Brian Loesgen's Blog

During a recent trip to Redmond, I was interviewed by Ron Jacobs for his Endpoint.TV series.

I had just been shown a bunch of new things, was full of excitement, and we had a great chat about models, clouds, workflow... all my current hot-buttons :)

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/endpointtv-WCF-and-WF-40-First-Look-with-Brian-Loesgen/

 

Enjoy!

 

The Windows Azure Platform and other Microsoft cloud offerings were announced at the recent Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles. This talk is an introduction to Microsoft's cloud computing platform, including Windows Azure, SQL Data Services and .NET Services. We'll explore the various components of the cloud computing platform, and describe their relationships and architectural significance. We'll also walk through the tools and technologies used to connect and manage the various cloud components. In addition to an architectural walkthrough, we'll also provide a number of demos that can be executed either on local developer machines or in the cloud after receiving a cloud account.

Speaker

Mickey Williams is the director of the Center of Excellence team at Neudesic. A Visual C# MVP, he has extensive experience building mission-critical applications on a wide variety of platforms, and has authored nine books on Windows programming.

When and Where

We'll be meeting on the 4th floor of the Microsoft La Jolla office. Pizza will be available at 6:00 PM. The meeting will start at 6:30 and end at 9 o'clock.

 

In case you've been stranded on a distant planet or trapped in a parallel universe and hadn't heard the news, Microsoft unveiled Oslo at PDC last week.

I am a member of the Connected Systems Advisors. In that capacity, I have been actively involved in the Oslo initiative for over a year now, providing the Microsoft product teams with input and feedback as "Oslo" has moved through the development lifecycle. Now, finally, we can speak freely about this exciting set of technologies, an evolutionary change that I feel will affect most developers.

 

<disclaimer> NOTE: this post is about pre-release software. Change is CERTAIN </disclaimer>

 

Oslo is Microsoft's modeling platform, and consists of three parts:

• a repository (SQL Server)
• a modeling language ("M")
• a visual editor ("Quadrant")

Most developers are going to have a lot of new things to learn. This is a very ambitious and far-reaching initiative, encompassing many technologies. I think though that people that consider themselves "BizTalk people" will have an easier path, as they've already made some of the mind shifts required, but even for them, there's still a lot to learn.

Fasten your seat belts, paradigm shift ahead...

The new wave of technologies brings with it some changes in the way we think about, construct and manage applications. In my opinion, the top ones are:

• make modeling mainstream
• advance the use of a declarative language
• involve more people in the development process
• make domain-specific languages mainstream
• bring distributed applications to the masses

Let's look at each of these:

Make modeling mainstream

Generally speaking, models of the past were a static visual depiction, often a UML-ish thing used to ultimately generate code from. In "Oslo", that's not the case, the model IS the application. When the runtime is handed a model, it "executes" the model. This is a long way from the static depictions we've seen over the years.

Advance the use of a declarative language

For decades now I've been a huge fan of data-driven development, and over the years we as an industry have found the true value of metadata. Currently, applications may have some of their logic in code, some bits in a rules engine store, configuration files, stored procedures, etc. Logic can pretty well be sprinkled all over the place, which increases complexity. If instead we made our applications work in a more declarative manner, and kept that data in a single store, then we could reap the benefits of it by creating a new breed of tooling to work with those application. For example, if a runtime knew more about an application, it may be able to make decisions and take actions on how to deploy, scale or recover from errors. With .NET 4.0, Windows Workflow can now be expressed declaratively as XAML, which means we can now use XAML to describe WCF, WF and WPF applications.

Involve more people in the development process

This is something Microsoft has been trying to do for some years with BizTalk. For example, look at the now-deprecated "orchestration designer for business analysts", and the fact that BizTalk BAM definitions begin their lifecycle in Excel. Although a great attempt, I don't know how many business analyst types ever used these tools. However, if you look at Quadrant (the visual design tool for Oslo) and the fact that Visio will be able to work with models in the repository, I think this time we may actually get business analyst types involved.

Make domain-specific languages mainstream

The M language has an MGrammar counterpart, that allows the creation of new domain-specific languages. You care about this because it can dramatically reduce the amount of code you need to write, and meshes well with involving business analysts in the process. Analysts using a visual tool would see terms that are meaningful to them, as would IT Pros working with the application at runtime.

Bring distributed applications to the masses

We have all the bits and pieces today that we need in order to build, deploy and manage distributed applications. However, it usually takes highly skilled, and rare, resources to be able to do so effectively. Microsoft aims to change that by lowering the bar on what it takes to do that.

