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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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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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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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Before I start: in the last few months I’d been using Mozy to do online backups to my personal laptop. Mozy installs a client tool that monitors changes in my files, and uploads them to a online repository. Another interesting feature is that it adds a new option in my windows explorer’s contextual menu, which allows me to browse and restore previous versions of each file.

Live Mesh, in many ways, is similar to this. I browse my file system, select folders to sync to my online Live Desktop, and the client tool it includes uploads those files to the Mesh, maintaining them synchronized. I can then open them either from the web page or any PC with the client tool installed. I can also start a remote desktop connection to any computer in my Mesh. My desktop, anywhere. (but that would be an old slogan :-)).

Anyway, this is a very interesting development (still needing perfecting…), and I’m looking forward to use it widely, since it’s still a Technical Preview).

If you want to learn more, while this is not yet completely public, the best source is the team’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/ .

Now, what I would really like to see in this platform is a Silverlight interface, using Deep Zoom to browse the "desktop". That would be cool, and an interesting desktop interaction model to try out.

This development is apparently in no way related to BizTalk Services, which kind of surprises me, and I have yet no idea what the programmability possibilities are/will be.

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Bungee Labs – Next Generation Web Development Platform
an ambitious new on-demand, web-based development environment that enables developers to build and deploy web apps that utilize the large variety of APIs and web services out on the Internet

BungeeConnect
The Bungee Connect Platform-as-a-Service is a single environment for the development, testing, deployment and hosting of amazing web applications. Bungee Connect powers highly interactive user web applications built 80% faster and at a cost tied only to end user adoption

Google App Engine: Cloud Control to Major Tom
Google App Engine is similar to the Amazon Web Services stack, which rolled out at the end of 2006 and has since gone on to be utilised by many startups for their infrastructure needs. But it is not a set of standalone services like Amazon’s – which includes S3 for storage, EC2 for hosting and the SimpleDB database. Google App Engine is an end-to-end service and bundles everything into one package.

Red Dog: Microsoft’s Answer to App Engine and AWS?
Kip Kniskern over at the LiveSide blog spotted a Microsoft job advert that appears to give some insight into a cloud computing platform under development at Redmond that could compete with Google’s just released App Engine or Amazon’s suite of web services. The utility computing platform, codenamed "Red Dog" according to the job ad, is under development at Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team and aims to see a version one release within the "coming year." What little info is provided by the job posting is rather obscure, but there are a few juicy tidbits to be had.

Google’s App Engine: Aiming At Facebook, Not Amazon
If the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook’s F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of App Engine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.

App Engine: Host Your Apps with Google
It’s about time that developers get access to Google’s platform! We’ve been hearing about Google’s server farms and development tools for years. After Amazon Web Services started doing so well we all knew it was just a matter of time (next will be Microsoft we can can safely assume). Though the obvious comparison is to AWS, they aren’t really the same beast. Amazon has released a set a disparate services that can be used to created a general computing platform. The services, though they work together, do not come bundled.

Linxter Internet Service Bus (ISB)
Linxter is an in-the-cloud, customizable communications infrastructure for distributed applications providing hyperconnective, secure, assured information delivery.

Google AppEngine
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

Red Dog: Yet another unannounced Microsoft cloud service
I believe Microsoft is working on a hosted app platform for developers, with BizTalk Services and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) at its heart. In fact, I‘ve heard the codename “Zurich” attached to this Google-App-Engine competitor. But are Red Dog and Zurich one and the same? I think they are different, and all part of the big Microsoft services plan in the sky.

Google unlocks its data centers
Where’s Microsoft?

Food for thought.

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The information about the meeting is here (in Portuguese), and the slides are up at my skydrive.

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A few days back I finally ended reading Nicholas Carr's polemic "Does IT matter – Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage". Being in a company that has "IT" in its name, the contents of these book are very relevant. The author spells a message similar to Fukuyama's, but applied to IT, stating that IT cannot be seen as giving a real competitive advantage in today's markets: whatever lead the use of Information Technology gives to a given organization, will be quickly replicated by its competitors. Additionally, the author defends that IT is becoming infrastructure, much like electricity or the railway (or other means of fast transportation). This analogy with electricity actually is used throughout most of the book to sustain the main thesis: no organization strategy today is based on the fact that the company has access to "state-of-the-art" electricity. And, consequently, no organization can base their strategies/market leads in investments in information technology.

This book had a lot of impact a few years back, and like Fukuyama's, has strong, extremely intelligent and well built arguments. It's a book I profoundly disagree with, as well, one that made me scribble lots of notes on its margins. XXX wrote a book dedicated to contradict Carr, and there is information all over the net about this, so I doubt I can add much to this argument, so I'll just leave some notes: there are a lot of anecdotes in the book that justify some positions. While stories and specific cases are interesting to know, they are hardly proof of anything: there are probably as many examples pointing in the opposite direction. The last part of the book I found especially dishonest, when the author compares the impact of IT with that of basic living conditions stuff, such as clean water to drink, or sanitation. My answer to this is: can't the same be said of BOOKS (=recorded human history) and that same water/sanitation? We wouldn't have this world without it. This is the stuff of journalist rhetoric, and not honest discussion.

