VS2005 and SOAPExtensions

For the last couple of days I have been concentrating on creating some SOAP extensions that will allow me to Log messages, validate messages and monitor performance counters in my web services. I got stumped the other day when I was trying to debug the extension by adding them to a dummy web service. It turns out in VS 2005 when using the default documentation page to send soap to the web service I could not get the SOAPExtension to load. After spending a day researching I discover the problem is IE when sending the message uses HTTP GET and this does not get intercepted by the SOAP Pipleline. Finaly I had to use Altova XML SPy to send test message to the service in order to debug. Finally it is working now; just got to finish my Logging, Validating, Authenticate, Timing and Exception throwing SOAPExtension library.

Companies get the systems they deserve

Over the past couple of years working with various clients in Australia, Eurpoe and US I often came accross organisations whose applications were siloed and in total mess. During these times I did often wonder how did they get there, understanding that is partly the way to help them get out of it. Recently I came accross following quote and I think in few lines it aptly sums up the issue. Challenge is how do you fix something as fundamental as this.

Jim Crookes, Chief Architect at BT has observed,
“Companies get the systems they deserve. A company's systems estate is a result of its culture, organizational history, and its funding structures. Coherent, well integrated systems will only ever exist in companies that value coherence and integrated service.”

Just when you thought VB6 was dead

I recently came across this while reading Australian IT and could not resist the urge to blog about it. Sun and Microsoft have teamed together and released Semplice. You might be wondering what is Semplice. Project Semplice - Visual Basic for the Java Platform, yes indeed. It will allow you to compile your program to Java platform and run it on any platform that JVM supports. You never thought that it would be possible to run VB6 on mainframes did you. Well here is your chance :-)

More details here, have fun. Would be interesting to see how this technology is received and pans out.
http://blogs.sun.com/herbertc/entry/project_semplice_visual_basic_for

Business architecture

When doing Enterprise Architecture for any organisation, most people tend to start from bottom up. They would map out the infrastructure architecture (more or less what assets they have), application architecture and may be their information architecture. What often gets left behind is the business architecture, fundamentally what is the organisation trying to achieve and does all its assets support that objective. The key to achieving this is to have a solid understanding of what business motivations are what are its strategy and then map it back to its applications and infrastructure, while maintaining all the relationships that exist between all the entities.

Just trying to visualise (Business Strategy to Function to Application and finally to Infrastructure) the scenario will send most people into a head spin, often we try to visualise the complexity using Visio or PowerPoint. These are good presentation tools but lack the depth when it comes to modelling dynamic relationships. This then leads to simplifications and the risk of abstracting the reality away just so we can fit it into the modelling tool of choice.

In next couple of weeks I will try and blog around this concept and how it then translates into SOA (Business Services vs. Web Services).

Another blog from inside Microsoft Word 2007 Beta as you can see I am loving this.

My first Word 2007 Blog post

This is a test blog to see if I can publish from right inside Word 2007 Beta.

Excellent Enterprise Architecture Books

For past few weeks I have had the pleasure of working with Adrian (he is a Principle in Architecture and Strategy Team), during this time we have had numerous discussions about what should make an Enterprise Architecture. Surprisingly we have been in violent agreement all the time. He shares the same view as me EA is more that IT it should encompass all aspects of an organisation including manual tasks. Often when we focus too much on IT aspect is when we miss the flow on effects manual tasks have on IT dependent processes.

Adrian being more experienced than I am (having been Chief Architect for 3G at Vodafone in UK), has written a simple book on the EA framework that he has developed during his career. I would recommend it to anyone considering some light reading on the topic.

Book Details:
"An Enterprise Architecture Development Framework: The Business Case, Framework and Best Practices for Building Your Enterprise Architecture" : by Adrian Grigoriu
Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1412086655/sr=1-1/qid=1154835650/ref=sr_1_1/104-0229407-0975133?ie=UTF8&s=books

Some changes for good in my life

I have been silent for a long time on this blog and it has been due to some personal reasons. Most of you who knew me professionally were aware that I was working as National Lead Architect for Volante Software Solutions in Sydney. Volante became target of a hostile takeover by Commander Communications and they won after a protracted period. At this point I thought it may not be a bad idea to explore greener pastures.