How do I think of Oslo? Oslo is an onion....

Why do I say it's an onion? It has a core that is surrounded by multiple layers. In Oslo, the core of the onion is two parts: the repository, and the language used to create the models that inhabit the repository. It was when I came up with that mental picture that everything came together for me, so hopefully that will help others.

The repository is the heart of the whole thing. It's where your applications are defined, and where the assets live that they need to execute. When Oslo ships, it will include a set of pre-defined models, just as we have a class library now in the .NET framework, you can expect to see models with names starting with "microsoft." or "system.". So, how populate the repository in the first place? It is after all a series of tables and metadata, we need a way to create and populate the repository with these items.

Outside of this core, we see the first layers of tooling. The PDC VM  includes two tools for working with model: Intellipad and Quadrant. Quadrant is a visual tool, whereas Intellipad is a textual editor with enhancements such as syntax highlight and dynamic parsing (development-time notification of syntax issues).  If you weren't at PDC and didn't get that VM, you can download the Oslo SDK to get Intellipad.

A couple of  years back, I saw Don Box give a presentation about models (and he was billing himself as "Chief Modeling Office" at the time, another thing that intrigued me), and he did the whole presentation in Notepad. When I first thought about this, I wondered: why anyone would ever want to work with a textual editor when dealing with something as visual as a model? I was using conventional thinking that models are a visual thing. I am a visual person, when I start brainstorming solutions, it never takes long before I'm reaching for whiteboard markers or firing up Visio. Sure, there could be a textual or binary representation, but that would like be emitted by one tool for another tool to consume. Now that I "get" M however, I've completely changed my view. I now expect that at least some of the time, I will be creating models in text. Developers spend most of their days in a code editor, and many like it that way. Why force them to live in a "boxes and lines" visual world? Turns out that the language, and associated grammar, are really useful for other things too, like running it through a "loader" that creates SQL artifacts.

Beyond that, there will be other layers and other tools. Consider the Dublin runtime, it will "pull" a model from the repository and run it. Work is underway with other groups at Microsoft such as the Systems Center folks, whereby they will work with the models in the repository to deploy distribute applications.

Where are we at?

We are at the very early stages of what I think could end up being a fundamental change in the way we design, build, deploy and manage distributed applications. The overall vision is, in my view, brilliant. I stand in awe of what the team has been able to produce over the past year, but I also fear how much more remains to be done. There are no guarantees that they'll achieve the goals they've set, but I am cautiously optimistic that they'll succeed. No matter what happens, this should be a fun ride, and I suspect I'll have much more to say about this over the next few weeks/months/years. It's always a fun time being around building the bandwagon that everyone else will be clamoring to get onto in a couple of years, and... that's where we are at today in my opinion.

When I blogged about the .NET Framework 4.0/Dublin announcement recently, I also mentioned that the code name "Oslo" has taken on a refined meaning. Since then, I've seen some confusion out there, and thought I would do a post that specifically addresses this change, as well as other recent name changes.

First off, the vision of what this new wave of technologies has not changed. The term "Oslo" used to refer to the entire technology stack that will make it so much easier to develop applications. Now, as we move through the development lifecycle, some items are migrating, quite naturally, into their ultimate ship vehicles. Some examples of things that were once under the "Oslo" umbrella, but have since migrated, include:

• WCF/WF enhancements (part of the .NET 4.0 framework)
• The runtime hosts for WCF/WF and models (part of the Windows Server application server, will be shipped as part of "Dublin" and beyond)
• Improved WCF/WF design/authoring experience (now part of Visual Studio 2010)

A nice side effect of all this is that the separate pieces are now decoupled from each other. There will be no "Big Bang Release" that will appear one day, the decoupled pieces can be delivered independent of each other. However, as all of this work is being done by Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, everybody's is talking to each other, and the end-goal remains the same.

So, with those things out from under Oslo, what is Oslo? Oslo today is now the modeling platform, which consists of three things:

• the repository
• the modeling language
• tooling (to author models)

Hopefully this helps to clear up some confusion.

Another name change from last week...  if you've been following the work at labs.biztalk.net, which has been live for over a year, well.... that was the incubation project, it morphed into Zurich, and was re-unveiled last week as .NET Services. It consists of an identity system, a service bus and a workflow engine. I looked at this some months back, and my experience at the time was it took about an hour from the time I downloaded the SDK until I had my first customized workflow running in the cloud. It was a defining moment for me, and my mind started reeling, when I sat back and let the potential implications of what I had done sink in. With a few quick browser clicks, I had a workflow running in the cloud. A few years down the road, it would just take a credit card number to scale that and have it running on hundreds of machines.... Intrigued? Check it out, you can sign up for an early preview.

