ARC206 Patterns & Anti-Patterns. I did this session together with Tiago Pascoal, and we mostly talked about Architectural Anti-Patterns (and not Patterns/Design Patterns), in a Developer-oriented session. The original TechEd EMEA 2008 session we based it off was one of the best I’ve seen yet, at and I think we managed to surpass the original delivery and contents with examples and real-life experiences.  We had very good feedback on this session.

ARC208 O que há de novo no BizTalk 2009. I do one of these every two years :-). It’s a difficult session to do, because the next release of BizTalk Server has mostly small incremental features, and because there are lots of them. I did two demos, of the developer experience and the new Sql Adapter, to break the sequence of slides, and also mentioned the ESB Guidance 2.0, the relationship with Dublin, and the ISV Royalties program.

ARC209 Windows Azure – Introdução aos .Net Services. This session was similar to my presentation last year on this same topic (when it was still called “BizTalk Services”), but with more deep technical content and demos. The main host of the session was Pedro Félix, I mostly did the connection to real-life use cases, some clarifications, and the final segment on hosted Workflow, the third component (with the Access Control and Service Bus) of .Net Services. This session had a very high rating.

All the presentations are available here for download in PDF format at my Skydrive.

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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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Anyway, a highly recommended read.

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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. 🙂

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"Businesses start and fail in the United States at an increasingly staggering rate. Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business. Within five years, more than 80 percent of them will have failed.  […] And more than 80 percent of the small businesses that survive the the first five years fail in the second five."

Create It is now over 7 years old, and 16 people strong.  It makes me proud to be in the small percentage of companies that do make it (although we are still 3 years away from the danger zone). 🙂

Meanwhile, on the technical side, I've been trying out the new BizTalk Services R12 release, which includes (hosted) Workflow support. It's limited in the sense that there are not many activities included, and there's not yet rich and integrated tooling, but it's an interesting start nonetheless. Well worth exploring. And on another track, I've been looking into BizTalk Server R3. The new features do look interesting, although clearly in the "evolution" side of things.

Finally, I've been getting ready for the PDC2008, in October, where it's interesting to note that the topic "Cloud Services" is the one with most sessions. If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend you subscribe to the Cloud Computing group hosted at Google Groups (but not specifically Google-related or sponsored). Interesting discussions there.

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I am also attending this year’s PDC2008, where a lot is expected, for example, in what regards Microsoft’s approach to Cloud Computing. BizTalk Services is sure to be there, as well as BizTalk "Oslo", Live Mesh and other initiatives like SQL Data Services. Just check the session list, full of vague descriptions so as to not spoil the surprise, and you’ll realize this has the right ingredients to be a great conference again.

I know of several other (Portuguese) people who are attending, and if you can, try to be there. The PDC2008 is about future technologies, and it’s the Microsoft conference to attend this year.

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Since the Summit, BizTalk Server R3 (the "old girlfriend", as it was amusingly called at the a session) was announced by Steve Martin, and will included a set of interesting new features. Not quite a revolution, but interesting developments anyway. The BizTalk Hotrod #4 issue is out for you to check out (I especially liked the ESB Exception Management and WF Hosting in BizTalk articles).

Anyway, just wanted to ping: I’m back. 🙂

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After this long description, ,where the lines blur enterprise and social, we discussed the impacts of using the cloud as a computing fabric, where distribution is everywhere, there are no transactions but rather reconciliations or consistency corrections, and where “all data from distant stars is from the past” (in the words of Pat Helland), and where there is no synchronicity, only eventual replication.

One of the interesting discussions was around the question of if these cloud platforms (especially in the MS space) will be able to give us simple, easy to use application interfaces, where we can forget about the fact that our application is hosted somewhere in a distributed datacenter environment, and just assume some kind of “SLA” in “ADO.NET.Cloud”, where the distribution aspects are hidden from the developers. Or rather, if on the contrary we will have to change the way we develop to be aware of this environment: Amazon’s Dynamo points in this latest direction, where some of the conflicts between different versions of data have to be solved in the semantic/application level.

Other aspect of this discussion, and one that I consider to be especially fascinating, is around data models. How to store it, how to have different copies of it, replicated, and how to reconcile it. There are some interesting initiatives here, especially Amazon’s, in its data store service and in SimpleDB. I had been studying the ideas of Linda Tupplespaces, and found it really interesting that Amazon is using these ideas. Other interesting idea is Facebook’s, which seems to have created a “domain specific” information store, around the notion of the user profile, for their own needs.

Anyway, it was a very interesting discussion, and eye opening in some cases. Let’s see what the future brings.

In the social space specifically, some interesting ideas came up: what if Microsoft added to SharePoint 2007+ some kind of Facebook app hosting? a Web Part to host Facebook apps, for instance, would be great! And an implementation of OpenSocial in SharePoint, again to interop with its Web Parts, would also be interesting, especially if OpenSocial ever becomes successful. 🙂

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