Couple of months back I got a firm offer from Oakton to join their Enterprise Strategy and Architecture team as an Enterprise Architect. I did accept the offer and for past one month have been working with them. Having said that I am still passionate about technology and Microsoft .NET so will continue to blog about that including SOA, and some new areas around Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture and what ever else that catches my fancy :-) .

Agile dev end of life, Waterfall is back

For all the SCRUM and Agile people out there, Waterfall is back have a look at this conf and meet all like minded people. http://www.waterfall2006.com/

One of the guys at work sent me the link after I had been pestering everyone why Agile is so cool....

:-)

I found the following really funny and will resonate with all Architects.

"If designs are ruined by execution details, then we should divorce designs from execution. Implementation is harmful to designs! Implementation ruins the elegance, beauty, and symmetry of designs. The problem is execution; and so it is execution that must be eliminated. As a community of designers we need to insist that our designs remain unexecutable!"

Every thought what would happen if Amazon and Google were to merge

This is an old movie but a classic it looks at how we bloggers are changing the world, what would happen if Google and Amazon were to merge and become one company how will Microsoft respond. What will happen to all of us the bloggers......in 2014.

Have a look at this http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/ might change your perspective at things.

I remember at the last Code Camp in Wagga Wagga someone (an un-named person :-) ) said, "I don't buy books any more, prefer to read blogs instead" think about that after seeing this movie....I am already seeing in my profession what I call Bloggitechture (Software Architecture by blogs ).


By now I think I have pissed of quite a few people so let me stop now.

Ever wondered how much your blog is worth

This one is worth B$1,297.49 there is a web site which calculates what blogs are worth. Mine is way lower than Frank's which is worth a princely amount of B$19,216.04. You can check your blog rating out on this page http://www.blogshares.com/ . This is the trading history of Franks blog
http://www.blogshares.com/newgraph.php?type=price&large=true&blog=http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/

Future Shock and our daily lives

<>
For those who know me, will know my fascination for the book Future Shock written by Alvin Toffler. He was recently in Sydney Australia and said the following in his interview with Australian Financial Review.
"The issue is not jobs but creating value, creating something that someone else needs," he says. "Whether you get that through a regular, paid job, whether you do that as a freelancer, or whether you do that as a group that forms itself for a purpose and then folds up its tent."

Everyday we worry about the fact where our next job is going to come from, how will Indian outsourcing engine will effect us. Yet we continue along creating value for our customers and employers hence remaining employed. Fundamentaly I think the day we stop creating value will be the day we slowly start moveing towards unemployment.

His other thought that interested me the most was "It a period in which wealth is now mobile and we can reverse the tyranny of distance because value is so often based on intangibles and weightless products. ". Which is so true did I write a kilo of code today :-) or how many kilos of software did Microsoft ship this month.

Anyway I am eagerly waiting for his new book "Next May, Toffler publishes his latest book, Revolutionary Wealth (Alfred A. Knopf), about the way we are making money and will continue to make money in the knowledge economy. " April 25th to be precise.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375401741/103-2029315-9912650?vi=ossnet-20&n=283155
<>

Chatty or Chunky Interfaces

I came across this article sometime back and thought to share it around. I have often discussed this during interviews and architectural reviews and was really surprised to find how many developers and solutions architects fail to comprehend the performance hits between chatty interfaces and chunky interfaces. This is especially true for web services, I can give more examples of bad Web Services implementations with 100's of method calls running over internet or WAN's resulting is slow or badly performing applications. Some of the classic implementations are where the developer decides to decorate every function call in their business logic layer with attribute and rest is history.

One such Architecture that I had the privilege of working with was Oracle Forms running over internet. Forms sends every user click back to the server for processing, this results in very bad user experience over slow connections and sometimes database corruptions. Let me just say I don't work for that organization anymore and all the issues I had predicted at design time are croping up now. Oh well all you do is say if your boss does not listen and you know it is going to be a disaster polish up your resume :-).