Another name change from last week, the poorly kept secret code name of "D" for the modeling language in Oslo is no more, it's now "M" (for models), as well as the related MGrammar for creating DSLs. I'll have much more to say about these soon....

Yet another name change - sort of... if you follow my blog you know I really like Live Mesh and use it a lot (see: Adventures with Live Mesh (CTP), More cool tricks with Live Mesh). Live Mesh is now integrated into the Live Services part of the Azure Services Platform. They also moved from CTP to Beta stage last week, and the geeky-cool part of the new release is Windows Mobile support. I take a picture with my phone, and it automagically appears in the "mobile photos" folder of my Live Mesh desktop-in-the-cloud, as well as any other devices that are synchronizing that folder.

 

Finally, details about Oslo are being made public..... For those of you who are not at PDC, here are some links you may want to check out:

 

The Oslo dev center is now live:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/default.aspx

 

Cool new Oslo site from Connected Systems Div (see the cartoon “history of modeling” spoof video):

http://modelsremixed.com/

 

This is a start. There will be a lot more in days/weeks/years  to follow.

 

Ladies and gentlemen of the dev community, fasten your seatbelts, you are about to evolve (again).

 

The announcement has not gone out yet, but.... I will be doing an Oslo presentation on Tuesday at the main meeting of the San Diego .NET User Group. This is a bit impromptu, as it turned out I would be home the week of the meeting (somewhat a rarity as I have been home for one week out of eight), the meeting is on Tuesday, and on Monday Microsoft will start to talk about, and show, Oslo to the world. So, we looked at all those things and decided to modify the meeting. Thanks to Scott Reed of Developmentor for being accommodating and yielding a time slot for me to do this.

 

As far as I know, this is the first user group presentation on Oslo and the new wave of technologies that Microsoft has been investing heavily in. This is the same presentation I did a couple of weeks ago at the SOA Symposium in Amsterdam, only I will be able to speak a bit more freely. If time permits, I will even show some tools (live, running bits, not just PowerPoint!).

 

Joe McKendrick, an analyst who writes the Service-Oriented blog at ZDNet, blogged about the Amsterdam presentation here.

 

You can get time/location information at the website, session info is below.

 

If you're in San Diego and work with .NET, you'll want to see this as it affects you greatly (although you may not know it yet :))

 

 

Session title:
A Look at Microsoft's New Wave of Technologies

Session abstract:
The technologies currently being built by Microsoft are a major initiative with a goal to make it easier to design, construct, deploy and manage distributed applications and services. It is an evolution of SOA technologies, encompassing Windows Communications Foundation, the next version of .NET, BizTalk Server, Windows Workflow Foundation, Visual Studio and more. Using those technologies as a starting point and building on them, the new "Oslo" modeling platform also introduces a suite of modeling tools and a repository that allow the creation of role-based tools that can be used throughout an application's lifecycle.

This wave of technologies will have a profound impact on the way software is created and managed. In this session, we will look at what an architect needs to know about the various technologies, and gain an understanding of how they fit together.

We're now just a few short weeks away from PDC, which promises to yield a bumper crop of announcements. Aside from the Oslo/Dublin stuff that regular readers of my blog know I follow closely, there will also be cloud-related announcements. One thing I would expect is that Live Mesh will either get more features/capabilities, or that it may become part of something larger. Either way, I'm a big fan of the existing offering, and am eagerly waiting to see where this leads.

 

Here's a few things I've done lately  that I think are pretty cool use-cases for Live Mesh:

Share, REALLY share

I started a new project recently, and I was given a client machine to work with (for security reasons, we cannot plug our laptops in to the network). The first thing I did was set up a folder on my desktop that I would use as a place to archive documents. Then, I synched it with my Live Mesh desktop. Next, I shared it locally (inside the network, a conventional folder share) with my fellow team members so they could also access it, so a colleague could drop a file in there, and it would propagate to my Live Mesh desktop-in-the-cloud. Lastly, from my Live Mesh desktop, I invited my colleagues and gave them rights to the folder so that they could also access the content from remote locations. Now,you may be wondering.... we already have MOSS and a project portal set up for collaboration. In addition, we also run Groove,  so I could have used that to replicate content. So, why did I do this? Because it was a geeky way to test the functionality.  I could also share the Live Mesh folder with anyone, even people who may not have Groove, or may not have rights to our MOSS portal. All in all, it was really cool, and quick to set up.

