Industry
Industry
It looks like Eric Meijer has taken retiring the the four tenets to heart. In his CTP announcement blog entry, Meijer states that Microsoft's project code-named Volta, service boundaries are crossed by decorating a class with [RunAtOrigin] and configuring for the origin on the application tier (disclaimer: I haven't yet looked at the implementation details of Volta).
This does not bode well for the contract-first folks and doesn't seemed to be aimed at long-lived commercial software. That focus would fit in well with Linq to SQL's target audience though.
I guess life is a mashup.
RIA is currently populated by AJAX and Flash/Flex. Silverlight is an interesting newcomer because it provides one designer/developer experience for the all the UI offerings: Desktop, RIA, Mobile. And you can use your language of choice in a rich Design/Development experience.
Sun is attempting to get in to the RIA space with, in my opinion, a weak offering. JavaFX. Mary Jo Foly, of Microsoft Watch, I think has the most succinct analysis:
Sun's JavaFX fannouncement elt more to me like Sun's to reset Java and get the platform back on track than to break new ground.
My immediate question on the news of the Microsoft/Novell Linux agreement was: does this cover Mono? It does! You can now safely deploy Mono applications without fear of patent police coming after you! Put that together with the news of a .NET Runtime kernel in WFP/E we can envision the reach of the CLR/CLI slowly beginning to expand beyond windows.
For someone wanting to find out where we are headed in the Enterprise using virtualization, I highly recommend the Channel 9 "Going Deep" episode on Virtualization(video).
The episode host, not the techs, was making it clear that this will be core OS architecture in the future. The techs, however, confirmed this by saying that that was the reason that they are position as a Kernel group. Concepts discussed included:
- Legacy OS support
- Server Consolidation
- App Isolation
- Implications for Disaster Recovery
- Hypervisor technology
- Enlightened Guest OSs
- Dynamic, autonomous VM management, a kind of self managing VMotion.
However, the techs' vision went way beyond these to the point where different subsystems core can live on their own VM. The example given was an IP Phone stack that could keep running even if the host OS blue-screened. That's isolation with n the OS itself.
One big thing from a practice perspective, one tech mentioned a built in "undo" that virtual server has to move a VM back to a starting configuration. I need to investigate that further for integration machines.
On a recent project, a reviewer mentioned that SQL Server Express should never be used in a corporate application because companies would never install a database on the client. This is wrong headed because of two important trends: IT Centralization and ClickOnce Deployment.
As part of an organization that had many hundreds of Access applications to migrate to a new Wide Area File System (WAFS) infrastructure I can inform you on the pain of herding a plethora of unmanaged databases. As the tools to centrally manage IT improve, it will become more and more untenable for a corporation to accept unmanageable databases.
I say unmanageable databases, because the second trend, ClickOnce Deployment, not only speaks of centralized deployment but also of unprivileged user installations; really, self-service installations. This is the "trick" of Express Edition that older school architects are missing, in my opinion. You get the deployment and database management ease of an MDB file but the power of a real database. With Expression Edition being virtually part of the operating system (something you can enforce with centralized IT), internal teams can play with MDF files just as easy as they did with MDBs, but, when it is time to grow up, the switch to a centralized server is painless.
A final trend is simply inevitability: JET and MDAC are dead; Long Live SQL Server Express Edition. Deal with it.
WS-ReliableMessaging, part of the WS-* family of specifications developed and adopted by IBM, Microsoft and their partners, has been submitted to OASIS for ratification. It may be fast tracked as WS-Security was to became OASIS WSS. However, it is probable that it may be merged with WS-Reliability which was already ratified by OASIS in 2004.
Update: OASIS blurb here.
I had noticed a headline about the SHA-1 cryptographic hashing algorithm being broken, but didn't get the details. Here's a great post by Bruce Schneier on what it all means. Upshot?
SHA-1 is still too hard to break on current technology. However, given Moore's law and people's ingenuity, it's prudent to use a stronger hash such as SHA-224 through SHA-512. Also, NIST needs to run a competition for hashing as they did for AES.
Highlights and Juicy Tidbits:
First Indigo bits will be delivered in a March 2005 CTP. Avalon and Indigo will be released together.
Steve Swartz (has blank blog) said that they settled on using Client/Service terminology rather than Service/Service, or Client/Server
Indigo does a great job of interoperation with WSDL, MSMQ, and COM+, allowing you to migrate one tier at a time. I especially like the easy change for clients. You only need to replace CreateInstance with GetObject and a Moniker that describes the Indigo service. Very nice.
WS-Discovery will not be supported by Indigo. Apparently that will be device support in Longhorn.
There will be Five SKUs for VS Team System. Team Server, Team Architect, Team Developer, Team Test, Team Suite. The Universal License will cover ONE of the user licenses and you can buy Suite “for a small fee”
Versant has jumped into the .NET Object Relational Mapping business with Versant Open Access.NET. Being pretty much cleaned out by the ObjectSpaces vaporware, the market should be ripe for them.
