|
|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » Connected Systems (RSS)
-
Welcome to the 11th article in the series. In this article, I will take a broad detour from the abstract into the concrete with WCF. The title of this article is "Introduction to WCF: Architecture and the "ABCs" of Indigo." BTW, I have been in the Indigo SDR program for over 4 years and the term Indigo has stuck in my mind, so I will use the terms interchangeably. Plus, as I think Don Box said in a presentation, It's spelled W-C-F and pronounced Indigo. The WCF is silent." :) Hello Indigo Step by Step I am going to show you WCF step by step and make it as easy as possible. To that end, I am put both the Sender and Receiver in the same console application and I am not going to use either generated proxies or config files. You would never do this in the real world, but it makes it easy to describe the "ABCs" of WCF. So, let's start with a shell console application that should be totally familiar to you. Run VS2008 and Create a new C# Console application and replace the code with the following. using System; using System.ServiceModel; namespace HelloIndigo { class Program { static void Main() { } } } A Service is a Set of Endpoints A WCF service is a set of endpoints that provide Read More...
|
-
This is the 10th article in the series. I should mention that much of the series so far has been geared at a high level and strategic focus for IT Decision Makers rather than for those writing code. This is deliberate as much of SOA is an "Enterprise IT" activity. There has been a fair amount geared towards Architects as well. That will change as I get into Indigo, but today's topic is again a strategic one. Given that we have looked at the current state of SOA, how to make the paradigm shift and SOA design approaches, we are now faced with the questions of what should I do "Short Term" and what investments should I make "Long Term." As a reminder, the series so far is: Symptoms of a Problem, Diagnosis and Why SOA? Dynamic IT to Support the Agile Business and Business Benefits of SOA What is Service Orientation? What is SOA? The Many Definitions, a Working Definition, the Four Tenets What is a Service? The Four Tenets of SOA Service Architectural Patterns The Current State of SOA and How to Make the Paradigm Shift Realization of SOA with Web Services, Web Services Standards, 1st Gen and 2nd Gen, Web standards Microsoft IO SOA Design Approaches: The "Middle Out" Approach As we went along, I talked about the need to build a Capability Driven strategy, as IT needed to become more in sync with the needs of the business, and the capabilities that the business offers. I talked about ensuring that SOA is part of the implementation in current Read More...
|
-
This is 9th of a series. I haven’t really received much feedback. Please let me know if this is useful, if posts too long, too abstract, your thoughts. Symptoms of a Problem, Diagnosis and Why SOA? Dynamic IT to Support the Agile Business and Business Benefits of SOA What is Service Orientation? What is SOA? The Many Definitions, a Working Definition, the Four Tenets What is a Service? The Four Tenets of SOA Service Architectural Patterns The Current State of SOA and How to Make the Paradigm Shift Realization of SOA with Web Services, Web Services Standards, 1st Gen and 2nd Gen, Web standards Microsoft IO What SOA Design Approach Should I Take? Now, that we have gone broad and general across IT, we need to look at at a Design Approach for Identifying, Designing and Building Services. Should we go Top-Down or Bottom Up? The answer is neither or actually a combination of both together with Agile techniques. Nick Malik had a couple of landmark posts that influenced a lot of thinking, especially mine in the whole approach of SOA. The first was “Bottom-Up SOA is harmful and should be discouraged,” where he laid out the three kinds of SOA: “There are three schools of thought around "how to build an Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture." They are: Top down - central group decides everything and the dev teams adopt them. Bottom up - central group provides a directory and dev teams make whatever services they want. Dev teams go to the directory to find services Read More...
|
-
Along with my series , I have a New and Notable. I have pretty much abandoned N&N in favor of writing original content, especially since Jason and Alvin, among others, are doing such a great job. However, these links go well with the series. SOA/WCF So the biggest news is the beta publication of the patterns & practices WCF Security Guide. You can download the beta of the full security guide from CodePlex now. I can’t say enough good things about this. I did get to look at some of this in draft form and it’s am amazing work. The thing with WCF is that it supports to many security scenarios that it quickly becomes overwhelming. This real-world scenario based guide is an absolute must-have if you work with WCF, and you will after reading my series right? My good friend Nicholas Allen, from the Indigo team, wrote the Introduction The Managed Services Engine is a solution built on top of WCF to supply a repository-based runtime and management tool for service virtualization. You can get their new June CTP on CodePlex , which replaces the previous beta release from last October. [via Nick ] I am doing a lot of work lately with the WCF Untyped Message class, and the underlying Transport and Channels, which I will be writing about. Christian has a nice short post about Accessing the message inside of your WCF service In that same area, Nick has a post about Building with Encoders And speaking of the series, my colleague in the Connected Systems practice writes Why do SOA projects Read More...