Ingo in the following article really sums up the issues involved with chatty interfaces. Fundamentally if you have an application in production using chatty interface, better start working on improving the speed of light :-).

Pasted from <http://blogs.thinktecture.com/ingo/archive/2005/11/08/LatencyVsBandwidth.aspx>


Latency vs. Bandwidth – Developers vs. Einstein

One piece of The Ultimate Wisdom which is quoted quite often is that "chatty interfaces kill the performance of a distributed application". But actually, it's not the chatty interface which kills it - the really limiting factor is instead one of the handful of unchallenged physical constants of this universe: the speed of light. But let me come back to this later.
Whenever something - and this can be something non-physical like a stream of bytes or a huge chunk of extremely physical rocks - needs to move, you can choose between a set of different alternatives in the way you transport it: You can transfer as much as possible in one go, or alternatively, you could take multiple round trips with smaller amounts of your payload. When you're a teenager moving out of your parent's house, you will quite likely just pack your stuff into your and your friend's cars and just hit the road, going back and forth a few times just to get out as quickly as possible. Years later, after you bought and sold the right stock at the right time, you might instead hire someone to move everything from your 8 bedroom home in one state to your new mansion in a different state using just one big truck and trailer. (Unless of course, you had special help with your choice of stocks, in which case somebody will move you with a rather small car to a rather small room in your final roundtrip for the next 15 years.)
Is Bigger Better?
Despite the fact that reducing the number of roundtrips usually decreases the complete processing time, the usage of smaller units of transportation also has a few advantages: you can for example unpack the first boxes and start using their contents while the rest of your flat is still being sent in smaller packages. That’s what we ended up calling streaming. (My wife would now point out the fact that somebody in our family always managed to be out of the country whenever the two of us moved. That’s what we ended up calling slipping away. Unless you are my wife, in which case you would have use a slightly more explicit term.)
You also get the benefit of being able to use the smaller self-contained packages which might arrive out of sequence. In computer systems, this is sometimes implemented by only returning a small response (let’s say only the header information) as the answer of a synchronous request while returning the detailed information asynchronously using a message queuing system. In real life, I tend to implement this during my regular commuter flights: no matter whether or not my checked bags are delayed or re-routed, I will always have my computer, a power adapter, a toothbrush, and clothes for the next day in my carry on luggage. Especially when traveling via CDG or LHR.
The Speed Of Light – Or: In Doubt, Assume Bandwidth
But in any case: the general recommendation is that chunky interfaces are better than chatty ones. This suggestion is based on the belief that, in doubt, you should assume high bandwidth but not low latency. And this belief in turn is grounded in one ultimate fact: the former can be bought with money – the latter can’t.
I’ve been online since 94. At that time I used a 1200 baud modem to connect to the Internet via terminal dial-in to a Unix box. For me the WWW was Lynx, but that’s a completely different story. At that time, I could send a ping from Europe to the US in about 1200 milliseconds. Today, I can roundtrip the same ping in about 120 milliseconds. But today, I can download the full 3629.6 MB of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite in approximately 6 hours from a random hotel room. This is coincidentally what I’m doing right now which triggered the writing of this article.
The Long Walk
If I would have done the same thing back in ’94, it would have taken roughly 367 days to transfer the 3,805,911,450 bytes with approximately 120 bytes per second, including start/stop bits and hardware compression. Just to put this into perspective: let’s assume that your hotel room is at the point on this earth which is the farthest away from Redmond. (The fact that penguins will be the only neighbors on this small island might make you think again about the likely roots of the Linux mascot.) If you would have received divine help to walk over water towards the Microsoft HQ, something interesting would have happened: With a swift pace of 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per hour for 12 hours a day, you would have finished the roughly 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) on the earth’s surface in 333 days (23.7 fortnights) which means that you would have had your hands on Visual Studio about a month earlier than your friend who started the download at the same time when you left the island.
Now, of course, this would not have helped you too much as you would have had to wait two more years for a DVD player to become available 1997.
But I think that it’s really interesting to see that the end-to-end bandwidth increased by 1468 times within the last 11 years while the latency (the time a single ping takes) has only been improved tenfold. If this wouldn’t be enough, there is even a natural cap on latency. The minimum round-trip time between two points of this earth is determined by the maximum speed of information transmission: the speed of light. At roughly 300,000 kilometers per second (3.6 * 10E12 teraangstrom per fortnight), it will always take at least 30 milliseconds to send a ping from Europe to the US and back, even if the processing would be done in real time.
That’s why most people recommend chunky interfaces instead of chatty ones to optimize for higher latency instead of smaller bandwidths: The latter will be solved automatically; the former only if you prove Einstein wrong.

