Jelle Druyts

After arriving a little late at TechEd in Amsterdam yesterday morning (due to the obligatory Dutch traffic jams), I went through the rather quick and painless registration process^[1], quickly grabbed some healthy breakfast^[2] and dove into the "Building Connected Systems Today" Preconference Session.

The proposed new approach to building connected systems is to introduce a new 3-part service based system model, supplementing the more "traditional" 2-part Business and Technical Model with an intermediary "Service Oriented Architecture" Model. This SOA Model forms the bridge between the capabilities, processes and SLE's (Service Level Expectations) defined by the business, and the technical services offered by an implementation framework (e.g. Enterprise Services or WS-ReliableMessaging). So the SOA Model basically defines the Service Contract (implementation independent, by using WSDL and XSD), the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and optionally the Orchestration rules defining the business processes, again independent of the used technology.

The Business Model can be created by adopting a new modelling strategy called "Motion", which is entirely based on this concept of Capabilities, that only describe the "what" (structural information) and not the "how" (dynamic process information). Actually, this business modelling part wasn't that interesting to me, as it seemed mostly a high-level work-in-development, and it seemed like "just another methodology" to me without much real practical value for me in my current position. But maybe it could mean a lot to people who actually know what BPR, Six Sigma, Lean, Zachman and TOGAF stand for. Currently, there's also no tooling to support this new methodology, but they're implementing it as a DSL (Domain Specific Language) in a Software Factory (talk about buzzwords that are bound to come back in the coming days).

The SOA Model can be created by applying the "Pragmatic SOAD" approach (Pragmatic Service Oriented Analysis & Design), which is basically a higher-level mapping of our old-time friends: use cases, collaboration diagrams, message exchange patterns, canonical data, ... to model the actual Services.

Finally, the Technical Model was shown as an implementation in C# which had endpoints as WebServices and as COM+ ServicedComponents, and which was partially created by tools and code generators powered by the GAT (Guidance Automation Toolkit, another hype in Software Factory land). Not a lot of surprises there, and I was actually much more impressed by Scott Hanselmans TechEd US session on a practical approach of using code generation from WSDL and XSD all the way to actual code and technical as well as functional documentation.

One interesting slide showed the platform capabilities for the 2005 and Longhorn product waves, defining that Indigo, Avalon, Office 12, BizTalk Server 2006, SQL Server 2005 and WinFS would become increasingly important. I'm glad to see WinFS is still alive and on the roadmaps as there has been quite some confusion about its future. Alongside BizTalk Server, a service called WWS or "Windows Workflow Services" was mentioned, which I hadn't heard of before. It's basically a lightweight workflow server baked right into the operating system. Sounds interesting!

Generally, I'd say the first day was a nice warm-up for the content to come later this week, but not much new just yet.

^[1] Goodies:

Swag[] techedSwag = new Swag[] {
   backpack, tshirt, baseballCap, msdnMagazine,
   new FreeLicense[] { SQLServer2005, VisualStudio.NET2005StandardEdition, VirtualServer2005 },
   randomOtherStuff };

^[2] Cookies, muffins, coffee. Yum.