November 2007 - Posts
Yesterday, we've had our annual non-Tech-Ed Developer event in Airport City.
We are continuing the momentum of last year with the great brand of Developer's Academy.
By this we mean that people are coming mostly to learn and less to hear about marketing and this is what we tried to do yesterday.
The event was amazing this year, 5 parallel tracks on the current and new technologies also focusing on the goodies of Visual Studio 2008 which is already here, btw.
I had the pleasure of presenting my talk about the matrix which talks about modeling tools that Microsoft is delivering today and tomorrow mostly focusing on VSTS Arch Edition 2008 and the DSL Tools with demos where we took the hats of the architects of the Matrix trying to develop with models a version for the Matrix which includes agent software like agent Smith from the movie.
If you haven't had the time to see it, the videos will come soon, although I presented it also in Finland a month and a half ago so you can watch the video from here.
Here are some pictures of me presenting, that Yosi Taguri already uploaded to FaceBook:
I am also presenting The Matrix! Powered by Microsoft Modeling Framework, a cool presentation about the Modeling Tools in Visual Studio and the DSL Tools.
I was really amazed by the amount of customers and partners who joined me to the SOA Conference in Redmond. We've had people from the Government, Post Office, Nice, Elbit, Astea, PNMSoft, Sela University, SRL, Experts4D, Benefit SI and two of us from Microsoft - Myself and Dmitry Khait.
It was a great experience for everyone to hear about Oslo, Microsoft's ESB, Methodologies and more in the conference that took place in Microsoft's Campus in Redmond Seattle. The conference officially started at October 29th at a welcome reception in a billiard club where I had the chance of discovering that the of my customers who never played in their lives are showing a lot of beginner's luck.
Then, 4 days of SOA sessions began.The conference was interesting and the sessions created many opportunities that we are now working on in Israel with the customers who attended.
But for once, I want to tell that there were also other things we did in addition to attending the sessions.
Here are some that the customers enjoyed the most:
Dinner for Israel's Customers and Partners
All the Israeli attendees accepted my invitation to one of the best restaurants on the top floor of the highest building in Bellevue - Daniel Broiler's. Shy Cohen and Ofer Ashkenazi (from Microsoft's Connected Systems Division) organized people from Redmond who came to dinner on the evening of Halloween to hear what our customer's feedbacks. We got the private dining room and people were really impressed by the quality of food, wine and discussions they had between themselves and with Microsoft's Redmond teams.
Pre-Summit Trip to Mount Rainier
We came there as most of our customers a day before, so we had an entire morning plus an afternoon before the conference. So, what did we do? Dmitry organized a trip to Mount Rainier and we invited the Israelis who came with us to the Mountain. This was one of the best trips I have done in my life, doing a trek in the snow, watching squirrels chasing each other in loops around a tree and going to the Snoqualmee waterfalls were just part of the great experiences we had that day.
Just one tip, cellular phones do not work through the entire natinal park area.
NBA Season Opening with Seattle Super Sonics an the Phoenix Suns
Ariel Itzhaki from Benefit came with this idea to go to an NBA game on the third evening which was free. So, instead of going to eat like we could usually do, we decided to look for tickets. At the end there were 6 of us who decided to go to the game and really went there. The prices in the website varied from 53$ and even up to 2000$$$!!!!
But, we managed to buy six tickets at the entrance from someone who sold them for 15$ each. That's all.
It was worth every dollar :-)
Last week, on the Microsoft's SOA and BPM Summit in Redmond, me and more than 1000 people had the chance of hearing Microsoft's announcement for the next generation of SOA code-named "Oslo".
This is cool stuff and I kind of hoped that more information will be revealed in the conference.
However, most of the conference focused on the current set of innovations for SOA which kind of makes sense.
Customers who attended the conference wanted to hear about what they can do tomorrow and not in a few years.
You can read more about it in the Directions Article on Oslo.
Here are some details that were released that I can share:
What Is “Oslo”? What Are the Product and Technology Components That Will Be Delivered?