posted on Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:38 PM

Found a solution architect

Remember sometime back I had blogged about the fact I was looking for a Solutions Architect, well after a long and hard search finally found someone, it came as a pleasant surprise to find out he blogs as well ( Out of personal experience I can tell you this it is quite hard to find the right person you just have to keep your standards up and persevere). Check out Arons blog http://ruskydotnet.blogspot.com/ he is cool and passionate about .NET, in some respects I think a bit more than me.

Welcome aboard Aaron.

CTP of Enterprise Library and download issues

I have two rants.
Start RANT
1. I have been desperately trying to download the CTP version of Enterprise Library and for some reason it keeps on asking me to join the Project. I don't want to join the project just give me the library such that I can get on with it. (BTW if any one has ideas on how I can get my hands on the CTP it would be appreciated).
2. I have been looking around for the ODP.NET (Oracle's data provider) implementation for DAUB (Data Access Application Block) and not been able to find anything. I am sure someone out there has written this. I hate to write the provider and then find out it was already available. Any hints most appreciate :-)

End RANT

WSE 3.0 and MTOM

Over my holidays I started playing with WSE 3.0 and VS 2005. As part of the exercise built a simple web service that would allow people to send pictures and view pictures. All worked well till I enabled MTOM on the services. Since then everything the client tries to connect to the service it gets the following message "The request failed with HTTP status 415: Unsupported Media Type.". I have looked around in newsgroups and not found any resolution. BTW the web services is hosted inside IIS running on XP pro with SP2, have not tries if it will work on VS 2005 inbuilt web server (had I chosen directory option instead of web server).

For now I have decided to move on if any of you find a resolution do let me know, if I find it will post it here.

The raw messages is below that is sent to server
"POST /VisitorDataService/VisitorService.asmx HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MS Web Services Client Protocol 2.0.50727.42)
VsDebuggerCausalityData: uIDPo4jPn8RWmPlAjcQTkQgpUHMAAAAAX7/rVlC6HkyUzBUqLrewxBLVzD4GiL1Cips5Q4ONci0ACAAA
SOAPAction: "http://www.shajisethu.com/schemas/VisitorService/getVisitors"
Host: sethu.homedns.org
Content-Type: multipart/related; type="application/xop+xml"; boundary=--MIMEBoundary632701497681437264; start="<0.632701497681437264@example.org>"; start-info="text/xml; charset=utf-8"
Content-Length: 1424
Expect: 100-continue
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive


----MIMEBoundary632701497681437264
content-id: <0.632701497681437264@example.org>
content-type: application/xop+xml; charset=utf-8; type="text/xml; charset=utf-8"
content-transfer-encoding: binary

http://www.shajisethu.com/schemas/VisitorService/getVisitorsurn:uuid:bd1fa634-e620-4649-a316-b7d64d80e71bhttp://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing/role/anonymoushttp://sethu.homedns.org/VisitorDataService/VisitorService.asmx2005-12-13T22:36:08Z2005-12-13T22:41:08Z
----MIMEBoundary632701497681437264--"

Looking for a Solutions Architect

This may not be the right forum to post this advert but I am trying anyway :-)

The company I work for Volante (http://www.volante.com.au ) is looking for a Software Solutions Architect based in Sydney Australia reporting to me (NSW Software Solutions Manager). It is an exiting role and quite challenging, will involve giving presentations to CIO and COO level executives including tender bid management. I have pasted the details from the advert below and if you are interested please feel free to contact me on Shaji(dot)Sethu(at)volante(dot)com(dot)au.

