correctly (not setting the SoapEnvelope.Context.Destination property for use with a bare WSE2 Pipeline in the presence of policy) and when I reassembled the distribution I didn't reset an option that I use for debugging on my machine and that caused installation hiccups over at Achim's machine. Achim commented the hour-long bug hunt with "Ah, you gotta love software!".

There will be hands-on labs at TechEd Europe led by Achim and Jörg that let you play with what we (very much including our friends at Microsoft Argentina and Microsoft EMEA) have built. And even if you don't have a proper use for a one-way queuing network architecture, it actually turned into a fun thing to play with. 

I'll be starting to explain aspects of the spec over the upcoming days and will explain how the architecture works, how you configure it and what its potential uses are. Already posted is some relevant information about the great idea of an XmlReader-based message design (which I designed inspired by the Indigo PDC build) and our use of lightweight transactions.

I am in the boot phase for the next software project right now (proprietary work) and I have identified very many good uses for the FABRIQ model in there already (hint).

Once all parties involved are giving their "thumbs up", we'll also make the source code drop and the binaries available to the public (you) and from there we're looking forward to your input (and contributions?).