ANYWAY, changing gears, I do think several of the arguments in the book make perfect sense. The emerging trend of moving into cloud-based, hosted, software, is clearly a step that brings more truth the analogy of electricity and IT (software is just… there, somewhere, I don't really care). Having the software is no longer the advantage. At least, not for long periods of time, as it will be replicated by competitors sooner or later. So it all comes back to good, ol', business strategy and practices.

The question I now pose myself is: how can I, aware of this line of reasoning, "sell" a project to a customer based on its technology merits? I happened to have a conversation with a long-time client and business partner about the book, which he had also read, and 5 minutes later the topic changed to a possible new project we are doing with them, where I am proposing brand new technology, one month old. I couldn't help feeling something was wrong. I am going forward with it, especially because it's a very sound architectural approach to the specific business problem, but I feels uncomfortable anyway.

Changing to the second, related, topic of this post: in college, quite a few years back, I remember studying Amdahl's Law. It basically states (if I remember correctly) that the impact of a given change/optimization on a component of a system has an impact on the full system that is proportional to the relative importance of that component in the full system. Simple proportionality rules. An example. Like I said above, I have this situation where I am considering using this new technology that just came out. In the typical projects we do at |create|it|, 40-60% of the effort of a given project is spent in development/programming tasks, so let's consider 50% as the average. Let's suppose this technology is applies to 10% of the project, and that it allows me to cut in half (50%) the development time. This means, summit it up, that if the project had 100 days of development, we'd be saving the customer 0.5 * 0.1 * 0.5 * 100 = 2.5 days, or about 2.5% of the total cost of the project. And this is discounting the learning curve, obviously.

This whole rant is related to constant flux of innovations and new technology being made available almost everyday by Microsoft and other vendors ("can't they just stop for a few months?" – sentence I heard recently), and it serves as a kind of reality check. It's important to measure the impact of the technology we choose for our projects, especially if it's new technology. I'm just bundling here for the sake of example, but make sure you have an answer, when a customer asks you what's in it for him when you decide to use Linq, the Entity Framework Asp.Net MVC stuff, WCF/WPF/WF, Windows or Sql 2008, etc.

That said, and since I personally thrive on innovation and breathe new technology :-), I'll make sure I have that answer. It's a different world, out there in "Does IT matter"-land.

By the way: the new technology I mentioned is the BizTalk Adapter Pack.

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• Follow the installation steps as described in this video and blog post. Use the installation manual only for reference. When in doubt, trust the video. And don’t skip any step, or things WILL break later.
• In the above video, there’s a mistake when a Xml segment is pasted to Btsntsvc.exe.config: there’s a “[path]” that should have been replaced with the real path. This will break the Itinerary samples/functionality. Also, note this thread in the ESB discussions (especially the post by user pkelcey) : remove the newlines between the folder and the XML element, or BizTalk will go crazy with restarts.
• The docs mention an hotfix for BizTalk Server 2006 R2: KB943871. This code is wrong. The correct code is KB944532. This is actually an interesting hotfix, because it adds four useful properties to BizTalk’s default fault schema.
• The ESB Guidance is not regional settings agnostic. Everything will work if you have everything installed with English-US, however I had BizTalk’s user running with Portuguese-Portugal. The date formats are different, so no faults showed up in the ESB Management Portal, even if everything seemed to work correctly. To fix this, see this thread.
• Samples: unfortunately, there is no video explaining how to install the samples. You’ll have to follow the docs. Some warnings:
• The MSI’s (“Windows Installer Files”) mentioned don’t actually exist in the package. You’ll always have to follow the “Install the [component] from the Binding File/Solution Project” alternative.
• Be careful not to install the same thing twice (especially when installing the Itineraries/Resolution/Rules parts). The instructions go around themselves and you can be led to install the same thing twice.
• Always manually check the contents of every bat/cmd file the instructions tell you to run. One of the problems I had was with the create user part: my BizTalk installation is local, not in a domain, and the script didn’t create the user nor complained (… “On Error Resume Next” …). The creation of App Pools and Web Sites in general worked correctly, but be careful. I actually preferred to do some steps manually. Oh, and again, be careful to avoid doing the same thing twice.

As a conclusion: I wish the ESB Guidance Package had a much simpler “next-next-next” installation. The package has a lot of great stuff done with care, all the source is available, and I’m sure all the BizTalk developers and architects will find some use for parts, if not all, of it. The installation process and the documentation definitely turns people off, however. When in doubt, check the discussions on CodePlex.

I hope to post more information about the ESB Guidance in the next weeks, and maybe a couple of videos of the demos.

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