|
-
In this episode, I get to define SOA, instantly coming into conflict with just about everyone who has ever defined it :). Right. Onward. First and foremost, Service-Oriented Architecture is an architectural style, not a framework. It's a design model, it's a way of thinking . I like to say it's not something you can buy or run a wizard for. I would also say that it is a Design model with a very strong emphasis on encapsulating application logic within Services that interact via a common communications protocol. Then there is the business aspect of SOA which I think is extremely important and relevant to the definition. I said, back here , some of this which I will repeat, " any definition of SOA must encompass the business drivers and business reasons, as SOA is not really about technology. It is about a better alignment of business and IT through business processes and services . The goal is to create a dynamic, more Agile and Dynamic IT that can respond quickly to new business opportunities and threats by quickly assembling new capabilities from putting together composite applications (and even Mash-ups) from reusable business services. Heck, people have been arguing about this definition for years, including me . I like this definition [1] "SOA establishes an architectural model that aims to embrace the efficiency, agility, and productivity of an enterprise by positioning services as the primary means through which solution logic is represented in support Read More...
|
-
So what have I been doing? Lots of things! I gave Advanced WCF talks in Lehigh Valley and Northern Delaware . The message of EDA is starting to resonate with folks who want their communications infrastructure to be taken care of and want to focus on Event Driven communications (i.e. Purchase Order event published by Order system and subscribed by Microsoft CRM and GP) and not having to write that Raw WCF code anymore. Basic Pub/Sub is 470 lines of code in the WCF sample. It is 3 lines in Neuron (or probably any event-driven bus). It doesn't make business sense in an Agile world to spend all your time writing infrastructure code instead of delivering business value stories. I have also been doing a lot of work out of the Microsoft Reston MTC where I met a new friend, Matt Podwysocki, who also works there, and I met via Twitter. Great guy who feels very passionately about ALT.NET and making positive contributions. At Reston, I helped Microsoft open up their new SOA Resource Center . If you are a Microsoft customer struggling with SOA and making it deliver real business value rather than hype, come bring your problems to the MTC and we'll help you. There is a great bunch of folks there. I also worked on an "ESB Study" for a branch of the military where us (Microsoft) used an ESB for a couple of months together with folks from BEA Web Logic and Cape Clear, culminating in a cross-vendor ESB demo which was a blast. Made some great new friends with our "competitors." Read More...
|
-
So three people in a row have asked for WCF Tips and Gotchas. We as the WCF/Connected Systems and Neuron teams have posted these on Dave Pallman's blog , our Neuron Architect. Collectively we have over 20 years of WCF experience including Indigo team members David and Marty Waznicki. So, to repeat and condense September 25 WCF Tips #1 - Service Interface Design David Pallmann’s WCF Tips #1 - Service Interface Design Service Interface Design Design Service Contracts that are Themed and Indivisible Tip: Ensure service contracts have a theme (purpose). Avoid combining unrelated service operations in the same contract; only include operations that contribute to the theme. This is also a SOA best practice. Rationale: A service interface is supposed to be indivisible—that’s why we use the word contract . If a service contract has a purpose or theme and all of the operations in the contract contribute to that theme, the contract design is likely to be strong and survive. In contrast, throwing many unrelated operations into the same service contract under a weak premise, such as “all the public services my company exposes to partners”, is not likely to stand the test of time. What if I Don’t? The longevity of your service contracts may be compromised. Examples: · A bad example is a service whose theme is “Data Access”: this is far too vague a purpose for a service and invites Read More...
