If you happen to be at any of the events and want to meet, contact me using the form on the blog.

You just gotta love technology… 🙂 See you there.

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There are two things that interest me, personally, in these kind of cloud paradigms. First, that there are new application models, new architectures, new colors in the pallete, new tools (modeling is one of them). Just look at all the technologies I mentioned. Most of them are usable to develop enterprise applications, they are not customer-facing new things (Mesh is the partial exception here). The second thing that interests me is precisely the engineering challenge, the new problems we will have to solve in a world where almost nothing can be taken for granted. (Can we communicate at all, if everything is extremely loosely coupled?)

Truth is, however, that I don’t think this will be an easy or widespread shift (regardless of what Nicholas Carr thinks). If you talk to most people working in IT today about “moving to the cloud”, you’ll hear jokes about “fog”, and (legitimate) questions about data ownership, security, trust, cost, SLAs and QoS, etc. These issues will have to be tackled with, or at least enough of them.

Data and Business Logic has been near (“it’s mine, all mine!”) almost since the first days of IT, after all.

… so if you are in Portugal or nearby and want a partner company to explore some new ground using these technologies (or just have interesting discussions), get in touch. 🙂

The post PDC(loud) 2007 appeared first on Blog IT.

Ted Neward has a good overview of the sessions: day 1, day 2, day 3.

The post 2008 Lang.Net Symposium appeared first on Blog IT.

D will be a declarative language aimed at non-developers, and will be based on eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML), sources, who asked not to be named, said.

I guess this explains one of the (NDA’d) presentations we had at last year’s MVP Summit, by the man now titled «Microsoft’s Chief Modeling Officer», Don Box.

The discussion thread following this post is already very long, and several of the posts either raise problems with modeling/higher abstraction, and others just complain about “yet another language“. On my personal opinion, it makes perfect sense to have new languages that are good at new, specific tasks. I’m still now sure, for example, that bringing LINQ to C# is good, in terms of aspects like language-cluttering and database-coupling, but most of the time these aspects are neglected in discussions of LINQ. On the other hand, in this SOA world of today, I think it COULD make sense to have a “service-oriented language”, with primitives to send/receive messages, define message schemas, handle service/message versioning, governance, deployment, logging and monitoring built into the language itself.

So my take in this is: go D! 🙂 I’m looking forward to try it out and see how far it can be pushed. It it can help me do more in less time, I’m all for it.

The post «D» Modeling Language appeared first on Blog IT.

There are two features of WF, which I was unfortunately unable to demonstrate at the session, which I really love: first, dynamic  instance update – the ability to modify a running workflow in runtime, adding new activities and modifying its behavior. I can think of several uses for this, some on a professional level, some for fun. 🙂 The second is using custom activities together with WF to define Domain-Specific languages. Simpler than the DSL toolkit (and also  with distinct applicabilities), and given the fact that you can run your declarative XAML workflows without recompilation, it’s something I’m really looking into.

The post TechDays 2007: WF Extensibility With Custom Activities appeared first on Blog IT.