Live Traffic on Local.Live.Com - for Torontonians

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Should you take Lakeshore or the Gardiner home tonight? I just noticed on Local.Live.com that the Traffic button works for Toronto. I have no idea how long this has been going on - anarchy I tell you. Live Search Maps with Canadian Data! Bravo. Incidentally, this picture was taken from the 3D view - it's just too much fun. If only I could fly home that fast.

Congratulations to Tony Cavaliere, Gadget Guru and Agenda Junkie

Congratulations are in order for Tony Cavaliere, a fellow ObjectSharp Consultant. 

Tony is a self confessed addict of the TVO show The Agenda and when Microsoft Canada announced the competition for building Vista sidebar gadgets, Tony jumped on the chance to show off his sidebar gadget building skills while building something useful for fans of the show.

Tony finished third in the competition, but more importantly is now up to date on all the happenings with the show without having to leave his desktop.

IT Business Canada featured Tony's work in a recent article that the discusses the merits of building vista gadgets to deliver a powerful marketing punch.

You can download Tony's gadget on his blog.

Are you an aspiring architect?

I guess by the very definition of an architect, you would have to have aspirational qualities. Mohammad Akif & and Dave Remmer, Architect Evangelists with Microsoft Canada are putting on a series of web casts just for you. Check them out....

Architecture 101 (Mohammad, May 24)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338971&culture=en-CA

Architecture is the balance between art and engineering, it requires a certain mindset and approach to solving problems. Architects often function as a bridge between the business users and development groups and are increasingly being recognized as a critical community within organizations. Becoming an Architect can often translate in  to an elevated status from a career stage perspective but it is hard to find prescriptive guidance around how to become an architect. Join Mohammad Akif for the first of a four part series focused on aspiring architects. During the Architecture 101 session we will discuss some key ideas around Architecture and define attributes of an architect.

Software development lifecycle and methodologies (Dave, May 31)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338974&culture=en-CA

Over the years the various approaches teams have used to develop software have evolved. Join Dave Remmer in the second of a series focused on aspiring architects where we will discuss the various stages projects go through and sample some of the methodologies used by teams developing software. In this session we will compare and contrast the waterfall, agile, RUP, Scrum and MSF methodologies and how they are used within software projects.

Services orientation and other architectural paradigms  (Dave, June 7)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338978&culture=en-CA

One of the hottest topics in software architecture is the services oriented approach to building solutions and how this can provide agility, flexibility and reuse. Join Dave Remmer in the third of a series focused on aspiring architects where we will be looking at approaches to architecting software. This session will give an overall description of service orientation and how it differs from object oriented and component based architectures as well as a discussion of some of the organizational challenges teams experience when using a services oriented architecture.

Transitioning from a developer to an architect  (Mohammad, June 14)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338980&culture=en-CA

Are you a developer who would like to learn more about becoming an architect? Or how to get formally recognized as one (since you already wear the design and architecture hat along with the developer one)?. Join Mohammad Akif for the fourth and last part of the series focused on aspiring architects, during this session we will discuss how you can attain the skill set required to be an architect and sell yourself as an architect within your organization and industry. We will also provide a list of resources that you can use to continue the transition from a developer to an architect role.

Are we still talking about Stored Procedures vs. Dynamic SQL?

Rob Howard and Frans Bouma still are. And I guess, I am now too. Let's summarize a few of the facts from these counter points:

  • Any form of pre-compilation or cached query plan arguments are moot betweem SQL and Procs. Rob has some outdated information and Frans corrects that in his post.
  • Stored Procedures can offer the perf benefits if they are designed properly that Rob claims by avoiding round trips and unncessarily data transfer when trying to get computed or aggregated data out of the database.
  • Both are susceptible to SQL Injection attacks if the SQL is concatenated with parm values.

Let's talk about security. Frans thinks that Role Based security is the way to get fine grained security in your database while using embedded or dynamic SQL. Frans's solution of adding users and roles in the database is a dated technique back to client server 2 tier systems. Web-based or other wise distributed applications typically have a connection pool - and unless you are going to have a connection pool for each role, then you can't rely on SQL Server based role based security to be your cop. Frans goes on to talk about how views can be used to encapsulate security rules just like a stored procedure.

