Author: Wolfgang

The Second Day at TechEd

On the second day I attended some interesting sessions.
One was about Microsoft and Open Source. Very interesting what Microsoft says about Linux, Application server, Standards and other open source products.
Althought it’s not an easy subject to speak about the atmosphere was very calm, open and polite.
I like this kind of constructive communication. Some of the comments were very enlighting.
I attended a Don Box session about several hosting containers as well. No comments.

At the end of the day I attended a session about mobile development with the Compact Framework 2.0. Very interesting.
In general the main topic in terms of development is the upcoming product release of Visual Studio.NET 2005.
It’s great to see new visual modeling support inside the development environment.
Whitehorse will inprove the way operations people, developers and architects will work together. And there will be a class designer for roundtrip engineering as well. It’s not an MDA approach, but a pragmatic modelling approach to enable developers to do round trip engineering. I’m glad to see that.
The new features of ASP.NET are very exiting as well. You will have personalization, authentication, and portal support with low effort. The languages have been improved as well. We’ll have generics and new (and easier) C++ language extensions.
On the whole a lot of improvements which will ease the development.
And the best thing is WSE2.0 now fully supports the OASIS WS-Security specification from 6.April 2004. This is the first toolkit available which can be used to create standards compliant secure Web Services.
What was first – the specification or the product? This question has not been answered yet.

TechEd Amsterdam is Starting

TechEd 2004 Amsterdam is starting today with the preconference sessions.
By now my first impression are about Amsterdam itself. It’s an interesting location. I think the conference will surely contiune after the end of the sessions.
The event preparation seems to be as perfect as always. It’s amazing to see all the technical infrastructure. But the best is to meet all the people from around the world.
Today we had some presentations from the MCT program manager. The bar will raise again for the upcoming MCT program year in order to continue the best possible customer satisfaction hiring a Microsoft Certified Trainer. Sorry, a little bit of marketing should be allowed 😉

Don’t Miss It!

This year I will attend the Tech Ed 2004 in Amsterdam from 27.June until 2.July.
I’ll be proctoring the Hand on Labs and be available the Ask the Expert stand for you.
If you visit Tech Ed as well don’t hesitate to contact me.
I look forward meeting all the nice people that I met in Barcelona last year.

My daily impressions will be written directly into this blog.
I’ll try to give you as much first hand information as I can.

WS-Security is Final

On April 6th 2004 OASIS ratified the WS-Security specifications. This is an important step for the adoption of Web Service technology as it is one of the building blocks of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).
It seems that Gartner shares this opinion: Gartner Advise Enterprises to Adopt Web Services Security (WS-Security).

I think in the near future all leading application servers / frameworks will support these specifications and thus make it possible to write secure and interoperable Web Services.

That’s great.

The RAD Experience

After evaluating Weblogic Workshop 8.1 for a while I think this is what the J2EE community needs.
I have been working with Visual Studio .NET since the very first days. When I used it the first time I was very excited about how easy it is to create applications without all the plumbing. Due to this capabilities it was a lot of fun to deliver what I call Coding On Demand (COD) Workshops. That is gathering requirements and then code the solution together with the attendees. Unluckily it was not possbile to present COD/J2EE Workshops as it was nearly impossible to code an deploy an EJB from scratch in front of a waiting audience. It simply was too time consuming and boring.

But now Weblogic Workshop uses the same approach to create Applications as Visual Studio .NET. With help of code annotations (aka attributes) the compilers do all of the plumbing for the developer. Now one can code and deploy a enterprise level in a few minutes (ok, let’s say a small one).

The drawback is that you definitively loose vendor independence as the javadoc annotations are proprietary. But who cares? Everyone who has ever tried to change the application server knows that vendor independence is just a marketing promise. Let us face it. No vendor is really interested to allow the replacement of it’s product without costs. And most of the companies have strategic alliances for good reason.

Tools like Weblogic Workshop (WLW) are great to speed up the development. But the developer still has to know what happens inside the server in order to create sophisticated applications.
I’m glad about WLW as it gives me new opportunities to build more powerful applications in less time.
See A Study In Enterprise Development Productivity for a comparsion of API coding (with IBM WSAD) vs. using J2EE development framework (with BEA WLW) for further information.

Enjoy.