“Oslo” is the latest in a series of long-term investments in SOA and business process management (BPM) technologies that enable the development of distributed applications.
There are five primary areas of investment targeted by “Oslo” development efforts:
- Framework. The .NET Framework “4” release will make further investments in model-driven development as part of our WCF and Workflow Foundation (WF) technologies. This will be the logical successor to the .NET Framework 3.5 release happening later this calendar year.
- Server. This release will continue to evolve BizTalk family of products as the distributed platform for highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions. BizTalk Server “6” will build deeply on top of both WCF and WF as its core foundation, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.
- Services. Extending the early BizTalk Services incubation (currently available at http://labs.biztalk.net), the BizTalk Services “1” release will deliver a commercial release of hosted services that enable cross-organizational composite application scenarios. This includes expanded capabilities around hosted messaging, identity and workflow capabilities.
- Tools. These investments will advance the application life-cycle management capabilities of Visual Studio Team System and provide support for an expanded range of roles. Furthermore, Visual Studio “10” will provide deep support for model-driven design and deployment of composite applications.
- Repository. There will also be investments aligning the metadata repositories across the Server & Tools Business products. System Center “5,” Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a common repository technology for managing, versioning and deploying models.
I wish I could share more, but you can read between the lines and learn quite a lot.
After all of these come true, our customers will be very very happy and so will I.
Diego Dagum, my friend, and the Architect from Redmond responsible for the MSDN Architecture site has uploaded my ESB/SOA/S+S talk to the MSDN Architecture site - "A walkthrough towards SOA and S+S"
The recording is from Finland.
I encourage you to go to this link and see the meat behind the buzzwords and how they can be implemented in organizations today.
This is the site screenshot as of November 10th, 2007:
I’m pleased to announce the final release of the Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance for BizTalk Server 2006 R2!
“The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, frameworks, reusable components and samples for BizTalk Server R2 to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions.
The Microsoft ESB Guidance results from the successful collaboration between the Connected Systems Division and Patterns and Practices within Microsoft and is intended to empower customers to develop more policy driven, governed applications on the BizTalk platform. The Guidance provides new exception mediation, analytics, registry provisioning as well dynamic messaging and process options to the BizTalk platform. Combined, these features allow customers to lower their overall cost of implementation as well as enable them to build more agile and dynamic solutions that can more easily accommodate business changes over time.
The Microsoft ESB Guidance extends the functionality of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to provide a range of new capabilities focused on building robust, connected, service-oriented applications. The following are some of the core capabilities that the ESB Guidance provides to enhance BizTalk Server 2006 R2:
- Policy driven mediation:
- Itinerary-based service invocation that supports lightweight service composition at the time of message publication. The Itinerary mechanism dynamically resolves service endpoints and mediation requirements, and routes messages using any resolver that ships with the Guidance. This approach allows developers to implement loosely coupled patterns such as VETO/VETRO.
- Provides dynamic resolution of endpoints and maps using the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework. This supports dynamic resolution of endpoints and transformation requirements, as well as providing custom configuration to services, effectively decoupling the consumer from the services.
- Exception Management Framework for unified exception handling, mediation and reporting.
- Connecting systems:
- Performs namespace normalization of messages.
- Provides IBM JMS/WMQ connectivity.
- Supports messaging patterns that enable dynamic service aggregation, message routing, message validation, and message transformation.
- Incorporates service registry and repository integration using UDDI and WS-MetadataExchange.
- Management and monitoring:
Includes the ESB Management Portal that provides: - Exception mediation and fault management.
- Message repair and resubmission.
- Exception notification and alert engine enabling user/group subscriptions.
- BizTalk endpoint and registry integration, management, and publication. Support auto publication from the BizTalk Administration Console
- Reporting and analytics for exceptions, alerts, subscriptions and registrations.
- Basic auditing on message saves, edits and resubmits
- SOA governance:
- Provides integrated SOA governance solutions developed by AmberPoint and SOA Software.
Get it from here.