Both Frans and Rob talk about the brittleness of SQL with regards to schema changes. Rob thinks your SQL centralization/encapsulation  should occurr inside of stored procedures. Frans think you should do this in a data access component that is part of your application. Frans hasn't really explained what his application's component does specifically but it sounds like he prefers to dynamically create the SQL on the fly by reflecting on schema of entities in his application.

What both of them has avoided is any realization that talking to a SQL Server database is the same problem as talking to any external service. Whose responsibility is it to provide the encapsulation and deep understanding of the underlying database schema. The answer to that question can't be answer universally. Back in May 2005, I blogged about the notion of DatabaseAsService.

Is your database a shared service between several applications? Some folks might even go as far as to say that their database is an enterprise service. Especially in this case it makes perfect sense to encapsulate complex internal schematics inside of the single shared resource the database. This can be done with Stored Procedures or Views, but do you really want each application to have intimate knowledge of deep schema details? That's brittle way beyond the scope of a single application.

In other cases, your database is more like a file that your application persists its data and it is not a shared resource. In these cases, the database is not really a service in terms of Service Oriented Architecture principles. In fact, I'd go as far to argue in these cases that the db is such an intimate part of your application's design that there should be no “mapping“ of schema inside/outside of the database and that they could/should be the same. Go ahead and make the full set of tables/schema public to your application logic.

 

Toronto Architect's Breakfast: Service Oriented Design Questions Answered

Bruce Johnson is hosting our next Architect's Breakfast in Toronto this Thursday. In case you haven't been to one in the past, here's a few points of interest.

  • This is more of an interactive event. Round tables of 5-8 have breakout sessions to discuss issues. Of course there are networking opportunities with your peers before, during and after.
  • The content is focused at an architectural perspective, in this session in particular, SOA design.
  • The meeting kicks off at 7:30am. (registration/breakfast begins at 7:AM).
  • The St. Andrew's club will feed you a lovely breakfast with a great view of Toronto at the top (27th floor) of the Sun Life Building.
  • You'll be done by 9:00am and back in the office in no time.
  • You'll get to meet some really smart and nice people.

You can view the outline and register here. Hope to see you there.

Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation (and you thought you wouldn't have to learn BizTalk)

If you're not using BizTalk today in your applications, probably the #1 reason is that you can't afford it. “It's overkill” is probably a big reason as well, but I consider that a variation. Seriously, how many applications do you write that don't have some component of workflow? Maybe you don't, but if it was baked into the framework, and you didn't have to install (and pay for) a workflow engine, maybe you'd take advantage of it - no?

Windows Workflow Foundation, a new component of WinFx was announced today. Lots of great resources here. Including overviews, labs, and even an MSDN VirtualLab so you can play with this stuff without having to install it. Also keep tabs on the blogs of Scott WoodgatePaul Andrew, and of course our own Matt Meleski

You can download the beta 1 of the extension for Visual Studio 2005. Don't get too carried away yet - it's not going to be released with 2005, it will be released in the second half of 2006 (likely along with the rest of the WinFx bits).

Reflections on the PDC Day 1 Keynote

Bill Gates gave a pretty typical high level keynote to introduce the keynote this morning. He talked about the past, how far we've come, and how now is the most exciting time, and that we are in most exciting industry. Not that I don't disagree, but I swear I've heard this keynote before.

After Bill, a series of VP's and Architect's ran through more product details. Things started to get much more interesting at this point. Chris Capossela gave an end user run down of Windows Vista and Office 12 - which will be both released at the same time near the end of 2006.

The UI is just stunning (as it always is in these demos). It was also nice to see the QuickSearch text box integrated through both products. Not unlike Google Desktop Search, and using the same engine as MSN Desktop Search, the QuickSearch text box gives context sensitive searching through the application. If you're in a document explorer - you can search there for documents. If you are in the start menu, you can easily search for applications (and recent documents). If you are in outlook you can easily search your in-box, contacts, etc. Of course you can do broad computer searches too, but that context is nice.

Chris also showed off Sidebar which isn't really big news, but he also showed the audience Sideshow. Sideshow uses the same dock-able gadgets that Sidebar does, but re-use them on what I can only describe as a built in Pocket PC device that is built into the cabinetry of your laptop. This allows you to check real-time information (email, appointments, etc.) without turning on or booting up your laptop. Expedia had a nice gadget working in Sideshow that showed up to the minute flight status. Nice.

