Anjana's Arena

It's not new for the software industry to be lead by the industry buzz words and hypes like SOA, EDI,ERP,CRM etc. Popular blogs, gartner reports and well marketed products usually contributed to these hypes. Though most of these hyped words proved good for us most of the times, still many developers usually followed them because of the hype, rather than the actual goodness of the product or technology.

Though this still contunues...but for the past few months, i am seeing a slightly new trend. [I should be saying i see an anti-pattern;)]
I am seeing that more than buzz words, buzz sentence or buzz thoughts are getting hyped up.
Two popular statements that i have been hearing a lot are 'AJAX is a hype and is not new' and 'Do no use SOA eveywhere for the sake of SOA'.

I am not now trying to analyse these two statements, if they are right or wrong.
But, what's funny here is even a developer who does not know the fullform of AJAX, knows that 'AJAX is a hype'. The statement  'AJAX is a hype' has become more popular than AJAX itself:) Someone if asks a developer, do u know AJAX, he says 'i do not know AJAX, but i heard it's hype'

And same thing with poor SOA as well. These days whereever i go, people are demystifying SOA. I wonder who mystified it in the first place;) (the same guys who are demystifying it now)
Anyways, all for good:)

There is a free Ebook on Sharepoint services, released as TechEd 2006 edition, based on May 2006 Pre-release for download.

People can downlaod it from here

Thanks to Eli Robillard's for the pointer, and he talks more on this in his blog...

I was just going thru all the TechEd sessions i felt like i should notedown briefly on the topics for some of the tracks. As TechEd covers so many tracks and topics, it's important to understand which track and sessions should one attend based on one's interest. Because it practically is not possible to attend all sessions:) ( i wish this was possible)

The below are my ideas on what these topics would be covering...But ofcourse for some of them even i do not have enough clue and are more of my assumptions...

In this post i would cover the topics for the Architect Track

Threat Modeling - The Essential Approach to Building Secure Software.

It's very important to understand and analyse the possible application threats and come up with workarounds from the application design time itself. Threat modelling is way to understand the adversary’s view, characterizing the security of the system, and determining the threats of the system. This approach helps in systematic way of building secure applcation.
Microsoft also has a threat modelleing tool for the same purpose.
I think this session will focus on the need for threat modeleling, and on the tool.

Case Study: Avanade Software Lifecycle Platform - Customizing VSTS to Your Own Methodology
VSTS is an integrated environement for applcation dveelopement and collaboration. Now VSTS, by default comes with MSF Agile process templates.
But then each company might use different processes and methodologies. VSTS allows us to customize the existing process templates to work with custom processes defined.
I think this session would cover as how Avanade has used VSTS features to cater to their own specific needs.

The Road Ahead: Where is Microsoft going with its Products and Why
With MS coming up with so many new technologies 'Windows Vista, WinFx, Office 2007, VSTS,Katmai,LINQ,DLINQ etc etc..It becomes important to know what's the roadmap for these technologies and how these would be used in future. This knowledge would help us to understand how to architect solutions for the future with these tchnologies. And we would also be able to discover the new opportunities that would open up because of new technology trends.
I think this session would be more in these lines.

Case Study: Designing Workflow Based Apps
Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) is an extensible programming model and runtime components for building solutions on the Windows platform. This is a part of WinFX. This session would show a POC that showcases the work flow automation and programming using WWF. 

Case Study: Architect & Collaboration Solutions Using Windows Vista Technologies
This would showcase a POC developed by Satyam Computer Services with Vista using the power of WinFX (WCF,WPF,WWF,Infocard) . 

Business is Business and IT is IT and Ever the Twain Shall Meet: Aligning IT with Business or Success
This session would cover the solutions to problems that creates ever lasting gap between the requirements (Business) and IT systems. The agileness of Business is not well aligned with IT systems and thus it makes the systems fail or creates over budgets in many cases. I hope this session should be able to give a thoughtful insight in to IT system's alignment with Business.

