David Pallmann's Blog

SOA/WCF talks at San Diego Code Camp

david.pallmann — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:24:00 GMT

I meant to post this before the event but neglected to. Over the weekend I spoke on SOA and WCF at the San Diego Rock and Roll Code Camp held at the UCSD extension in La Jolla, CA (http://www.socalcodecamp.com/).

I participated in 5 sessions with my esteemed Neudesic colleague Chris Rolon:

SOA - first principles, benefits, and best practices
Introduction to WCF - full tour of capabilities and many code demos
WCF Deep Dive - here Chris and I just build anything the group wants in an hour
WCF Design Patterns - survey of popular design patterns (mostly Gregor Hohpe's) and how you would implement them using WCF

I've given these talks before, but they continue to get more and more refined over time. I'm also starting to work the ESB concept into these talks, as I believe it's the ESB that puts the A in SOA and makes large collections of autonomous services manageable.

The WCF Deep Dive is always very interesting. Chris and I just ask the room what they want to build--absolutely anything--and we try to pull it off on an hour. When we did this at Desert Code Camp a month or so ago in Phoenix, we built a service and client that did business oriented work, submitting purchase orders. This time, the room wanted to see security at work, including determining the Windows identity of a client and limiting some service methods to users with specific authorizations. Not a problem, since Chris is Mr. Security at Neudesic, but we did have to scramble a bit to remember the fine details of setting security properties in code and config. It's always a little challenging to "fly without a net" like this, but it's a really good way to make sure we know our subject matter well. And, it's fun.

CD Recording

david.pallmann — Sat, 27 May 2006 05:26:00 GMT

This week I did something new and interesting: I recorded my first music CD. No, it's not David Pallmann solo or anything like that. My wife and I are part of a very dynamic church choir which numbers 40-60 people depending what time of year it is. Our director is very gifted, works us hard, and we perform concerts 4 or 5 times a year. We sing many different kinds of music, from hymns to modern music. The CD we just recorded is Gospel music.

So what's it like to record a CD? Everyone wears headphones, so they can hear the accompaniment without it clouding the vocal tracks that are being recorded. Obviosuly you have to work hard to sound your best and suffer through many takes of each piece. As with live concerts, you have to avoid making unwanted noise such as loud page turning. And this might be surprising, but an important consideration is movement. Our director believes you have to be moving and smiling to really do justice to music, and that this comes through on a recording and makes a big difference in the final result. From what I've seen (er, heard) he's right, it's a night and day difference.

Weighing in on SOA

david.pallmann — Thu, 25 May 2006 08:33:00 GMT

I first wrote about service orientation in the opening chapters of Programming Indigo, where I dutifully enumerated Don Box's 4 tenets and explained them in the context of WCF application programming. That was a whole year ago, and there have been many SOA developments since. I've found myself immersed in many service oriented customer projects and I also regularly present on SOA and WCF at code camps and other events around the country. So it's time to start blogging my thoughts on SOA. To kick it off, I'll give you my opinion about where SOA is today.

First, let's dispense of the silly SO vs. SOA acronym argument. Some folks don't feel the term 'architecture' is justified, others do. Why is that? If I may, I'd like to remind everyone that there's a lot of disagreement on what 'architecture' is. If the word architecture makes you think of something very defined and standardized, like an OSI network stack, then I understand your hesitancy because we don't have a general architecture (noun) like that for service orientation yet. But service orientation is certainly an architectural consideration, and an important one at that; any time I architect an enterprise solution I begin by figuring out the boundaries of communication, security, etc. So I personally find the term Service Oriented Architecture perfectly appropriate. Ultimately, I think SOA will win over SO if for no other reason that it's the more catchy acronym.

How far can we advance SOA when it's still the subject of much debate? I liken SOA to a hurricane. Sure, there's a lot of chaos at the edges as debates rage on, both technically and politically motivated. But in the eye of the storm there is calm, because there is general agreement on the spirit of SOA: message-based communication, loose coupling, autonomy of services. SOA is young and will continue to be refined, but it's real enough to talk about meaningfully and put into practice.

To make SOA real and practical for people, we have to go beyond the 4 tenets. At Neudesic, we've been doing a lot of thinking about all things SOA. One very interesting group exercise we went through was to collectively list everything we could think of related to SOA, then categorize the items into first principles, benefits, and best practices. This was very illuminating, and also very surprising. I expected many arguments to arise as part of the process; instead, there was a great deal of consensus and only occasional differences of opinion. I'll share our findings on this in a separate article in the near future.

One recent development that shows SOA is progressing is William Oellermann's Enterprise Service Oriented Maturity Model (ESOMM). ESOMM describes stages an enterprise can go through to more deeply embrace SOA. At the onset, enterprises have casual hosting or consumption of services. By the final stage, enterprise are aggregating and orchestrating services in sophisticated ways.

One thing that's become very clear about SOA is that in an enterprise setting customers need a central way to configure, monitor, and manage those decentralzed services. Enter the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which provides just those capabilities. I'm skeptical enterprises will move beyond fringe use of services unless they have the centralized control (or the illusion thereof) an ESB provides. I'm doing a lot of ESB work and will have more to share about that in the future as well.

WCF is obviously a great technology for SOA work, as it was designed with service orientation in mind. As good as WCF is, we could wish for a few more SOA features going forward. Discovery of services, so we no longer need to have addresses in our code or config files. Publish-Subscribe communication over topics. Dynamic reconfiguration of running services. Perhaps we'll see some of these in subsequent versions. If not, the good news is you can build these things yourself here and now without too much trouble on top of WCF.

