|create|tek|

Back to Life, Back to Reality

Back from PDC08, back from TechEd EMEA 2008, session done yesterday at the Architect Forum 2008. The trip to PDC08 was very interesting, on the same level as the 2005 edition, now focused – obviously – on cloud computing. TechEd was interesting for me especially because of the Architecture track, which was the best I’ve ever attended, but the best was being at the Ask The Experts BizTalk booth: we had several people going by with interesting questions and challenges, and I got to do several contacts. Yesterday in Lisbon I did the afternoon session at the Microsoft Architect Forum 2009, representing GASP and together with José António Silva and Nuno Godinho as the developer. The topic, obviously, was around the cloud.

I have several posts to do, I’ll try to add them in the next few days.

posted @ 10:28 AM | Feedback (0)

Live blogging from PDC2008

Follow me here: http://www.twitter.com/LokiJota

posted @ 3:46 PM | Feedback (0)

PDC08 + TechEd Emea 2008

Next week I’ll be off at PDC08, which is shaping up to be as good as PDC05 was, with a lot of sessions on Today’s hot topic: Cloud Computing. One week later, I’ll be at the Ask-The-Experts booths at TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers in Barcelona (my colleague and SharePoint God Raúl is also attending the conference), focused on making contacts and maybe attending some of the sessions missed from PDC that will be repeated there. Pedro Rosa from Microsoft Portugal is the owner of the dev track, and has some pretty good sessions lined up.

If you happen to be at any of the events and want to meet, contact me using the form on the blog.

You just gotta love technology… :-) See you there.

posted @ 4:28 PM | Feedback (0)

BizTalk Server and “Dublin” (Me Too)

Check out Charles Young’s post “Dublin and BizTalk Server - What's the difference?”. It’s well worth the read, for all BizTalk developers, and a very interesting analysis.  I’ve been to some of the events Charles mentions, where there was some discussion about this new application server and its relationship to BizTalk Server, and this a curious solution Microsoft has found. I do have a complaint, however: I do feel BizTalk Server could be improved in several areas, and the last two versions (R2 and the planned 2009) have been somewhat lacking in this aspect. Things like the Orchestration Designer, BAM, BRE and even the mapped could clearly be improved (and don’t get me started in Usability), and low-latency support added, but Microsoft has not focused the evolution of the product in these aspects, which I regret.

Anyway, a highly recommended read.

posted @ 2:21 AM | Feedback (0)

PDC(loud) 2007

For me, this year's PDC in LA will totally be about the "Cloud". Sure topics that interest me are Mesh and Sql Server Data Services (SSDS), but I'm sure there's more to come, about things like Oslo and other European cities, perhaps BizTalk Services and a curiously colored and mysterious canine, RedDog.

There are two things that interest me, personally, in these kind of cloud paradigms. First, that there are new application models, new architectures, new colors in the pallete, new tools (modeling is one of them). Just look at all the technologies I mentioned. Most of them are usable to develop enterprise applications, they are not customer-facing new things (Mesh is the partial exception here). The second thing that interests me is precisely the engineering challenge, the new problems we will have to solve in a world where almost nothing can be taken for granted. (Can we communicate at all, if everything is extremely loosely coupled?)

Truth is, however, that I don’t think this will be an easy or widespread shift (regardless of what Nicholas Carr thinks). If you talk to most people working in IT today about “moving to the cloud”, you’ll hear jokes about “fog”, and (legitimate) questions about data ownership, security, trust, cost, SLAs and QoS, etc. These issues will have to be tackled with, or at least enough of them.

Data and Business Logic has been near (“it’s mine, all mine!”) almost since the first days of IT, after all.

… so if you are in Portugal or nearby and want a partner company to explore some new ground using these technologies (or just have interesting discussions), get in touch. :-)

posted @ 2:54 AM | Feedback (0)

Braid/Game Development in Linux

I mostly stay clear of platform choice debates, not entering very much in “Open Source vs Microsoft” debates, but this one is too hilarious to miss.