Motion: A Framework for SOA Adoption in the Enterprise
When an enterprise application needs to be architected, it's very important to understand an enterprise's end to end business model,it's weaknesses, capabilities and processes.

This is something that we have been doing, but architects never had any tool or a framework to do this so far.

Microsoft Motion is a methodology framework which helps the architects in analyzing the companies business model and understand their capabilities and weaknesses. This framework no where tells ' How' to solve the enterprise problems, but stresses only on 'what' are the enterprise problems and strenghts.

War of the TLAs: Demystifying the Buzz Words in Architecture
There are many Three Letter Acronyms(TLAs) like SOA, EDA  etc which are today's buzz words in Architecture world. It's very important to understand when and where to use these patterns or Buzzwords and when not to use them.

I think this session would be more the demystifying these buzz words and helping the architects to decide when to use SOA, EDA and other TLAs

Edge Architecture: Putting the User Back in SOA
When designing applications for enterprises, architects usually dwelve much on the technology aspects for SOA like websevices, reusability,patterns etc, but they miss to give equal importance to the users and the user experience .

SOA should help in increasing the business agility which is directly related to user experience. Hence an architect should give equal importance to the consumer/user and put the user back in SOA.

The edge architecture divides an application's architecture as consumer edge and enterprise edge. The enterprise edge is built with SOA related technologies and deals with enterprise services, and consumer edge incorporates the web 2.0 trends to improve the user experience.

This session might also be covering SaaS(software as services)

High Performance Computing: Why, How and Where to go the HPC Route
HPC has become very popular recently and most of the companies prefer cluster and grid system. As per HPC, Instead of running compute-intensive applications on one large specialized system we use high-performance clusters and grids that divide up the processing load across thousands of separate servers, workstations, or even PCs. This way multiple applications can be running on the same grid system without any dedicated servers, and hence the existing server resources get utlised to the maximum, and this reduces the need of buying new servers everytime with every new application. This works more on concept of virtualization.

So i think this session would talk more on the Microsoft roadmap in this space.

I will come up soon with draft on other tracks which do not have description and i think i can describe it. But i observed that most of the other tracks have either a video or description attached to it. This is a good thing they have done this time.

For any queries on TechEd , one can shoot queries to the experts at http://forums.techedindia.com

Just 3 more days for Teched 2006 to kick-off in India.

For the first time, we would be having two TechEd programs in each city.

One would be a two day program for Developers and Architects. And the other would an exclusive one day programing for IT Infrastructure professionals.

TechEd India 2006 is held across six cities. Detailed itinerary, conference fees and registration details can be found here

New Delhi - June 5 to 7, 2006   - Taj Palace 
Pune       - June 8 to 10, 2006  - Le Meridien 
Mumbai    - June 12 to 14, 2006- Renaissance Powai 
Chennai   - June 15 to 17, 2006 - Chennai Trade Center 
Hyderabad- June 19 to 21, 2006 - Shilpkala Vedika 
Bangalore - June 22 to 24,  2006- Grand Ashok

Apart from these mind blowing technical sessions, there would also be lots of fun and community events in between!

There are some videos that one can watch out for to get some understanding of what is going to be covered in each of these sessions. 

MVPs would also be conducting some pre and post webcasts and webchats on the TechEd topics. Hopefully i would also be doing one very soon!

And for people who have some queries regarding the event or any technical queries regarding the TechEd topics, they can post their queries here http://forums.techedindia.com and MVPs and other experts would be answering these queries.

So 3 more days..and untill then let me be hooked to this contest to win a T-Shirt. Check here

I think VSTS and TFS was a one of the great and very thoughtful releases made by Microsoft to work in a single integrated and collaborative environement and for better application life cycle management.But the developer edition was so far focussing on .NET developers, and this has made me wonder as how can VSTS be used practically for end to end developement without a proper place for DB developers to develop, test and collaborate.

But the good news is that MS  would releasing VS Team Edition for DB Professionals very soon:)

This would allow DB developers to

• Take Control of Database Change
• Automate Database Testing to Improve Quality
• Improve Collaboration and Communication