Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference - Day 2

Today is day 2 of the conference, which turned out to be better than yesterday. The presentations were great from my point of view. I attended the following four presentations:

Craig McMurty, Technical Evangelist, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft
Windows Communication Foundation: Extensibility in the WCF Service Oriented Development Platform

Craig's presentation was the best of the day in my opinion. He made the point that WCF is a Software Factory for Communication. He went on to explain the WCF messaging process listing the following activities which can be customized:

• WSDL exporter
• Parameter Inspector
• Message Formatter
• Message Inspector
• Encoders
• Channels
• Dispatcher
• Message Inspector
• Operation Selector
• Message Formater
• Parameter Inspector
• Operation Invoker

He went to demonstrate developing a custom Message Formatter and Channel.

Steve Swartz, Architect, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Clemens Vasters, Program Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Connected Systems on Windows: An Introduction

This presentation was a historic look of the evolution of the application server products starting in 1996 with the release of the following products: Windows NT, Microsoft Transaction Server 1.0, ASP 1.0, InterDev 1.0, Visual C++ 5.0, Visual J++ 1.0, Visual Basic 5.0, IIS 3.0, SNA Server 3.0, ADO 1.0, VBScript.

Clemens did a short demonstration of MTS & IIS 3.0.

The presentation went on to address the following topics:

• The Client/Server Wave, followed by the N-Tier Wave to the current Federated Systems Wave (SOA).
• Application Services Evolution (MTS, COM+, Enterprise Services and WCF)
• Communication Technologies Evolution
• Security & Identity Services Evolution (Workgroup, Enterprise, Customers & Partners)

This was followed by brief introductions of Windows CardSpace and WF.

Lee Graber, Developer Lead, BizTalk Core Engine, Microsoft
Advanced Routing & Correlation with BizTalk Orchestrations

Lee gave a 400 level presentation on the covering:

• BizTalk Server Messages and their
• Data Storage Model
• Activating Subscriptions vs Correlating Subscriptions
• Correlation choices
• Convoys

After demonstrating a Resequencer Pattern he went on to discuss Zombies (suspended non-resumable instances with reasons "Completed with discarded messages") and how they are usually generated.

Lee provided the following links as BizTalk resources:

• Convoy Deep Dive - Stephen Thomas
• Kevin Lam's Weblog
• Lee Grabner - BizTalk Core Engine

Steve Swartz, Architect, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Clemens Vasters, Program Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Connected Systems On Windows - Logic, Rules, and Workflows

The main topic of the presentation was interconnected architectural patterns that can be used to develop application solutions:

• Direct connection pattern or also know as N-Tier which is has direct method calls and is highly coupled.
• Indirect connection pattern which has firm decoupling and can have reliable messaging through thread transaction, and example being queues.
• One to many/end to end/subscription pattern which is flexible about number of entities that respond to an event and is the least coupled.

Steve went on to mention that the strategy is to have WCF support all types of patterns and that they there can be a composition of all patterns within applications if needed.
The example mentioned being Outlook:

• Contacts, Notes (n-tier)
• Outbox, Task (queue)
• Inbox, Reminders (pub/sub)

The other main topic discussed was the move from imperative code to declarative code. The main reason being abstraction and moving logic into configurable metadata makes systems more agile and easier to adjust to changing needs.

There'll be more to come tomorrow...