September 20, 2006

Building Connected Systems - Day 2

Day 2 was excellent. Aaron did a demo on the Web Service Software Factory. If you have not seen this, check it out. It is something the PAG team built to help accelerate initial project creation. It creates a solution with multiple projects (web service layer, biz object layer, a mapping layer, and even some test projects). Ther is also one available for WCF, but as of this post there is no a version for RC1 available yet. I strongly encourage y'all to check this out as it seemed very useful! After that We focued on WCF concepts; contracts, serializers, behaviors and bindings. To end the day, Microsoft Connected Systems Division (think: WCF + BizTalk) Archtect Steve Swartz came in and talked about potential future directions. Some interesting comments were:

  • WCF is happy with SOAP or REST

  • MSFT is going to push more services "into the clouds": e.g. there is already a beta STS service available here

  • MSFT is going to try to make BizTalk more of a .Net extension and not a silo of its own.

  • Improve developer tools; e.g. if a developer wants to publish an RSS feed, it should be as simple as instantiating a class and 'start pumping RSS out'.

  • Start thinking about 'claims' in the security space. Check out Kim Cameron's blog for more information.

  • Autonomy is 'a' value - it is not the 'one' correct architecture value. (think: 4 tenets of SOA)

Steve was a blast to listen to; scary-smart guy!


jk

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