Santosh Benjamin

DAY 4 - Of Horses and Service Orientation

Did you like the title? Sound mysterious? Don't worry. Just read on and all will be revealed.

So here I am at home on Sunday evening, thinking back to the events of Friday and the sessions. Here are the details.

SOA and OOAD - Grey Area: This was an absolute thriller! Maarten Mullender and Beat Schwegler did a great job of explaining how to go about understanding the grey area of SOA just at the edge of the services. While the internal implementation can be OO, there are very good reasons to be ultra careful about the edge and the service interface. They demonstrated the kind of namespace issues that arise when you pass around objects and how to influence the WSDL generation by using the right types of attributes on the classes. Beat demonstrated the WSDL first approach to building the system. Of course, it isnt the rule. Designing the classes first and allowing the tool to generate the WSDL works for a lot of systems, but in the interests of interoperability you need to work on the WSDL a little more. Looking at it like that , the WSDL-First approach seems better in some areas.  Anyway, I want to blog this issue in more detail so I'll stop with this for now. Suffice to say I had a good long chat with Maarten after the session and in the lunch break (at the Ask the Experts booth) and he said that he was planning to put this up on a whitepaper shortly on MSDN. He also said that there would be one shortly published on Concurrency in WebServices and why CRUD approaches to WS is not a good thing.

BAM, BAM thank you Ma'am: Oh dear, got a little carried away didnt I? Alex Cobb took a heavy duty session on BAM stuff. It was very deep. He spoke a lot about the Progressive Dimension bit and lots of other things. Need to go and find the BTS documentation and go over it again.

The WHITE Horse: Maybe its just me, but I finally saw the light. Steve Cook closed out the conference with a talk on building SO applications and demonstrated aspects of DSL's and the Whidbey Team Architect. I cant for the life of me understand why he didnt show this for at least 5 mins in the keynote. In fact I told him so after the session. I missed all Prashant's talks on the Whidbey system since for one I was focussing more on BTS and secondly because Whidbey aint gonna be out for another year at least (hopefully sooner). Imagine my surprise when i saw the Application Connection Designer and the Logical DataCenter tool.

Just before he got to those specific things I was thinking how nice it would be to have a executable Visio template that built an entire solution structure with projects, bolier plate code, setup projects etc using standard patterns as well as points from Juval Lowy's talk, and lo and behold in the next few minutes he proceeded to demonstrate just that, or at least something quite like it. I'll blog this aspect in more detail later. This was waaay cool and i left the conference feeling really excited.

Now all I need is a spare machine in the office thats big enough to load WHIDBEY and YUKON and i'll be all set to work with a great set of tools. Way to go Microsoft!!