RSS is also taking a prominent position in Vista and Office. An RSS store was announced that would store subscribed RSS feed content. This content would be regularly downloaded automatically, and the content would be available to the Sidebar, Outlook, IE7, and your own applications. Cool.

Office 12 has a new user interface that hopes to make more of its features discoverable. At first glance I wasn't all too excited about this, but I'll reserve my judgment until I play around with it. The quick “wizard“ like features were absolutely stunning though.

The integration with Outlook and Sharepoint is quite impressive. We are all accustomed to having our email/contacts/appointments offline stored in our outlook store. With Office 12, you can keep in sync with any Sharepoint folder to keep those files on your local store. Sweet. Better yet, a special new Sharepoint List for sharing PowerPoint decks. When you upload a PowerPoint file, an item appears in the list for each slide. From within PowerPoint, I can create a new deck, and pull individual slides from the Sharepoint server. You can optionally have it keep that slide up to date so if a new version is uploaded to the server, you'll automatically get it. Corporate plagiarism has just become so much easier.

After Chris's “consumer“ demos, Jim Alchin came out with Don Box, Chris Anderson, Anders Hejlsberg and Scott Guthrie. Jim started by giving some demos of some interesting plumbing bits. One cool thing in Vista is Super Fetch. Super Fetch is a preloaded memory cache of things you'll likely need, but unlike typical hard drive caches, it basis it's decisions on analyzing your behavior over days, weeks, months to determine what an idle machine should be preloading. The second part of his demo tied in very nicely where he showed that any USB Memory Stick could be plugged into a Vista machine and it would automatically start using it for expanded virtual ram. That totally rocks for laptops which can quickly max out their ram capacities.

Don and Anders went on to talk about some big news, namely the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) project. Linq provides a query engine on top of XML, Object and Relational data stores using a common query language reminiscent of SQL. No, this isn't an O/R mapping tool, but you can see how they may have wanted to delay ObjectSpaces until they got Linq out the door. I'll have more on this in my blog in the coming days. Attendees at PDC are getting Linq bits to try out, and don't forget to stop by the track lounge to pick up a copy of a Linq whitepaper. 

Next Don and Chris messed around with Indigo, and they also created a goofy Avalon application. Scott Guthrie came out to show off the Atlas product which is a set of cross browser javascripts and server side ASP.NET 2 controls to make Ajax style programming a snap.

To close out the lengthy presentation, Jim brought out a few other people to demonstrate complete applications to bring up the wow factor, including Microsoft Max and a kiosk application created for the North Face.

UPDATE: Dinesh Kulkarni gives some inside scoop on how ObjectSpaces is dead, or rather morphed into DLinq. It would appear ObjectsSpaces is not something you'll see built down the road on top of Linq.

Metro Toronto .NET User Group Meeting September 8th: Managed Code in Sql Server 2005

On September 8th I'll be speaking at the .NET User Group here in Toronto. I'll be talking about how developers can take advantage of Sql Server 2005's ability to host managed code. Full abstract and registration details are here.

DevTeach Conference in Montreal

I'm going to be heading out in a couple of weeks to DevTeach in Montreal. In addition to my regular session talk on Datasets, I'll also be participating in an architecture panel discussion as part of Groupe d’usagers Visual Studio Montréal, Software Architecture Special Interest Group's Special Software Architecture Meeting. The meeting is open to conference attendees, members of the user group, and anybody else for $5. Here's the details....

Speaker: Joel Semeniuk, Microsoft Regional Director, Winnipeg

Subject: Software architecture from the trenches

 

Architecture is the soul of our software. Software Architecture truly helps to define our success since if our architecture fails us, our software fails us. However, what makes a good architecture? What truly drives architectural decisions? Is one architecture better than another? In this session we will explore and discuss some of these questions while taking a close look at a few real-world examples. In each real-world scenario we will explore the resulting architecture and review the constraints the project faced both during design and during production and maintenance phases. We will also look retrospectively at each architecture presented and discuss ways that it could be improved upon with Microsoft .NET 2.0.