Almost like being there...

I have been in pretty intense travel mode for most of the year (when I go home now I call it a "visit"). This poses some interesting life logistic challenges, such as something arrives in the postal mail at home when I'm on the other side of the planet. So... using Live Mesh, I took my "public scans" folder and synched it with my Live Mesh desktop. I then synched that to a folder on my notebook. Now when something comes in the mail, I can tell my wife to put it on the scanner, and then using Live Mesh's remote desktop functionality, take control of my machine at home and scan the document. Once it has been scanned, it replicates up to my desktop and then to my notebook. Very cool!

And now, mobile....

Lastly, I discovered that there's a mobile Live Mesh experience (http://m.mesh.com). So, using my Windows  Mobile phone, I can get to my Live Mesh desktop, navigate to my "public scans" folder (or, of course, any other folder in my Live Mesh desktop), and see the PDF that was scanned and replicated above.

 

Clearly, I'm having far too much fun with Live Mesh, and I am eagerly awaiting whatever comes out of PDC around this...

 

I'll be at the SOA Symposium in Amsterdam next week, and am really excited about it. Amsterdam's a great place, I've been there a few times, and this is looking like it will be a really good event. I could do without yet-another trans-Atlantic flight, but, I'm getting pretty good at doing them.

 

At the Symposium, I'll be doing:

• My first-ever public-facing Oslo presentation, and to the best of my knowledge the second-ever conference presentation on Oslo by a non-Microsoft person (my friend David Chappell was first with one at TechEd this year). This is huge, and a major milestone that I can now talk about at least some of the vision (more will become public at PDC).
• A panel on the future of ESBs
• Visiting a user group in Utrecht and doing to do a BizTalk Development Best Practices presentation/workshop

 

I also plan to do Oslo presentations at a couple of locations in SoCal after PDC (I promise!), including my own user group in San Diego, and the L.A. CodeCamp. More on that later, I have to somehow make it align with a near-100% travel schedule, which will be a challenge, but I think/hope November may be slower, with hopefully "only" 50% or so travel.

 

As we head towards the PDC later this month, Microsoft today pre-announced some of the things you can expect to see there.

 

To meet the evolving needs of service-oriented applications, Microsoft is extending the capabilities of Windows Server, by adding a set of capabilities, "Dublin", aimed at making it easier to deploy, manage and monitor WF/WCF applications. For developers creating WF-based solutions, this is great news, because it means you will get an enterprise-grade runtime environment to host your WCF/WF. Prior to this, the only WF host from Microsoft was MOSS, you would have had to write your own host, which is a non-trivial task. Now, Microsoft has solved all those hard problems for you. If you're a BizTalk developer, then rest assured that you will get a host too that will run in this platform, and that all your investments are protected, BizTalk Server 2009 and the roadmap was announced recently, I blogged about it here.

 

I'm also excited about the enhancements to WF: workflows become declarative, and are XAML-based. You get a new flowchart workflow style. This is all building towards the future, and gets even more interesting with the  Oslo modeling platform. I'll have a lot more to say about that later, starting after PDC.

 

I'd also like to clarify something that may be, or could become, a source of confusion for you. There has been a subtle morphing recently of what the code name "Oslo" means. When there was just the vision, "Oslo" was used to refer to the entire spectrum of technologies that needed to be built to support the vision. Now that we are further along in the lifecycle, and bits are becoming real, those bits are naturally migrating towards what will ultimately be their ship vehicles.You can see some of that now, with the enhancements to WF/WCF that will be in .NET 4.0, and the process server capabilities that will be in the OS: these are things that used to be part of what "Oslo" was. So to be clear, when we say "Oslo" today, we are now referring ONLY to Microsoft's modeling platform. I like this shift, and it makes a lot of sense, although I find myself saying "Oslo and related technologies" a lot now when I refer to the whole vision.

 

Some early bits will be made available to PDC attendees, with betas to follow some time in the future. You can get an overview here. Steven Martin, Senior Director of Product Management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division (CSD), wrote about it this morning here.

 

We're in for an exciting ride folks, this is just the start....

 

I'm a bit late because of my extended bout of 100% travel, much of it disconnected, but I thought I'd do a post about this anyhow because it is a very significant piece of news.

Microsoft has announced that what was previously being called BizTalk Server 2006R3 has been renamed to BizTalk Server 2009.