Sybase has release DataWindow.NET, Windows Forms and WebForms control that acts exactly like the PowerBuilder 10 Data Window so PowerBuilder developers will feel at home. PowerBuilder 11 applications can be compiled as .NET applications, even Web Applications. Finally PowerBuilder 12 will be a .NET language, like Delphi.NET is now. I see the future of PowerBuilder and it is .NET!
I especially liked Rich Turner's presentation on how to do SO on .NET today. Good job. I hope to have him present it when we have our EBC in Redmond in May.
Indigo Day was a long one for me. They only have the Exhibition floor open over lunch time. I had to skip lunch yesterday.
S. “Soma” Somasgar keynoted the day emphasizing .NET, smart clients, and mobile technology. Conveniently the themes of the conference. He mentioned the Forrester study I've written on earlier. He showed some case studies about using Smart Clients including:
But, hey, you can check out the case studies page and bone up yourself.
They only news shared was MicroFocus' decision to centralize their development on Visual Studio, and reminder on the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office System announcement.
I think one compelling sign I'm getting from the conference is that Visual Studio as a development platform is really taking off. Combine the MicroFocus announcement with Oracle 10g Release 2's integration with Visual Studio and you see a clear for tools vendors trend to live within the VS2005 IDE. This will only increase with Team System.
The balance of the day was introducing and demo'ing ClickOnce, ASP.NET 2.0 Web and Web Services, and Team System.
I was disappointed that they put in the “second string” when they were showing off Team System. Ajay Sudan, Product Manager for Visual Studio Team Architect, is definitely not a presenter and did not sell the product.
I saw two very clear things concerning Team System: 1) It will be 3.0 until it's competitive with top CRM vendors 2) it doesn't matter because they are changing the rules. Their focus is primarily on extensibility; they will do features latter or use partners if the market plays out that way. Team System will grow the market and force integration just as vendors are now compelled to integrate with Visual Studio IDE. The most compelling part of Team System is the Team System Foundation itself; the repository and the APIs...and the deep integration it will afford the rest of the software development team with those who use the Visual Studio IDE. It will be extremely compelling, but not right away.
Well, off to Indigo Day!
Somehow I made it to VSLive! this week. I won't be doing any live blogging, but I hope to put in some entries while I'm here. It's Whidbey Day today, Indigo Day tomorrow, and C#Live! for me on Wednesday. Christian Weyer confirmed to me what Clemens Vaster alluded to in a post, that Indigo Day will be Indigo's big coming out party.
I'd like to meet up with some bloggers while I'm here. We'll see what we can find. Think I'll check out Google...
Update: Yup, Sam Gentile is trying to get a blogging meeting to happen.
Here's more news on Oracle jumping on the .NET bandwagon.
Indian blogospherian Anjana notes that Oracle has just launched a .NET developer center. Time for you cross-breeds to link up. Anjana has more details.
Actually, several groups at our company are big .NET and Oracle houses. If only we had forty hour days...
Mack Male points us to news of an announcement that Microsoft will extend their close relationship with Citrix for five more years.
Our company is a huge user of Citrix technology (one example). Although some of the use is due to poor Client/Server design or poor infrastructure, even when these problems are fixed, we have several use cases where it makes the most sense to stay with Citrix technology.
The most important reason is the standard one: Although Microsoft provides similar technology with Terminal Services, they don't provide the level of Enterprise Management that Citrix does. With a huge installation, we need the better management features.
It looks as though Munich is having a harder time banishing Microsoft technology that it thought. Völcker, a software supplier to the Munich government is porting it's Microsoft code to Mono, bypassing Java.
It would be interesting if Europe's push to Linux would cement the dominance of Microsoft technology.
My company's move to a new data center will rely heavily on server consolidation through VMWare to provide significant cost savings.
Why VMWare?
- VMWare is a more mature product than Windows Virtual Server 2005
- VMWare ESX is a below-the-os solution that is more efficient
- VMWare ESX has better management facilities for large installations
- VMWare ESX allows you to move a virtual machine from one computer to another while it's running! That give you a new picture of load balancing, now doesn't it?
And VMWare continues to mature. Here are some just announced features.
The November 3rd 2004 Forrester report, Trends 2005: Enterprise Portals ($$) by Laura Ramos, makes some interesting predictions. One is the demise of the portal market, except for niche players in vertical markets and the other is the drive to composable applications and rich functionality.
Her point is that portal technology will drop into the core development infrastructure. This is already happening with ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts Framework, which will form the foundation of SharePoint Services technology.
The report also supports the idea of “Composable Applications” which lies at the heart of the Dashboard/Web Parts/Portlet model. Interestingly, though, is the mention of “[b]usness apps that require persistent state, rich UIs, or real-time delivery of server-side data in volume.” The report speaks of technologies such as IBM's Workspace Client and Nexaweb. These tools are supposed to evolve to “consume standards-compliant portlets, cross device footprints, and let user access portals even when left offline.”
Hmm, sounds a lot like smart clients!
One interesting thought here, though is if portals are trending to smart clients, what is the Web Part analog on Windows Forms/Avalon? Time to start desiging some technology, I would say.
In fact, that would put Microsoft way ahead of the curve when .NET 2.0 comes out.