Please note only Australian Permanent Residents will be considered as most of our clients are government agencies.

Location - Sydney (some interstate travel) Australia

Immediate start

Volante is expanding its Software Solutions Team in NSW. This team specializes in Application Development (.NET), Enterprise Information Access Solutions, Workflow Solutions, and Business Integration (thru Web Services) using EAI tools like BizTalk 2004. We are seeking a highly talented person with demonstrated skills in:

• Architecting and implementing software solutions
• Technical management of fixed price projects
• Delivery of consulting services

The role requires a mixture of technical and business skills. Broad and deep technology knowledge, the ability to architect end-to-end business solutions, and a thorough understanding of Service Oriented Architectures and Web Services (Contract first approach) are required with strong emphasis on XML skills. Just as important are commercial acumen and the ability to understand customer’s business model and processes.
Must be able to think ‘outside the box’ to bring together ‘packaged’ products to deliver cohesive solutions aligned to business requirements.
Must be able to communicate at any level from developers to Cxx level. Must be able to talk to executives about their business requirements and what causes them pain (without talking technology) and then translate those requirements into an effective technology solution that will work within the constraints of their environment.
Must be able to collect customer requirements using a number of techniques such as workshops, interviews, precision questioning, surveys etc and then document them using industry standards like IEEE 830 specifications. The solutions architect must be able to take these requirements and then translate them into software architecture using MDA approach (UML 1.4 – 2.0 preferred). Any familiarity with Enterprise Architecture frameworks like Zachman and TOGAF would be highly desirable.
Must be able to manage the complete lifecycle of large and complex projects.
Must be able to manage, mentor and build teams.
Must readily accept ownership of problems and source effective solutions.
Must have a passion for the customer, which is demonstrated through professionalism and striving for excellence in all aspects that impact the customer.

Must have experience in as many of the following as possible (minimum of 4):

• .NET Visual Studio 2003 (Framework, VB.NET, C#, ADO.NET, ASP.NET)
• MS CRM 1.2
• MS Sharepoint Portal Services
• MS Commerce Server
• MS Content Management Server (CMS)
• SQL Server
• MS Analysis Services
• MS Reporting Services
• Microsoft Solution Accelerators
• BizTalk 2004
• Meridio or any other document management system (Trim, Hummingbird, etc)
• Workflow Systems (Captaris, K2.NET, etc)
• Holocentric Business Modeler or any other business process modeling tools
• Must enjoy being ‘hands-on’ and should have superior written and verbal communication skills as the job will involve giving presentations to Cxx level executives.

A tertiary qualified candidate (preferably in Computer Science) with 10 years industry experience would be highly desirable. Any cross industry experience would be favorably looked upon.
This position has become available as a result of internal promotion.

IFPUG Function Point Counting http://www.ifpug.org/

Today I started working on a tender response to a client which required Function Point Counting to be used as a basis for estimating the size and cost of the project. To be honest I had never heard of Function Point Counting before now, so I did what all of us in Software Development do. Went and searched Amazon and bought the book most users recommended http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0201699443/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-3488611-1234263#reader-link and plan to read up on it before the week ends. For the uninitiated here is what function point counting is all about.

 

"Function Point Analysis (FPA) is a sizing measure of clear business significance. First made public by Allan Albrecht of IBM in 1979, the FPA technique quantifies the functions contained within software in terms that are meaningful to the software users. The measure relates directly to the business requirements that the software is intended to address. It can therefore be readily applied across a wide range of development environments and throughout the life of a development project, from early requirements definition to full operational use. Other business measures, such as the productivity of the development process and the cost per unit to support the software, can also be readily derived.