Why is this announcement important? Because, if you've been following my blog and others, you know that Oslo and a wave of other technologies is heading towards us, and that there will be a first-release of some of this at the PDC in October. Many people are probably wondering: what does this mean to existing BizTalk customers? Are their investments protected? Is there a migration path? Is migration something that needs to be done? The BizTalk Server 2009 announcement should go a long way to reassuring people that their investments are protected, and that there is a BizTalk future in Oslo-land.

In the announcement, Microsoft also reaffirmed their commitment to continuing to release new versions of BizTalk Server at 2 year intervals.

Key highlights of what will be in BizTalk Server 2009 are:

• Support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio .NET 2008 and SQL Server 2008
• Support for Hyper-V virtualization
• A new version of Microsoft's ESB Guidance (more on this later, it's an impressive release)
• UDDI 3.0
• Team Foundation Services integration (MSBuild)
• EDI Enhancements
• RFID support for LLRP protocol, TDT standard, and Mobility stack
• New SQL and Oracle Apps adapters
• Upgrades for .NET 3.5 compatibility
• SWIFT enhancements

 

For more info:

• You can read more about this at the press pass interview with Connected Systems GM Oliver Sharp 
• You can read more about BizTalk Server 2009, and beyond, at the BizTalk Roadmap page

 

OK, keeping with the recent theme, here's another entry in my travel blog :) Very soon I will get back to technical posts, I have some pent-up ones waiting to be written, some about BizTalk and some about Oslo, so stay tuned!

We recently completed the design/planning stage for the Jordanian government ESB project. It has been an honor to work with such a talented team, and as part of the planning process we did a non-trivial amount of development, solving some very tough problems along the way. I made several trips to Amman over the past year, and took full advantage of being there by seeing as much as I could of the country in the time I had. I have been saying that I have seen more of Jordan than most Jordanians have.  A Jordanian challenged me on that, and I started listing off some of the things I'd done, and.... well.... it sounded like a blog post, particularly when he agreed that he had not seen many of these places :) It's was quite difficult for me to pick "high points", as I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see the country and region. However, I did it, and here is my list (photos below) of "do this if you go" for Jordan:

 

Petra	Voted in last year as one of the new seven wonders of the world, the "rose red city carved out of the mountains". I went there twice, once alone and once with my wife. Truly an amazing place, and well deserving of the title.  However, with the new recognition comes more tourists, there were definitely more people there this year than last year.
Wadi Mujib preserve	I did something like this in Utah a few years back, and it was called canyoneering. Basically, an all-day hike through the desert, much of it in a river (sometimes deep) the high point of which was rappelling down a 75 foot (25 meter) waterfall. An incredible experience.
Aqaba, and how I got there	Aqaba is at the south end of Jordan, and is a major economic zone/shipping port on the Red Sea. I heard there was a locals bus that went down there, so I did the 5 hour trip that way. I was the only North American (and non-Arab) on the bus, it  was a unique experience, one that I suspect would have made many North Americans feel uncomfortable, but as I enjoy "going local" and being outside my comfort zone, and this experience certainly did both. The reason I went to Aqaba was to see it, and to also do my first scuba diving in the Red Sea.
Irbid, Um Quais and Jerrash	This was a tour of northern Jordan, and some amazing Roman ruins (Jerrash was a major/important Roman city, and is one of the largest and most well preserved sites of Roman architecture in the world outside Italy)
Dead Sea	I actually got there three times, once to see it, another time it was my "base camp" for the Wadi Mujib hike, and then I stopped there with my wife so she could experience floating ON the water. If you go, be really careful not to swallow any of the water or get it in your eyes. It's about as pleasant as swallowing an acid. On my first trip, I did a side trip to see the Christ baptism site, with is about a half-hour away from the hotel area. While there, I could have literally jumped across the Jordan river and been in Israel, but the proliferation of guys with machine guns made me think that could be a Bad Idea.
Wadi Rum	This is the desert where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. I hired a private guide and we 4-wheeled throughout the desert, rode a camel, spent the night in a Bedouin encampment, etc. I learned a lot about their lifestyles and history, and, being a desert person, felt right at home.
Amman Citadel	More impressive ruins, and a great antiquities museum. I spent a ton of time in the museum, as they had some impressive artifacts/explanations. I was there the day before Barack Obama came, and it actually went into security lockdown while I was there. People inside could stay, but nobody else was allowed in. Security (army I think) was posted every 30 feet.