Speaking on WCF at Desert Code Camp May 6

david.pallmann — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 09:33:00 GMT

The Phoenix-Tempe (AZ) area is hosting a Desert Code Camp on May 6th. I'll be giving 4 presentations, 2 of them with Chris Rolon:

Service Orientation / SOA (Pallmann)
Introduction to WCF (Rolon and Pallmann)
WCF Design Patterns (Pallmann)
WCF Deep Dive (Rolon and Pallmann)

To sign up, visit http://www.desertcodecamp.com

SCRUM, Agile Methodologies, and Change

david.pallmann — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:46:00 GMT

I've just had some training on SCRUM and Agile methodologies. Of course I've read about Agile and XP for several years now, but now I'm being invited to really dive in and apply these concepts more formally to future projects. If you want to get a quick feel for philosophy, read the Agile Manifesto. About half of what I heard are things I think I'm already doing with project teams: be adaptive and flexible, perform iterative development, deliver working software early, work off a backlog list, be willing to do architecture and design and use cases and requirements gathering somewhat in parallel when necessary, don't be afraid to throw away code, and so forth. The big driving idea here seems to be that there is going to be a lot of change, more than anybody expects, in any project--so treat change as a big part of the job, not as a nuisance or something to be avoided.

Which leads me to change, and our attitude toward it. Most programmers seem to resent change, mostly perhaps becuase it means discarding hard work and starting over at times. I have long maintained that there are 4 stages to programmer maturity:

The 4 Stages of Programmer Maturity

1. Resist Change.
2. Tolerate Change.
3. Expect Change.
4. Embrace Change.

That's right, embrace change. It's a chance to do things better. Do you remember early in your career, when you finished your first or second really large project? If you're like me, you wished you could do it all over again, because now you could do an even better job. Somewhere over the years, programmers get jaded and prickly about change. Instead, when we get a massive change request we should think of it as an opportunity to do something even better. When we have to throw away code, we shouldn't think of it as a wasted effort: the code may be discarded but it still pays dividends as a stepping stone to refinement of the solution you are building.

WCF Presentation from Southern California Code Camp

david.pallmann — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 03:33:00 GMT

I presented "A Guiided Tour ofWCF" talk at the Southern California Rock 'n' Roll Code Camp last weekend. There was a good turnout and a lot of interest in WCF. In addition to my overview talk, Michele Bustamante presented three talks on WCF particulars, including one on security.

Here's a like to my slide deck for those interested. The code examples are also available, which are largely updated examples from my book, Programming Indigo.

'Programming Indigo' code samples updated for January '06 WFC CTP

david.pallmann — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 04:17:00 GMT

They just can't leave WCF alone, can they? :) This week, I got myself up and running on the January 2006 CTP and upgraded all of the code samples to work. I had motivation--I had to speak and demo WCF at Southern Calfornia Code Camp this morning and wanted to be on the latest and greatest. Well, I got it all finished and my talk went great. It's nice to have a full set of demos that work on the latest bits.

I've sent the updated code samples to MS Press to be posted on the book's companion site. You can also get the updated code samples here. Enjoy.

http://homepage.mac.com/pallmann.family/.Public/ProgrammingIndigoCode.zip

Go Live licenses available for WCF

david.pallmann — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 07:04:00 GMT

Now you can use WCF in production:

"Microsoft today announced the availability of Go Live licenses for Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies. Along with the WinFX January Community Technology Preview, these new resources are meant to give millions of .NET developers a leg up on next-generation application design. All three releases are available now from the MSDN Download Center. " http://www.irishdev.com/NewsArticle.aspx?id=1739

List of WCF Changes

david.pallmann — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 03:33:00 GMT

Ed Pinto of the WCF team has posted a nice definitive list of changes to Indigo/WCF this year at http://blogs.msdn.com/edpinto/archive/2005/12/14/503811.aspx. If you're looking to get up the speed on all the changes since Indigo beta 1, this is a good place to start.

Code Examples Updated At Last for Programming Indigo

david.pallmann — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 05:11:00 GMT

No sooner did Programming Indigo come out earlier this year on the heels of Indigo Beta 1 when a few months later at the PDC we were introduced to a revised edition in the form of a community technology preview (CTP), now christened Windows Communication Foundation, with a refactored programming model. That meant new names and combinatorics to learn for attributes, classes, and configuration elements.

No sooner did I get the books' code samples converted to the September PDC CTP when another community technology preview came out, and then another, with more changes. Between the constant updates and my day job, to which I must give priority, it's been slow going figuring out how WCF has changed and then amending my code samples. In fact, 'm not completely done yet, but I have most of them updated to current WCF (the bits in the Nov and Dec CTP) and have just turned them over to MS Press. They should be posted very soon now on the book's support site. I'm still working on updating the code for the three case study chapters.

I'll post the URL here once I see the updates have been posted. Or you can get the samples ported thus far from here: http://homepage.mac.com/pallmann.family/.Public/ProgrammingIndigoCode.zip

Debut of my Neudesic Blog

david.pallmann — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 06:06:00 GMT

It's a new year, and a new blog for me now that Neudesic has a blog server.

I'm still going to keep my blog on MSN (http://spaces.msn.com/members/davidpallmann/) alive, at least for the time being--a lot of people look there for information about WCF/Indigo and my book, "Programming Indigo". So anything WCF related will probably appear in both blogs.

My chief sin in blogging is not doing it often enough. For 2006, I'm going to try to do better. That resolution should be a lot easier to keep than, say, losing weight.