Relax. Grab a beer (a Guiness perhaps). Dublin, the application server role extension to WAS/IIS, is to be released roughly three months after Visual Studio 2010, so somewhere around 1,5-2 years from now. There is still time to come to grips with it. Even so… Although purposefully and overly simplified from the technological aspect from the visual aspect Dublin looks like the BizTalk Admin Console. It acts the same. The terms used are the same. There the queries for messages, there are Active instances (Running or Ready to Run), there are Suspended instances – which you can resume or terminate, there is context based routing, it imports and exports applications easily etc. But Dublin is of course much more then a user interface. When you dive down into it, it seperates itself through a number of things. Read more at Charles Youngs post here. But BizTalk developers, don’t worry, you’ll quickly feel at home.
Category: Conference
PDC Tweet
If you like twitter and want to listen in on the chitter chatter that happens there that revolves around PCD, check out this tweetgrid.
PDC Pre-Con – WCF
PDC Pre-con
Conference Tip #1: A Pre-Con is an introduction. At least the first part of the pre-con will be taking it from the beginning. Don’t be dissapointed if you feel you know all the stuff they say during the first hour or two.
Conference Tip #2: Don’t leave after the first hour or two. It will get more interesting.
WCF Pre-Con session
I’ve heard Juval Löwy of IDesign talk about WCF in the past. In fact I’ve even read his book (Programming WCF Services), now being sent to the presses for a 2nd edition. It is a comprehensive thing that gives a good introduction to WCF as well as introduces patterns and re-usable code for working with it. In a video recorded on Channel9 I’ve heard Juval say that everything should be a service. At the time I thought that sounded slightly crazy. This time the message was that the introduction of WCF is the same kind of semantic shift from .NET development as .NET was from VB or C++ and C++ was from C. Syntax is the small part, sematics is everything really. Overall what WCF gives us is a proven library of best practices and guidelines available out of the box. After an entire day he had has me convinced, of both of the points above. Now, I’m not saying that all classes should be a service and all methods a service call, but I definatly can tell you that I can see the advantages of such a situation after a full days worth of hammering it in by Juval.
It’s really all about the glue. Research has shown that as much as 95% of time is spent buidling, maintaining and troubleshooting glue code. That only leaveas 5% for doing the real stuff, the stuff that you are really getting payed for. WCF is out-of-the-box glue. All that security, transactional support, serialization, versioning etc etc that you’d want your application to have, without you having to spend any time on developing it. A sweet deal really.
I’d like to inform you of…
…what? Do you get it, I certainly don’t. All I got yesterday when opening up my laptop after standby was this (se image below). Apparantly it’s an error, at least that’s the title of the dialog, but then again the icon is informational. But hey, I didn’t really have much choice, I wanted to know what lay behind – I took the Red pill and pressed ok.
As PDC is approaching, do you want to take the red pill and learn what really goes on behind the scenes? If so then check out the The Devil’s Field Guide to the PDC, although I’m not entirely sure he got the whole red pill / blue pill anology correct – but that might be just my interpretation.
If you at this point are asking yourself “Hey., whatever happend after you pressed ok!?” – I’m sorry to dissapoint you, nothing happened. Which in itself doesn’t really do the red pill / blue pill analogy justice either…
The PDC is getting closer…
…anf get-togethers and parties are starting to add up. Some internal or private and some open to everyone that will hopefully be packed with people. We arrive late saturday, and will probably just fall asleep as soon as we hit the hotel, seeing that our local time places that at a 9 hours timediff from the local time in Los Angeles. So by the time we arrive at our hotel the head will still being in the mindset of 6 am. We’re hoping to be more in sync when we wake up on sunday – we have to, because that sunday night makes up the first party.
Be Logical - Notes from Johan Hedberg 