The function point measure itself is derived in a number of stages. Using a standardized set of basic criteria, each of the business functions is a numeric index according to its type and complexity. These indices are totalled to give an initial measure of size which is then normalized by incorporating a number of factors relating to the software as a whole. The end result is a single number called the Function Point index which measures the size and complexity of the software product. "

I will try and blog on my exp with this methodology, if any one else has used this before would appreciate your feed back.

 

Should we abandon WSDL?

I came across this write up recently.
http://www.webservices.org/ws/content/view/full/62161

"Philosophically contract-first is a good idea because it elevates the exchange of business documents to be the primary artefact around which systems are built. Modelling such exchanges leads to integration at a high level and should in turn lead to solutions which are suitably loosely coupled.

However, pragmatically contract-first is hamstrung by the contract languages which Web Services practitioners have at their disposal. WSDL is cumbersome and provides the wrong set of abstractions, while WS-BPEL is heavyweight and relies on WSDL. Given the prevailing conditions, contract first is fraught with difficulty when contract languages are brittle and unwieldy.

Using WSDL as the contract language for contract-first development may require some creativity at best. At worst the contract language will constrain the underlying service implementation resulting not so much with a robust Service-Oriented Architecture but a rather limp RPC-ish one. If that is the case, then it makes sense to drop WSDL in favour of some other contract language whether that is SSDL, BPEL, or simply schemas and natural language descriptions of message exchanges. Ultimately it boils down to the fact that the services are there to support the business and the contract language must be able to capture business interactions. A contract language should enable rather than constrain business protocols: the tail, after all, does not wag the dog."

Having said this I must look into SSDL, when I first started down the path of integrating hotel systems for chains I was doing it using XML over HTTP using MSMQ as asyn layer. Things were simple before we had SOAP, WSDL and WS-I, does anyone remember ebXML looks like it may have died a natural death.

Going by SSDL we should just have schemas and use SOAP to transport it without the constraints of WSDL....hmm not a bad idea eh..........

 

Cisco Readies XML Devices, Software AON (Application-Oriented Networking)

CISCO is coming out with new XML Router, the reason this excites me is due to this factor.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1826721,00.asp
"Cisco is using Tarari's programmable chip to perform low-level tasks such as checking XML signatures and verifying XML schemas. But Cisco's AON developers have also created a substantial amount of technology, including agents that work with the chip and handle tasks such as XML message transformation, which makes it possible to exchange XML messages between two systems that use different XML schemas."

This will mean we can have a router behind our firewall which will inspect every xml stream coming it and validate it against corporate schema repository. If not valid will discard it, otherwise route it appropriately. This implies we will have schema's for our web services, most of us who use contract first approach will nod our heads and say yeah (we are prepared for this world). Others I will leave to search Google and find out what I mean.

In addition by verifying XML signature on the chip and doing XSLT transformation we have taken the processor intensive task out of software and relegated it to the hardware making the messaging sub-system that much more faster.

In the past week or so I have been playing around and reading up on the CISCO call manager which allows one to send XML messages to the CISCO IP telephone, now with AON possibilities are limitless and I am exited :-)

Ohh well I am a nerd..................

Face Recognition and everything in between

 In the past few days I have been playing around with face recognition software trying to build my own identification. I have tried a few dll from various vendors and have not had much luck. Has anyone out there played around with this stuff, if so any pointers would be appreciated.

While trolling through the net found following snippet
"A study by the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, found false-negative rates for face-recognition verification of 43 percent using photos of subjects taken just 18 months earlier, for example. And those photos were taken in perfect conditions, significant because facial recognition software is terrible at handling changes in lighting or camera angle or images with busy backgrounds. The NIST study also found that a change of 45 degrees in the camera angle rendered the software useless. The technology works best under tightly controlled conditions, when the subject is starting directly into the camera under bright lights - although another study by the Department of Defense found high error rates even in those ideal conditions.  Grainy, dated video surveillance photographs of the type likely to be on file for suspected terrorists would be of very little use.
"
That is a bit discouraging but I persevere :-)

Any help from the larger collective would be appreciated.