 

Joel Semeniuk is a founder and VP of Software Development at ImagiNET Resources Corp, a Manitoba based Microsoft Gold Partner in Ecommerce and Enterprise Systems. Joel is also the Microsoft Regional Director for Winnipeg, Manitoba. With a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba, Joel has spent the last twelve years providing educational, development and infrastructure consulting services to clients throughout North America. Joel is the author of "Exchange and Outlook: Constructing Collaborative Solutions", from New Riders Publishing and contributing author of "Microsoft Visual Basic.NET 2003 KickStart" from SAMS. Joel has also acted as a technical reviewer on many other books and regularly writes articles for .NET Magazine and Exchange and Outlook Magazine on a variety of infrastructure and development related topics. Reach Joel by email at joels@imaginets.com.

 

Followed by a software architecture expert panel:

Beth Massi, Software Architecture MVP

Joel Semeniuk, Software Architecture MVP, Microsoft Regional Director Winnipeg

Barry Gervin, Software Architecture MVP, Microsoft Regional Director Toronto

Mario Cardinal, Software Architecture MVP

Carol Roy, Microsoft Canada .NET architecture specialist for the public sector

 

Well known Nick Landry (MVP .NET Compact Framework) will act as the moderator.

 

Come hear these experts talk about software architecture hot topics.  You'll also have the chance to ask questions and talk to the panelists.

 

Monday June 20th, 5:30PM to 9:30PM

Location: Sheraton Centre, 1201 Boulevard Rene-Levesque West

Cost: free for all the DevTeach attendees and the Groupe d’usagers Visual Studio Montréal members.  $5 for non members or non DevTeach attendees.

Note: this session will be held in English

More info: www.guvsm.net or http://www.devteach.com/BonusSession.asp

 

When is a database oriented as a service?

Do you consider your database as a service? It's worthwhile to review the tenents of a service oriented architecture. The first two tenents above are probably the most relevant to my question.

If you do all of your data access through stored procedures, then you might say your database boundary is explicit.

If your database doesn't depend on other services or applications to exist properly, then you could say that your database is autonomous. That's a little tricky. Although we may use stored procedures to access functionality in our database, we may have well known  practices that we have to call the ap_decrease_inventory  proc after we call the ap_ship_order proc to make sure our that our database values are all in check. I wouldn't call our database autonomous if it has to rely on these external rules being inforced.

I'm going to avoid the discussion of the last two tenents because I think the are a bit to pure for my question. I'm really just trying to differentiate between two types of databases that I see out there. For my purposes, I refer to these as Databases as Services, and Databases as File Systems.

Databases as Services typically are well encapsulated and contain business rules. These databases might be supporting several client applications. You probably take great care in these databases, designing them carefully, perhaps with modeling tools, and encapsulating the persistence function with stored procedures, functions, triggers, etc. You may or may not have a well defined data access layer in your client applications. You might consider all the stored procs to be your data access layer, so you might call you procs directly from UI and/or business layers of your application, but that really depends on how well your client application is written. From you database, you don't really care so much since it's well protected service that operates autonomously.

Databases as File Systems are much less strategic. They serve one purpose only - to save stuff from your application. You probably/hopefully have a well defined data access layer in your application. That may even be an Object Relational Mapping tool (ORM). You probably designed the database to support the persistence of the objects in your application, and to generalize, you probably only have one application using this database. The most important thing though is that all of your business rules should be in your application(s). This type of database doesn't mean you don't have db side logic such as stored procedures or triggers. You may decide for optimization reasons that some code needs to live closer to the tables and that's okay. It's okay, so long as you realize it's harder to reuse some of that logic in higher layers of your application and you are comfortable in having your logic live in multiple platforms.

Stored Procedures are increasingly being used to add encapsulation to our database. No longer is performance the rationale for stored procedures. And increasingly, we are seeing advanced services in our databases - 4GL code such as Java and .NET managed code are making their ways into our databases. User Defined Types, Objects, and with the next version of SQL Server, we're seeing a full fledged message queue mechanism with Service Broker. You can even host web services directly in SQL Server 2005.

Is your database a service? Which camp do you fall into? Unfortunately, I think many people live somewhere in between, and that isn't by design. Most of the architectural decisions here should be motivated by where you decide to draw your boundary for strategic reasons, not for what is handy at the moment. I'd like to see people more consciously make this decision and remain committed to it. What are your thoughts?