There’s a (great) platform game for the Xbox360 called “Braid”, which is the only Xbox Live Arcade game in the Metacritic game Top-10. This game was created by a single developer, Jonathan Blow, who recently posted in his blog some technical questions related to problems he was having with the Linux port of the game. Amidst several problems and the inability to do things with the quality he wants, he eventually drops the idea of the Linux version at all.

It’s an interesting and hilarious discussion (at least the first half of it) between an obviously very frustrated game developer and people telling him how wrong he is.

Two samples:

«What is it that you find good about the tools? It appears to me that they are about 12 years behind what I can use on Windows.»

«My posting here was not even about Braid. I may have Braid ported to Linux, but I will pay someone else to do it so that I can spend my effort working on my next game. This was about adopting Linux as my primary development platform for all future projects. I wanted to do this because I find Vista to be frankly sickening. However, as bad as it is, Vista is still my best option. I can’t get work done efficiently enough on Linux.»

Read it here.

posted @ 12:41 AM | Feedback (0)

MOSS2007 Excel Services - Web Services performance

This is gold: Kb 955144, "You may experience poor performance when you use many SetCell calls in Excel Services". Thanks, Microsoft.

posted @ 4:35 PM | Feedback (1)

"The E-Myth Revisited" and The World After Summer

I've been reading "The E Myth Revisited", by Michael Gerber. The book is all about entrepreneurs and small companies, and why they usually fail. The following quote is right at its start:

"Businesses start and fail in the United States at an increasingly staggering rate. Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business. Within five years, more than 80 percent of them will have failed.  [...] And more than 80 percent of the small businesses that survive the the first five years fail in the second five."

Create It is now over 7 years old, and 16 people strong.  It makes me proud to be in the small percentage of companies that do make it (although we are still 3 years away from the danger zone). :-)

Meanwhile, on the technical side, I've been trying out the new BizTalk Services R12 release, which includes (hosted) Workflow support. It's limited in the sense that there are not many activities included, and there's not yet rich and integrated tooling, but it's an interesting start nonetheless. Well worth exploring. And on another track, I've been looking into BizTalk Server R3. The new features do look interesting, although clearly in the "evolution" side of things.

Finally, I've been getting ready for the PDC2008, in October, where it's interesting to note that the topic "Cloud Services" is the one with most sessions. If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend you subscribe to the Cloud Computing group hosted at Google Groups (but not specifically Google-related or sponsored). Interesting discussions there.

posted @ 4:57 PM | Feedback (0)

PDC 2008

The PDC 2005 was the best conference I ever attended. Seeing WF and WCF for the first time, as well as the DSL Tools and lots of other stuff, plus the several contacts I did while there, helped understand what was to come in technology, and this help |create|it| prepare for this future.

I am also attending this year's PDC2008, where a lot is expected, for example, in what regards Microsoft's approach to Cloud Computing. BizTalk Services is sure to be there, as well as BizTalk "Oslo", Live Mesh and other initiatives like SQL Data Services. Just check the session list, full of vague descriptions so as to not spoil the surprise, and you'll realize this has the right ingredients to be a great conference again.

I know of several other (Portuguese) people who are attending, and if you can, try to be there. The PDC2008 is about future technologies, and it's the Microsoft conference to attend this year.

posted @ 9:36 PM | Feedback (0)

BizTalk Server Performance Optimization Guide + MsgBoxViewer

Microsoft has published a few days ago a new guide around optimization of BizTalk Server performance. This is a lengthy guide (over 200 pages), but it has a lot of very interesting information, some of which you can't find anywhere else, and there's always something to learn. Highly recommended. You can download it here.

A second recommendation is a little tool that is very helpful in gathering information about a BizTalk installation, and which also gives you a report about your installation. A little like the BizTalk Best Practices Analyzer, only deeper and with more information. It's MsgBoxViewer, and you can download version 9.20.3 here.

posted @ 9:23 PM | Feedback (0)

XNA Games on the Zune

Last night I finally had the opportunity to install the new Game Studio 3.0 CTP, and deploy some games to my Zune. I've tried 4 games (the official sample plus stuff I got from ZuneBoards) and one app (an e-book reader).

