February 2006 - Posts

A Sneak Peek at CSF - The Connected Services Framework

Ernst is finally dusting off the Connected Services Framework and will present CSF as outlined in http://www.saarchitect.net/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=278. Please attend and assist us in growing the saArchitect community from stremgth to strength.

How does the magical tablecloth (as described by Geoff on saARchitect.net) of EDRA, CSF and WinCF (Indigo) overlap or complement each other? For this question and more, please join us at the saArchitect community event.

30-3-2006

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www.drp.co.za recovered and back alive!

We experienced immense problems over the past two days with our www.drp.co.za, whereby links were broken and therefore snippets and posters unavailable. We have recovered the site and at a first glance everything looks back to normal ... please report any problems to drpsupport@bbd.co.za or myself immediately.
 
We have also noted that FireFox users are battling with the site and will address the issue at the next opportunity. The recommended browser for the site is IE5, 6 or 7.
 
We appologise for any inconvenience caused by the unavailability of the site and our value add materials.

www.drp.co.za problems ... please be patient.

We are experiencing serious problems with our www.drp.co.za site, whereby most links to posters and snippets are broken. We are investigating and will advise when the material is available for download again.

We applogise for the inconvenience!

WCF/Indigo: February CTP

Please note that February CTP is released and for those that claim that WiNFX is function complete, please look at the 71 page "breaking changes" report on WCF ... not for the faint hearted ... see http://windowscommunication.net/collateral/pages/BreakingChangesJanCTPToFebCTP.htm for details.

We will be downloading this CTP this weekend and will revise our DRP material, Book and demo code during the course of the week, obviously reporting on major issues encountered.

The CTP will also be made available to the saArchitect/Developer community to ensure that we are not all downloading the CTP at the same time.

 

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saArchitect Session - Windows Communication Foundation Feedback

We had an absolute bumper session at saArchitect last night, talking about Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), as well as other interesting offline discussions.

The venue at SysPro was excellent as always and we thank the sponsors for the excellent venue, food, drink and management of facilities overall ... much appreciated! Comments such as "Thanks. Informative. Good Venue. Presenters knowledge awesome. Well structured. Cool." show that most people had fun and that these sessions much continue. We had consensus that the sessions are indeed of value, that both the start time and new format (info+demo) is good and should be maintained. We had 25 community members attending, plus the sponsors and presenters. The session scored a 8/10 and the presenters a 8.4/10, which indicates that everyone was happy with the session. Even though we ran over time considerably due to the initial traffic and interesting offline discussions, we only had one person raising a concern regarding time on the evaluation form.

We mentioned a special thanks to Craig in the session and I herewith want to thank him again. Craig has helped us immensely over the past months, allowing us to become as passionate as we are in Indigo and evangelising it further in the community. There is a lot of excitement and expectation around Windows Communication Foundation and we are hoping to offer some hands-on explorations of the technology in due course.

The key questions we noted down on Indigo (sorry WCF) during the session and offline discussions include:

  1. What abut interoperability of Indigo with non-Microsoft environments?

  2. What about long running transactions?

  3. What about transactions across the enterprise?

  4. What about transactions scopes including asynchronous servce interaction?

Watch our blogs ... we will try and answer the above as soon as possible. We know that Craig "does not believe in taking off the brakes of a car and driving off", however, there seems to be a need for asynchronous communication and the dreaded transaction scope.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience when sessions are extended due to the conversations, which w believe are crucial, for your enthusiasm, your support in the community and for allowing all of us to get the most out of the monthly session. It was good to see such a good turnout again and we are looking forward to the future sessions, such as Connected Services Framework (CSF), Office 12, WWF, Deployment, Integration and much, much more. "saArchitect Gauteng "rocks"!

The illustration shows what the community wants us to talk about, whereby there was also requests for deployment, integration and case study discussions.


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Writely a cool collaboration solution ...

This post was written in Office Word uploaded and edited in Writely and then posted to the blog. YAH (or more recently known as Marinheiro) introduced me to this service which should be evaluated by all the passionate technology bloggers, who do not want to struggle with getting pictures into their posts.


Visit Writely at http://www.writely.com/Default.aspx.


Remember that we are hosting INDIGO (WCF) at saArchitect tonight!


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www.drp.co.za upgrade goes live … VSTS & WCF posters and much, much more.

Our upgraded www.drp.co.za website has finally gone live, hosting a wealth of value-add information such as saArchitect session scripts http://www.drp.co.za/default.asp?id=media/content_editorials, PDF and high quality JPG Quick Reference Posters http://www.drp.co.za/default.asp?id=technologies/content_technologies and a number of our technology transfer snippets http://www.drp.co.za/default.asp?id=media/content_snippets.

 

The quick reference posters are printable high-quality on both A4 and A3 media, whereas the PDF is adequate for most requirements.

