Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

With PDC around the corner and the buzz around Oslo beginning to form into some louder noise, it occurs to me that we (developers and architects) should be helping shape the discussion and hopefully make an impression.

If I could hand the Oslo team my single most precious wish it would read like this:

“Can I please have a framework that allows me to build applications that support durable messaging using the publish & subscribe pattern and communicate over a bus!”

That’s the main thing that I crave. In the meantime we can use nServiceBus, SimpleServiceBus, Mass Transit and a few others, including rolling our own with WCF but lets not forget that WCF does not give us this out of the box, in fact far from it.

To date we have heard about how integral Windows Communication Foundation and Workflow Foundation are to Oslo and that XAML activation looms large along with ‘the Repository‘ which might be storage for workflow and service discovery. It would seem that the idea of the ‘Repository’ is about assisting with architecture, but I’m not yet clear about how deep the Repository lives in the API and whether I can leverage it to promote or provide durable pub /sub messaging with a bus architectural pattern. Let’s wait and see what emacs.net, the repository and the so-called new process server bring to the table.

Parts 1 and 2 of this post.

From time to time I have the need to create file types within my BizTalk projects that you would think are pretty obvious, like an plain old vanilla XML file for example. Pretty obvious requirement I would have thought? The number of standard out of the box templates for BTS is not that complete so I decided to address that issue and create a few for myself : here’s how.

Locate the BizTalkProjectItems folder on your development machine, which should be often than not located under your program file folder here:

\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Developer Tools\BizTalkProjectItems

Create your template file (in my case a plain old XML and Text File (the text file for creating flat file inputs).

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<Root></Root>

PDC announcements have been made that begin to shed some light (small aperture stuff) on the whole mystery on OSLO. However before I get into discussing what might become apparent at the PDC let me digress a moment into a discussion on what constitutes an Enterprise and whether SOA is exclusively a valid Enterprise concept.

What constitutes an Enterprise?

3 Developers, 80 staff, 12 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

5 Developers, 120 staff, 17 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

7 Developers, 200 staff, 22 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

10, Developers, 300 staff, 50 million per annum revenue == Enterprise ?

15 Developers, 1000 staff, etc ?

What’s interesting to me is that you will find development teams and managers in any of the categories above, that want to connect applications in the organisation  (enterprise or whatever you want to call it) and believe that they are equally entitled to be thinking about SOA as the CIO of any large Telco or public / private Utility.

Recently I posted a suggestion that if BizTalk had an express version, then it would have "crossed the chasm" en masse some time ago. The question I pose now is what are Microsoft’s plan for BizTalk licensing given the positioning they have given the product within the context of Oslo? Based on the official documentation to date and working on the assumption that there is no change to the status quo to the licensing strategy around BizTalk, then Oslo seems to be limiting it’s audience somewhat. Quite a few of the organisations (Enterprise) listed above, will have a hard time justifying the cost of BizTalk licensing and will be faced with finding alternatives. Let’s face it, there are more businesses in these categories above than any other and it’s also representative of the vast majority of Microsoft’s constituency, so the questions have to be asked, just how central to Oslo will BizTalk be and what will it cost? I note that the roadmap does not include answers to these questions and I dare say that the PDC wont devote a lot of attention to it either but here’s hoping.

The technology that lies at the heart of Oslo is being listed as BizTalk Server V6, System Centre V5, Visual Studio V10, BizTalk Services V1, and the .NET 4.0  Framework. Oslo seems constrained to providing updates to existing technology and providing some new ones, both forming the parts in creating your own SOA soup. Certainly there seems to be no mention or evidence of a framework per se and I cant help but wonder if this isn’t one of the missing elements in their general approach. Certainly it has opened up the way for both open source and 3rd party commercial frameworks / products such as nServiceBus, Simple Service Bus, Neudesic Neuron ESB, Mass Transit and Linxter amongst them. I know nServiceBus reasonable well and it  addresses some of the key problems when faced with building a fluent service based eco system in your organisation and whilst it is early days yet, I can help but notice that Redmond would appear to be taking a heavily technological approach to the problem space. My hope is that the idea of messaging being about web services ‘everywhere’ with a whole lot of orchestration, becomes consigned to the past and that we become the beneficiaries of real pub sub with WCF providing the message transports and perhaps even BizTalk Express filling in the durable pub / sub piece of the architecture?

Some of the things imagineered into Oslo so far are BizTalk deployment of Workflow to Server farms, BAM type monitoring of Workflow, more visual Workflow design tools and an online repository for storage of message contracts , workflow’s, service publications /subscriptions and discovery (ciao UDDI?).

I look forward to seeing what the PDC will unveil and hopefully Microsoft will keep the process open to some rich community input.