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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do - BF Skinner
Day 4 at the conference and there are some bleary eyed attendees. While the conference has been great so far, I think people are tired and ready to go home. Today's presentations were all good in my opinion:
Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk Web Services: The Next Generation
Aaron pointed out that Service Orientation defines an architectural paradigm for software federation, with federation being the unification of self-governing entities.
Gruia then demonstrated using the WCF adapters to enable transactions and showed some security features using BizTalk Server, including single sign-on capability.
Aaron's final point was that BTS 2006 R2 will provide full WS-* support, custom bindings, flexible hosting & communications.
Aaron Skonnard, Cofounder, Pluralsight
Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Microsoft
BizTalk WCF Adapters: In-Depth
In this session Aaron and Gruia continued showing demos of the new WCF Adapters. There were no slides only the a dive into some real code (I found this refreshing).
The first demonstration showed a client sending a message to BTS through a web service with option to select separate XML versions for the message structure. BizTalk then routed the message to separate versions of the backend application. Version 1 used transport security (which resulted in a smaller message) and version 2 used message security. The BizTalk receive location was a WCF-NetTcp adapter using a custom pipeline to add a custom header to the message header that contains the version (it can also look for differences in actions, namespace, etc). The pipeline promotes the value (needs a property schema), the send port filters on the custom operation and then routes it to the service depending on the version number. It provided a model for versioning using web services.
The second demonstration showed how to build a custom WCF adapter. The binding tab on the adapter allows to pick different binding types (you can install other bindings or even create a custom binding element).
Don Smith, Product Manager, Patterns & Practices, Microsoft
Web Services Software Factory
Don started by speaking about how software factories help you build a specific kind of application (smart client, service, etc). He then went on to speak about the Software Factory that can be downloaded from the Patterns and Practices website. He mentioned that the software factory incorporates a variety of guidance content types and form factors:
Guidance packages provided are:
Don demonstrated the Software Factory by setting up a wine rating service for a winery.
The benefits of using the factory are:
According to Don the next version of the Software Factory with WCF support is set to be released in December 2006. It will include:
Links:
Blog: Don Smith
Patterns & Practices
Web Service Software Factory
Service Factory Community Workspace
The LINQ Project
Paul Andrew, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating Custom Activities for Workflows
The level of the presentation was at an introductory level, covering topics from “What is workflow” to speaking about workflow runtime, and the Base Activity Library (BAL). I’ve listed some points that Paul mentioned:
The demo was a simple console workflow that showed how to build custom activities. Paul added a Validator and a Designer to the activity. What I had not seen before was the effect of the designer which changed the way that the workflow was presented in the Visual Studio workflow designer. It is a great way to develop a set of activities that are going to be used by your organization and providing a different look for them. In fact you can go as far as categorizing activities by their function and giving a different look to each one, similar to the way that functoids are colour coded in BizTalk. Different information can be added to the activity as well.
Blog: Paul Andrew
Eilene Hao, Program Manager, Office Shared Services, Microsoft
Windows Workflow Foundation: Developing Office 2007 Workflows in Visual Studio 2005
Eilene’s presentation was mostly a walkthrough demonstration of how to build a workflow for SharePoint using Visual Studio and InfoPath 2007.
Recommended downloads for developing workflows:
The five steps used to build these workflows are:
Her development recommendation was that to develop on the server, either virtual machine environment or on an actual server box.
Steve Swartz, Architect, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Clemens Vasters, Program Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Presentation
There main objectives for the presentation were:
Chandramouli Venkatesh, Group Manager, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Adapter Framework - Walkthrough
This was, in my opinion, the best presentation yet. Chandramouli provided a walkthrough of the Adapter Framework (AF). The main points were that there is no unified adapter development framework for .Net and that adapters today are built to be specific to each of the consuming hosts like BTS, MIIS.
The goal of the AF is to enable easy development of high quality, metadata driven, host-agnostic, custom adpapters to LOBs. The idea is for them to extend WCF and to make the adapters consumption exactly same as other WCF adapters.
The benefits will be that it will:
Chandramouli went on to demonstrate using the SAP adapter from Visual Studio 2005 and from a BizTalk Orchestration. He also demonstrated using the “.Net 3.0 Adapter Development Wizard” to develop a custom adapter. Note: he mentioned that the wizard name may still change prior to release.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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...