|
-
For the NuCon events we have been running with Microsoft to launch the 2008 Launch Wave, we have been giving out these Neudesic/Microsoft shirts that, IMHO, are really cool - they have this cool timeline on the back on how we see we got to here and shows a lot of the things we focus on (i.e. We use Agile/Scrum methodologies exclusively to run our projects): Simula 67 '67 Pascal '70 Internet Goes Public '92 SQL Server 4.21 Shipped '92 Scrum Created '93 SOA Coined '96 MS Released OLAP Services '98 EAI Coined '99 C# Announced '00 Web Services Coined '00 WSDL 1.0 Spec. '00 SOAP 1.1 Spec. '00 SQL Server Released '00 Neudesic Formed '01 Agile Manifesto '01 ESB Coined '02 "Indigo" Available '03 WS-Security 1.0 Spec '04 Neuron Conceived '05 .NET 3.0 RTM '06 LINQ Announced '05 C# 3.0 RTM '07 .NET 3.5 RTM '07 SOAP 1.2 Spec. '07 Neuron RTM '07 SQL Server 2008 '08 Technorati Tags: Microsoft , Neudesic , Web Services , SQL Server , LINQ , .NET Framework 3.5 , Neuron Read More...
|
-
I am stepping back into my INETA gigs and have the following dates confirmed: March 17, 2008 Lehigh Valley .NET March 27, 2008 Northern Delaware .Net User Group April 2, 2008 NuCon 08 with Microsoft, SetFocus May 20, 2008 Central Pennsylvania .NET Users Group August 26, 2008 Capital Area .NET Users Group Technorati Tags: INETA , Sam Gentile , Microsoft MVP , Connected Systems , Microsoft IO , WCF Read More...
|
-
We are running our developer conference again three times this year. This is all on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 technologies you need in order to be productive like LINQ, Silverlight, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF, and SQL Server 2008. I will be speaking at the NYC event on Real World SOA, WCF and WF. When Thursday, February 21st, 2008 8:30am-5:00pm Breakfast and lunch will be provided Where New York Marriott East Side 525 Lexington Ave. at 49th St. New York, NY 10017 [see map] Cost $75 per person Includes sessions, attendee bag, t-shirt, breakfast, lunch, and raffle tickets <>Break </> Three Tracks: Visual Studio 2008 SQL 2008 IO 9:45a -11:00a Session 1 LINQ The upcoming release of Visual Studio 2008 includes significant updates to the Visual Basic and C# languages. The most significant of these enhancements is Language Integrated Query (LINQ), which adds general-purpose query syntax to the Visual Basic and C# languages. Using LINQ, you can query collections, databases, and XML content using a clear and consistent syntax. This talk will describe LINQ, including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, and LINQ to Objects. We’ll also spend some time on some fundamental changes to C# that enable LINQ, such as anonymous types, extension methods, and Lambda expressions. Presented by: Mickey Williams, Technical Director, Neudesic Enterprise Data Platform Microsoft has cast a new vision for data management. They are looking to harness, secure, and keep available all Read More...
|
-
I haven't found much in the last 5 days that is New and Notable but here is a few items of interest. BizTalk Server/Connected Systems/WCF/CSD/WF Our own Brian Loesgen did a presentation on a deck that he had been circulating internally (it is cool to work with these people in our Connected Systems!) on BizTalk Best Practices. He did this for attended the Connected Systems SIG meeting of the San Diego .NET User Group . Check out the post for links as well! Dr. Nick outlines What's New in Orcas from the CSD standpoint Sharepoint Here's a neat post on integrating Virtual Earth Maps into Sharepoint . I am working on a project that uses Neuron to connect up various Legacy Web Services between disparate systems and potentially does positioning via Virtual Earth maps in Sharepoint so this is timely Software Development/C++ Microsoft launched the Windows SDK MSDN Developer Center Soma announces the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack with support for the few still stuck with native libraries Other link blogs (via Jason ) Jason - Interesting Finds Jan 8, 2008 Matt - 23 Links Today (2008-01-07) Alvin Ashcraft - Daily Bits - January 8, 2008 Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #119 and WWD Coffee Break - Search, Disposable Email & A Bad Day Christopher Steen - Link Listing - January 7, 2008 Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for January 7, 2008 Technorati Tags: Neudesic , BizTalk , BizTalk Server , CSD , Connected Systems , Sharepoint , WCF , WF , Software Development , C++ Read More...