These are very simple, and most of them had small quirks and bugs that occasionally restarted the Zune, but my music and podcasts are not damaged in this process.

What disappointed me a little was the control schemes: the Zune touchpad is very sensitive, and some games use this, others use clicking on the large button, with wrong moves being done frequently. For example, when playing Sirtet (a clone of Tetris), I have to click the left part of the large Zune button to move the pieces left. Frequently, while doing this, I'd end up clicking either UP (rotate piece) or the center of the button (hard drop of the piece). Clear nuisances! And I imagine left-handed players will have the inverse problem.

Other interesting thing is that people are using XNA/.Net to develop applications for the Zune, some of them are here. Most seem like early releases of simple stuff, like clocks, stopwatches, instant messengers, phone books or text file readers, but are very interesting nonetheless.

A final note to mention how quick and simple the process is: just connect the Zune, open Visual Studio, select the Zune as the deployment location, then build your project and select Deploy. DONE!

posted @ 12:32 PM | Feedback (0)

BizTalk Server MVP, Year 3

Microsoft has decided to re-award me with the MVP title for another year, still in the BizTalk Server category, which means another year in the wonderful world of Connected Systems technologies, and more learning ahead. :-) Hurray! With Oslo and BizTalk Services coming out with new stuff at the PDC2008, there will certainly be a lot to explore.

posted @ 11:41 PM | Feedback (0)

XNA Game Night

I've never been involved either in game development or frequent gaming, but being an Xbox360 owner in the last 6 months, I've been paying more attention to the field.

Last night, local Microsoft organized an XNA Game Night, where 6 teams showed off some of their game dev skills. Most of the games were simple (with 2 exceptions), some of the PC and some for the Xbox360 (none for the Zune!), most of them Arcade-like games, but it was apparent that XNA is a very interesting platform for game development, and it's very easy to get caught up and seduced by ideas and start thinking about giving it a try. Guess what I'm downloading... :-)

Anyway, if anyone is interested, some starting points are the following:

Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP

XNA Creators Club

XNA Developer Center (@MSDN)

posted @ 11:10 AM | Feedback (0)

Live Mesh impressions

I've been trying out Live Mesh in the last few days, and I am amazed at how well it works, and at the possibilities it opens in terms of the paradigm we use to interact with our resources. It's admittedly not a completely new idea, but it's new in the way it is realized.

Before I start: in the last few months I'd been using Mozy to do online backups to my personal laptop. Mozy installs a client tool that monitors changes in my files, and uploads them to a online repository. Another interesting feature is that it adds a new option in my windows explorer's contextual menu, which allows me to browse and restore previous versions of each file.

Live Mesh, in many ways, is similar to this. I browse my file system, select folders to sync to my online Live Desktop, and the client tool it includes uploads those files to the Mesh, maintaining them synchronized. I can then open them either from the web page or any PC with the client tool installed. I can also start a remote desktop connection to any computer in my Mesh. My desktop, anywhere. (but that would be an old slogan :-)).

Anyway, this is a very interesting development (still needing perfecting...), and I'm looking forward to use it widely, since it's still a Technical Preview).

If you want to learn more, while this is not yet completely public, the best source is the team's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/ .

Now, what I would really like to see in this platform is a Silverlight interface, using Deep Zoom to browse the "desktop". That would be cool, and an interesting desktop interaction model to try out.

This development is apparently in no way related to BizTalk Services, which kind of surprises me, and I have yet no idea what the programmability possibilities are/will be.

posted @ 3:00 PM | Feedback (0)

BizTalk Services in the Msdn Magazine

Jon Flanders and Aaron Skonnard wrote "Connect Enterprise Apps With Hosted BizTalk Services", an interesting technical overview of BizTalk Services and the feature set it provides today. If you are interested, this is probably the best introduction you can find. Especially relevant is the Identity/Claims configuration part, at the end.

posted @ 2:15 PM | Feedback (0)