 

We hope that the enhanced site will enhance the value-add to the community and are looking forward to your feedback.

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VSTS: Cool site http://accentient.com

If you are looking at VSTS make sure you visit this site http://accentient.com, especially their page listing all of the add-ins and widgets http://accentient.com/widgets.aspx.
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MTU is for the birds …

Yes, MTU is all “for the” birds … the feathered kind that is … and our new team member is a Falcon dressed up in a prisoners pyjama. He is the cutest team member, his name is Sid (short for Sindney) and he is at home in the Dullstroom Bird of Prey & Rehabilitation Centre in Dullstroom.

Have a look at Sid sponsored by BB&D MTU, at Rosie the Tawny Eagle sponsored by my son Jacques and some of the other feathered beauties in our album http://dotnet.org.za/photos/willy/category1318.aspx.

Also make some time to visit the Centre in Dullstroom, or their website on www.birdsofprey.co.za.

 

 

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WCF/Indigo: Community Session around the corner

Please remember the saArchitect community event on the 23rd February and RSVP to Maria if you are going to attend. You can find details on http://www.saarchitect.net/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=267 and http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2005/12/05/48238.aspx.

Both Garret and I are getting ready and looking forward to seeing the saArchitect community members again.

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Looking beyond the boundaries of SOA ... huh?

Just as we have started to become comfortable with service oriented architectures (SOA) we notice that major vendors are talking about going beyond SOA. This raises a few concerns in my mind, because we never seem to find the time to get fully comfortable with concepts and technologies, are never able to design and develop solutions in a consistent and more importantly measurable manner and often find ourselves spending time and resource to investigate a new concept or technology, only to find that we have encountered in an entity wearing a new pyjama, often a new TLA (three lettered acronym … or should that be Terrible Linguistic Anomaly?), yet containing a well known core.

Who out there remembers the Convergent Technologies Operating System (CTOS)? Those who do would remember that it is message based and service based … perhaps it is the most misunderstood and forgotten piece of technological excellence, which even included pinches of SOA … and that in the early 80’s.

It even introduced the modular … we used to call it the toaster concept … end extensible hardware, a concept for which a major prize was recently awarded (see http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2006/01/16/49266.aspx for details). Again it seems the CTOS era was “back to the future”.

I have run away from my initial blob thoughts … like New Horizon traveling at the rate of knots (50’000km/sec that is) away from Earth towards Pluto.

What really concerns me is that we do not seem to get the opportunity to adopt a concept of technology, ensuring maximum benefit and “value to business”, only to be forced by the vendor technology evolution to multi-thread between old, current and new … mastering none. Is it not time that we stabilize, take a deep breath and get maximum benefit from what we have today, before we dream of tomorrow? It is probably not going to benefit our strive for excellence and evolution, however, it would allow us to deliver information systems to business more consistently and continuously improving both our delivery process and the associated solutions.

... enough pondering for today, I need to get back to the exploration of 64-bit, VS2005, VSTS, WinFX ...

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VSTS: New Modelling Poster up for review

http://dotnet.org.za/photos/willy/picture50063.aspx lists a "low quality to minimise space" copy of the new VSTS Modelling poster we have just released and will post on www.drp.co.za in high quality, together with all other posters in the next few days. Your comments will be most welcome!
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VSTS: What is an external object in the modelling world ... a black Box?

VSTS allows the inclusion of consumer endpoints/connections from external objects for documentation purposes and to ensure that any dependencies of external objects can be catered for in the overall model. External objects are not black boxes, but instead represent objects referenced by the applications, but which are not to be deployed with those systems. It is therefore assumed that external objects are designed already or will be part of another solution.

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VSTS: Why are connector relationships defined in application models not defaulted (i.e. brought over to) system models?

Did you know that connections are carried over from the application to the system diagram when using all the applications in the application diagram. In order to carry across all connections select all objects, right click an object and select Design Application System. Alternatively right click on the AD surface and select the same option.

Note that connections are not made when objects are added one at a time from the System View, as the VSTS team determined that is would be better to allow the user to have explicit control over what connections or delegations are created when adding application one at a time.

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Team Foundation Server Release Candidate is alive and well

Congratulations to the VSTS team on the release of RC!

To upgrade from Beta3 Refresh to RTM, please follow these steps:

  1. Backup your server and copy the data to a safe location.
  2. Download the Team Foundation Server RC from MSDN Subscriber Downloads
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions
  3. Download the Upgrade Utility
    http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=60341
  4. Uninstall Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Refresh.
  5. Follow the upgrade instructions, which are included with the Upgrade Utility.
  6. Install Team Foundation Server RC.
  7. Complete the post install upgrade instructions, which are included with the Upgrade Utility.
  8. Digest Jeff's blog on
    http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2006/01/22/515917.aspx
    ...
    for a summary of the major changes since BETA 3 refresh.

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