Code Camp - Fullerton

Another code camp. The fourth one in Fullerton. It's great to be a part of the community. This year Azure was the hot topic (big surprise there). Cloud computing is interesting, however it seems at this stage people are spending more time clearing the cloud.

I presented Service Oriented Grid Applications and An Introduction to the CCR/DSS.

http://www.socalcodecamp.com/download.aspx?id=bfbd7a6c-1f46-42d5-80e5-29a699c31f9f

Silverlight vs WPF

I was wondering if someone could articulate the differences between Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the scenarios where one would be preferred the other?

Code Camp - San Diego

This year I made it to the Pre-Code Camp Dinner. It was great meeting fellow contributors and technology enthusiasts. On Sunday, I'll be speaking on Business Rules Engines . See you there.

Service Infrastructure

A good infrastructure is key to a successful SOA implementation. So what exactly is infrastructure? Infrastructure typically refers to the functional and non functional requirements of a service that are not a part of the business logic itself. In other words features such as brokered communication, mediation, security, administration and monitoring all qualify as infrastructure. The infrastructure may also be responsible for providing transaction management, resource management, provisioning, etc.

So how much infrastructure do we need? The answer: It depends. It's like asking how many features are needed before we ship a version of a product. The answer: It depends. Some features are crucial while others are nice to have. There are many factors to consider before investing in infrastructure. Remember the purpose of technology is to help the business profit ^[1]. One of the biggest considerations is build vs buy. I will cover the build vs buy debate in a future blog.

What is available from Microsoft? Microsoft currently has the .Net Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 8 and BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and is investing some of the top engineering talent in its OSLO initiative. Microsoft WCF is definitely a major leap in technology for building distributed applications on the Windows platform. However it's not immune to any poor design choices employed by a SOA practitioner.

When building SOA applications a good design discipline is separating infrastructure components from business/application components. It sounds like a no-brainer, but believe me I have seen many implementations that muddy the waters by not separating them. Keeping them separate allows for the infrastructure and business logic to change at different rates.

In my next blog, I will present a reference architecture and discuss service invocation. Cheers!

Service Interface Design

I define a “service” as logical grouping of discrete components you interact with via message exchanges. When building services employing an interface that exposes any native object schema nails you to a specific language set. (at least on the implementation side of things). The goal should be create a universally accessible messaging apparatus that permits a service to process requests irrespective of its language base. The best approach is to allow publishers and consumers of the message to work with their own view of a request.

In a pure messaging model, a message should be self describing which means you can't possibly know what the contents are until you get it. Upon receipt the message is analyzed and processed in context. An intermediate layer can mediate the request if needed.

The Verdit. - “String In – String Out”.

Notice that I didn't say XML in - XML out. XML could be the structure but the fact that the format is XML is happenstance.