Jelle Druyts

My first "official" article just went online here on my website: "Applied Visual Studio 2005 Enhancements In WeFly247".

There's a link to the article in the Beta Experience Newsletter that was just sent out today to everyone who subscribed to it (so welcome, all, and stick around for more!). So if you have a special interest in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 be sure to check out the Beta Experience!

And keep reading my blog, of course

Cool, if you live in Australia, you can now order WeFly247 as well (via frankarr). You can order just WeFly247, or WeFly247 with the Visual Studio 2005 Beta!

That's the first country outside of EMEA that I've heard of that's also giving away free copies. Good thing we localized it to Aussie Enjoy!

Update: New Zealand is also giving it away! (Via Nigel Parker, thanks Frank!)

Keynote 1: Ready For Business (Andrew Lees)

The official keynote was a combination of a "show" and a talk, with Corporate VP Andrew Lees being regularly swapped out for a couple of (what I presume to be) actors in the typical Developer/IT Pro/User roles. I'm sure we've all been there as one of these roles, just not getting anything done from the other ones; but it's all about team work, and the speach was mostly about how the Microsoft products will help these teams work together. Along with a number of videos and flashy demos (not built in Avalon though, which is a shame) this was quite an entertaining keynote, but nothing shockingly new of course.

There was one pretty cool demo about WS-Management (a new systems management protocol) that showed MOM sending management queries to a non-bootable machine (I'm still puzzled by which stack or hardware component). And since it's an open specification, it even worked on a Sun Solaris which they demoed live on stage. Nice!

They also mentioned that Microsoft Learning is currently offering free skills assessments and free trainings on Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Really nice!

ARC302 - Building And Using A Software Factory (Steve Cook, Annie Matthewman)

While the presentation was pretty "dry", I got quite some thinking out of the whole Software Factory concept. I think of Software Factories as the two-steps-up evolution of the Enterprise Templates you might remember from a few years ago when Visual Studio .NET first came out. They're basically an abstraction from recurring enterprise-specific patterns, implemented as Domain Specific Languages (DSL's). In a basic sense, this boils down to project and code generation inside Visual Studio 2005, along with graphical editors and designers that drive this generation process. It can be as simple as providing an editor for the UIP Application Block's configuration file (which they demoed), to an entire code generation of your business layer based on a service description.

They used the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) to build their DSL editor, so it's good to think of this as a "Factory for Factories". This is a tool that will mostly be used by architects defining and implementing DSL's for an enterprise scenario. At first sight, creating a DSL using the GAT seemed doable for one-way code generation (I also took a Hands-On-Lab on it), but I wonder how hard it would be to implement it in a two-way synchronized mannor. Nonetheless, impressive stuff, but it will take some significant effort to implement this into your current software development strategy.

ARC309 - Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects: Developing Service-Oriented Systems (Eric Lee)

This was an excellent overview on the Team System features for architects, mainly about the four Distributed System Designers that will help you create executable as well as deployable designs: the Application, System, Logical Datacenter and Deployment Designer. There isn't really a lot more to say about it other than the fact that Eric Lee is also a very good, enthousiastic and knowledgeable speaker. Great talk!

CTS365 - Implementing "Indigo" Endpoints: Addresses, Bindings and Contracts (Christian Weyer, Steve Swartz)

Steve Swartz did a nice job of explaining Indigo endpoints. He outlined the three types of contracts: the data contract (schema and versioning), the message contract (SOAP headers), and the service contract (behaviour).

The way to version a data contract is stunningly easy in Indigo: just add the VersionAdded, MustUnderstand and IsOptional attributes to your data member and you're set to go:

[DataMember(VersionAdded=2, MustUnderstand=false, IsOptional=true]
public string SomeNewField

The Indigo runtime will now have two-way support for this member, i.e. the new type will still work in the old service, and the old type will still work in the new service.

The proposed way to version a service contract was to inherit your new ServiceContract interface from the old one:

[ServiceContract]
public interface ICalculator2 : ICalculator

I'm not sure if this is really the way to go (it feels too much like MSXML, MSXML2, MSXML3, ...) but I'll give it some more thought before I make up my mind about this.

Another point he made was that Exceptions are problems in code, whereas Faults are error responses from the server. Since these Faults are also a WSDL standard, there's explicit support for them in Indigo through the Fault class:

DivideByZeroFault f = new DivideByZeroFault("Cannot divide by zero");
throw new Fault<DivideByZeroFault>(f);

There was also a cool demo showing the fact that you can return a Stream from a service operation, allowing infinite streaming data to be passed back (e.g. audio broadcasting, or webcam streams).

Finally, on the behaviour part of Indigo services, developers tend to care mostly about the concurrency and instancing behaviours (can recurrant calls be made, is it a singleton or singlecall service, is session state available, ...), whereas deployers care more about throttling and metadata behaviours (how many concurrent calls and instances can I have, is the WSDL available online, is WS-MetadataExchange supported, ...). All these types of behaviours can be defined by simple attributes or configuration settings.

All in all, a very nice talk showing some advanced capabilities of Indigo.

CHT072 - Drilldown into Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Eric Lee)

This interactive Chalk & Talk session gave a good demonstration about Team System, with Eric Lee showing how to create Team Projects and work in them, while answering questions from the attendees. Again, this guy seems to know pretty well what he's talking about, so it was a nice wrap-up for the day.

(Apart from the fact that there were free drinks in the community hall afterwards, but I'd argue that the Dutch beer doesn't really count as free drinks )

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.

Now that WeFly247 has finally shipped (as part of the Beta Experience) and rapidly gaining traction, each member of the team received a cool "Contributor Award" package for getting this sucker out of the door, containing a flight ticket, a miniature plane with a name-tag, a teddybear (just like the one in the Duty Free shop of the Passenger Website!) and some vintage stand-alone WeFly247 DVD's (not found in the Beta Experience package). Nice!

So seeing it's TechEd in Europe next week and you're all running around looking for free food and swag in stead of attending the 400+ sessions packed with material that is determined to overflow your brain, I figured I might as well just hand some of these limited-edition DVD's out to whoever gives the best impression of the number two engine of a Learjet 60 that just ran out of kerosine.

Oh, you'll also win if you just recognize me and beat it out of me (I'm not giving you my lunch money, though).

So if you see me in Amsterdam this week, come and say hi!