 

The Jordanian people themselves were awesome. I had heard before going there that most Jordanians speak English, and those that don't will still invite you into their homes for tea. I found them to be very kind, generous and helpful. The only possible exception to this is the taxi drivers who always seem ready to play "shaft the tourist", however, once I got the hang of how to deal and they saw I was a pseudo-local who knew how to play the game, they got more pleasant. Also, as I just recently found out, the Jordanian taxi drivers are really laid back and friendly compared to what I saw in Egypt!

I have a bazillion pictures of everything I did, here are some of the highpoints:

 

 

From Wadi Rum:

 

 

From the Amman Citadel

 

From Jerrash:

 

 

From Umm Qays, the middle photo shows the Golan Heights behind me, with Syria just to my left:

 

 

I had to work on my TechEd presentation one weekend, which sucked, but hey, if you HAVE to work a weekend, then why not do it at a really nice hotel on the Dead Sea? The first picture is that weekend, the others are from another visit to the area.

 

Pictures from Petra:

   

From Wadi Mujib:

 

Lastly, in case you were wondering about American cultural exports, you can find things like the Colbert Report, the Daily Show and Family Guy in Jordan. Here's Jon Stewart, with Arabic subtitles:

 

I'm not sure when my blog turned into a travel blog, but I think I may have found what I'll do as my next career :)

I've been very fortunate that work has taken me to interesting places, and I am able to jump off and see other interesting places. A few weeks ago I went to Dubai on my way home from Amman Jordan (where I'm working on a country-scale ESB project for Microsoft and the Jordanian government). I'm writing this in a taxi as my wife and I head to Petra (Jordan) for the weekend, then I work for another week in Amman before we head off to Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt) where I'll be doing more scuba diving in the Red Sea, and we'll be doing a side trip to Cairo for a few days to see the Pyramids and Sphinx.

But those are all future posts, this one's about last week when I went backpacking in the Sierras with my son.

A few years back my daughter and I backpacked out of Mineral King up to Franklin Lake (I did a post for that one too, which is here). I was inexperienced so we had far too much stuff, and to make it worse, we had more food than would fit in our bear canisters, so we had no choice, we had to make it to the lake where there were bear boxes. In my naive inexperience, my stretch goal was that the following day we'd keep on going up over Franklin Pass and down to the lakes beyond. The trip up to Franklin Lake almost killed us. We needed a day to recover before we could even day hike up to the pass, and we never went over.

This year, armed with far more backcountry experience, better gear and an insatiable drive to finish what I started, I went back with my son, determined to make it to the other side. And we did.

Here's the route we took:

 

If you can't read a topographical map, this one basically say "ouch". Every time you cross one of the bold lines, it hurts :)

The Mineral King valley is just perfect, very picturesque. If I set out to design "the prefect mountain valley", this would be it. Here's a picture of me as we're just starting out:

 

Then we began the climb up, this is the valley as seen from above (which gives you a great sense of the altitude gain):

We made it up to Franklin Lake in pretty good time, we had lots of daylight left.

People mean different things when they say "camping". To some it's "load up the RV", to others, "roughing it" means a state or national park where they have to line up for showers. For me, it means being as far from other humans as you can, being totally self-reliant, knowing that if you get in trouble you have to also get yourself out. Doing it my way takes you to much more interesting places! Here's our campsite overlooking Franklin Lake. There was another group (3 people) there that night, but they were far away and we never heard them.

And here's a view we had from our site. You can see we are almost above the tree line, and notice there's still snow around (in mid-August)

So, can you drink the water? Sure, but first you have to filter it, which is the hardest part of backpacking. I share the load with my kids though, here's Steven getting us our supply for the night:

Sometimes there are little surprises in the backcountry. Like a toilet. This one was probably built circa-1900, and has one and half walls still (barely) standing, but.... talk about a throne with a view!

 

The next day we hiked up to Franklin pass, given us a total altitude gain of some 5,000ft, taking us to 11,700ft, which means hiking with a backpack gets a whole lot more strenuous as the air is quite thin (particularly if you live at sea level like we do). Here's a view looking back at Franklin Lake, this again, gives you a great sense of the climb we did.

Then, looking over the other side of Franklin pass (roughly east-wards), we see where we're heading:

For two nights, this was our campsite at Forester. We had the whole lake to ourselves for those 2 days. I saw another group of people in the distance once, but they were just passing through on their way somewhere else. What really struck me about this lake was the silence. It was so absolutely quiet.