|
-
A reminder for those in the area is that I will be doing an Advanced WCF talk at Philly Code Camp 2008.1 will be held on Saturday, January 12th at DeVry University in Fort Washington, PA . We have 8 tracks and 48 sessions!! It's all sold out but at least I know one guy who is looking forward to hearing me speak :) Neudesic is a Gold Sponsor again. Please come see our booth and talk to us. Not only do we want to be active in the local community but we also want to talk to developers that want to join our fast growing team! Title : Advanced WCF: Asynchronous Messaging and Event-Driven Architectures Abstract: Many WCF developers start and end with the Request/Response Message Exchange Pattern. In actuality, there is a wide variety of Message Exchange Patterns cataloged by Hohpe and Woolfe in books like “Enterprise Integration Patterns” and Pattern & Practices “Integration Patterns.” In this advanced talk, that starts where most WCF talks leave off, we will show you how to build more loosely-coupled services and systems via these MEPs and with WCF. We will then focus on the powerful List-Based Publish/Subscribe Design Pattern. Upon showing how many lines of WCF code are required to implement the pattern in WCF, we will show the pattern as the basis for the Neuron ESB and achieve the same results with zero code. We will then focus on Mediation and how ESBs help mediate between disparate services. Bio: Sam Gentile is the SOA Practice Lead for Neudesic, Read More...
|
-
I want to thank the Microsoft folks for a fourth consecutive MVP award. This year I switched over to Connected Systems, which more accurately reflects my community service. Technorati Tags: Sam Gentile , MVP , Microsoft MVP , Connected Systems , WCF , Neudesic Read More...
|
-
My colleague, Brian already wrote about the Neuron team growth and openings, but I wanted to add my bits, as both a Neuron user/consumer and influencer/developer. As the SOA Practice Lead in Neudesic, I have been exposed to many areas of the Microsoft technology stack and their use in SOA and other Connected Systems in companies ranging from SMB's to large Fortune 100 accounts. One of the things I see, more and more is it takes a lot of effort to take the raw .NET Framework 3.0/3.5 and make them function in an SOA. I have seen a large upswing in using Neuron to enable WCF and WF. In other words, companies are very interested in not having to take 6 months and write pieces of a Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) with the raw WCF bits. I am using Neuron myself in several projects and I continue to be blown away by the continued innovation that comes from the team! 2007 was a banner year for Neuron and now we are staffing aggressively in order to help us develop a world class ESB product. As Brian pointed out , Neuron is a pure Microsoft ESB, built from the ground up on WCF. We are looking for some highly talented engineers to come on board and make it even better! And yes, you would be working for the one and only Marty Wasznicky, who, as I posted here , joined Neudesic as VP Product Development for Neuron. The positions are in Irvine CA only. If you are interested, please drop me a note, or through this blog. Senior Software Design Engineer (SDE) Are you a senior SDE looking Read More...
|
-
BizTalk Services This is one way to find out that the BizTalk Services hosted at http://biztalk.net have been updated :) WCF/Web Service Software Factory/Oslo/Neudesic I really love the new Web Services Software Factory and the Contract Modeling capabilities. They just recently released the WCF Security Guidance Package which automates applying security settings and guidance. After the last four years with Indigo, it is really the security that is the toughest part, simply because there are *so* many options to choose from. This really helps. Pablo has a nice post on WCF Dependency Injection Marty makes it official After almost 3 years of the one talk SOA with WCF that I have been doing (its been changed every time though), I am going for a very deep, advanced WCF talk on Pub-Sub and advanced MEP concepts and then showing how to get that advanced capability out of the box with our Neuron ESB at the upcoming Philly Code Camp . I am going to leap in at the place my other talks have ended and spend a lot more time on what you can achieve with WCF. I'm happy to announce that again, Neudesic will be a Gold Sponsor at the event UX Speaking of us, UX is one of our up and coming Practices and they recently impressed at the Phizzpop Design Challenge in Austin. Josh Holmes had this to say, " Neudesic actually worked out of the room that I was hanging out at to be available the entire time. They had three team members, two devs and a pure designer. It was great to watch how Read More...
|
|
|
|