Here's another view of "our private lake":

Here's a shot of my "little boy" as we were chilling and enjoying our time at Forester:

And me taking a break on the way home:

 

We had planned to do the trip out in 2 days, but when the sky turned black and the hail started, we thought it would be best to do it all in one shot. That means we had an elevation gain of approx 2,000 feet (topping out at 11,700 feet, where the air is thin), followed by a drop of 5,000 feet  (yes, almost a mile of elevation loss, which is really hard on the toes and feet). And all that was over 12 miles, with lightening in the next valley over.  At the end of that, we had a 1.5 hour trip (about 25 miles) down a mountain road with 1.5 or so lanes, sometimes dirt road, lots of blind curves and multi-hundred-foot drops. It's a nerve-wracking drive, which acts as a natural filter as it keeps a lot of people out of the valley :) Then, thanks to various energy drinks and greasy food (pizza tastes incredible after a few nights of dehydrated backpacking food), we made the 6 hour drive home.

 

It seems I say this after almost every backpacking trip, but, this was the most physically challenging and demanding thing I've done in my life. And, I wouldn't have it any other way. The aches and pains have faded, but the memories we made will last our lifetimes.

 

And so it begins....

On October 8th, I will be presenting "A Preview of Microsoft Oslo" at the SOA Symposium conference in Amsterdam.

I have been fortunate to have been involved in the Oslo process since it began. And now, as we move closer to parts of it becoming real, we are allowed to talk publicly about it. I'm super-excited about this presentation, as I have been given permission by MSFT to present material that has previously only been shown internally, and I even have some tool prototype screenshots :)

This is the first of many many many Oslo presentations I will be doing over the next few years,  and I am honored to be one of the first in the world to be doing one. As far as I know the only non-Microsoft Oslo presentation that has been done at a conference so far has been by my friend David Chappell at TechEd US this year.

My session abstract is:

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Microsoft's Oslo project is a major initiative that represents a wave of technologies aimed at making it easier to construct, deploy and manage distributed applications and services. It is an evolution of SOA technologies, encompassing Windows Communications Foundation, the next version of .NET, BizTalk Server, Windows Workflow Foundation, Visual Studio and more. Using those technologies as a starting point and building on them, Oslo also introduces a suite of modeling tools and a repository that allow the creation of role-based tools that can be used throughout an application's lifecycle.

The impact Oslo will have on the developer community using Microsoft tools cannot be understated, and will be equivalent in orders of magnitude to the impact of .NET 1.0: it will be a game-changing revolution. In this session we will take a very early look at the architecture and some of the capabilities Oslo provides, as well as what some of the tools may be.

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If you're in the neighborhood, stop on by! The conference site is:

 

 

On my return home from Jordan last week I diverted through Dubai, because I was "in the neighborhood" and have long been curious about it. Several people that knew I was going have asked me about it, and as it's such a technology hotspot, I thought I'd do a short post as most people reading my blog are probably curious about it.

My executive summary: "Like Vegas, only more so". More buildings, more money, more construction, and a very strong drive to be the first/biggest/tallest/fastest/best at everything. It was really eye-opening.

My first experience was on landing we were told it was 44 degrees C outside, and humid (in Fahrenheit that works out to "really really inhospitably hot", 112-ish). No problemo. I'm a desert person, and I'd been warned by several people ("whatever you do don't go during the summer").

I stayed at 5-star hotel, and hung out in the executive lounge for happy hour, so maybe my experience was not a typical cross-section of the population, but the snippets of conversation I overheard were fascinating. Everybody was negotiating *something*, even though it was the weekend. Dubai is a haven for type-A personalities, overachievers that's don't have an off switch or pause button. About 80% of the population is non-UAE, many of whom are just working there for a while and moving on. The feel of business in the air was palpable, and was everywhere I went. They've taken what I think was once a sleepy trade port and turned it into a technology and financial hub. Everybody who's anybody wants to be there, all major companies and banks have operations there.

Nothing happens at a small scale in Dubai. They are putting up the Burj Dubai tower (photo below), but for competitive reasons have not announced what the final height will be. Every few months they just say "yup, we're going up a few more floors". They're building a monorail that will serve the entire city, and it looks like they're doing it all at once. No 5 mile pilot projects here, it seemed like 50 miles or so at once.

Here's the Burj Dubai tower from afar, with the monorail in the foreground and lots of other cranes (I suspect that the cranes breed at night when nobody is watching :)). If you zoom in you'll see how many cranes there are, and this is just ONE PART of Dubai.

This was one of the highpoints of my whirlwind tour. Three days a week, and the city's main mosque, a volunteer group does a 2-hour presentation for anyone that wants to attend on Islam and what it means to be Muslim. The reason why they do this is all about building bridges between cultures, I thoroughly enjoyed it, learned a lot, and am very thankful that they're doing their part to try to help make the world a better place. I am very glad I went and would HIGHLY recommend this if you visit Dubai.

I visited the "Chill Out" lounge, where everything is made of ice. Inside temp was -6 deg C (21F), while outside was 40+C (105+F). Everything you see is made of ice, and the place was full of ice sculptures. They serve drinks in glasses made of ice.

 

I went on a "desert safari", which was "dune bashing", night in the desert, Arabian BBQ, belly dancing, etc.

 

Trade has always been an important part of Dubai's history. I went on a boat ride on the Dubai creek, where a lot of "Dhows" like this dock. They are actively in use, the docks were stacked high with cargo.

 

I did the mandatory trip to the Mall of the Emirates, which is the largest shopping mall outside the US (I'm not a shopper, I went to 2 of Dubai's biggest malls, and the week before did both of Amman's biggest malls, and bought, in all..... nothing). Dubai is not really a walking city, particularly in the summer, so if you want to walk, you go to a mall. And, if you want to ski, you go to Ski Dubai at the Mall of the Emirates. Here's a picture (poor quality because it's through a window, I didn't feel a need to go in having already seen a lot of snow in my lifetime :)) of the ski lift.

And, in case you're wondering what an indoor ski hill in the desert looks like from outside:

In a place where they build ski hills indoors, what else might they do? Well, how about air-conditioned bus stops (and, they really need them)?

This is the Burj Al Arab hotel, the (self-proclaimed) world's only 7-star hotel, where you're assigned a butler when you check in. The round platform is the helipad, they offer a helicopter limo to the airport. This is on the same part of the coast where they're building all the man-made islands.

 

I visited a local "souk" or market, a maze of alleyways that most tourists don't seem to brave. I went in deep, and bargained masterfully with a spice merchant (I think I won because he seemed quite annoyed with me). The photo below shows the entrance, once you go in there, you could get lost for hours.

Here's another angle of the main downtown. It's pretty much impossible to take a picture where without getting construction cranes.

Lastly, I got a chuckle out of this, as it pretty much sums up what Dubai is all about. In near where I live in California, we have things like "Stagecoach Park", and "Dog Beach". In Dubai? "Gold and diamond park"!

 

[[ OK, I am writing this with tongue-in-cheek, which for anyone not familiar with that term, means "not really serious"!!! ]]

 

Funny thing happened today on the ESB project that I'm on....

After a day of hard work, solving some really tough technical challenges (the kind that makes your head throb, your eyes glaze over and make you think that becoming a carpenter could be a smart career move), I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the landscape (my desk). A piece of tattered paper caught my eye, the piece of paper the team had been using all day long to describe concepts, flow and "you are here" type information to ourselves. But, I saw it as if I was seeing it for the first time, and I was struck by what it had evolved into. Then I noticed that it was actually just the latest diagram in a series (we had no white board in that room). The first one was crisp, and not marked up, and on a relatively small piece of paper (could have been a cocktail napkin). All the others in the series (there were three more leading up to the final one) were progressively more marked-up, scribbled on, and tattered, and all on A4 size paper. So, I though I would share with you that vital piece of paper that some very bright people spent the day with. And, I'm not sure what happened to that bottom-left corner.

This my friends, is actually the architecture of a very cool world-class, country-scale ESB. It solves ALL problems associated with ESB and SOA architecture. It is a comprehensive solution that also even layers on end-to-end governance. We have intermediaries, bus services, generic on-ramps, SLA enforcement, itinerary repository... we have it all. In fact, if you have ANY questions about how all these things fit together, it's probably clearly explained in this diagram. This, in all its blazing glory, is real-world goodness I just had to share, for the benefit of the community.

Although this could be confidential in nature, I felt I was pretty safe posting it on my blog as the intellectual property is pretty much naturally protected. To the untrained eye, this looks like, well, I'm not sure what it would look like, probably just an unintelligible mess. But to us, it's pure gold, and the roadmap to success. Enjoy!!!

And no, I will NOT do a webcast to explain it. Tomorrow is a whole new day, and, who knows, maybe even worthy of a fresh piece of paper. This, however, is perhaps one of the finest pieces of "software architecture art" in existance :)