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During the recent months I had to deal with several open source implementations like Log4J, Jacorb or Tomcat. While I was happy that it is free in terms of licence cost I was unhappy about some other issues that campe up when using it in an productive environment.

To make things clearer it sometimes helps to use an analogy.
In many aspects the use of software is similar to using like for instance a car or a hifi-system.

So what would you expect when buying a car? (at least I’m expecting that)
A .It should bring you from A to B in a secure and fast way.
B. It should be reliable and error free.
C. If an error comes up the garage should fix it as fast as possible.
D. The price/quality ratio should be reasonable.

Does it really matter, how the car works under the hood or that you can fix it on your own?
I think for 99% of drivers the answer is no.

The same applies to open source software. The fact that a software is open, semi open or closed source is not really a feature of a software (except of rare mainly academic cases).
The important thing is that the price/quality ratio is good so that it’s worth using it.
In brief the advantage of the features must be higher than the disadvantage of the cost.
I think this it true of all kinds of software.

My advice is as follows:

Use open source software when:
A. You can replace it easily without a lot of effort
B. The price/quality ratio is good in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO – be honest)
C. You are a geek and love it to do everything on your own
D. There is no other solution around

Don’t use open source software when:
A. You need a solution for infrastructure or mission critical applications except you can replace it easily
B. You need professional and guaranteed support
C. The open source software module can break the entire application
D. You have no choice due to your corporate policies

I know that this issue is very controversial – so what do you think?

At the MCT Party in Amsterdam Spiderman and Wolverine were invited as well.

Sometimes it might help to have some special powers as an IT-Trainer.
Greetings to Ken Rosen and David Lowe.

After one week TechEd Amsterdam I would like to say thank you to all the great people I met.
This year working at the Hands On Labs and Ask The Expert was again a lot of fun.
Moreover using all the new products and technologies was very interesting and will help us advising our customers in the future.
I hope to seeing you again next year or in the meantime.

Today I attended a panel discussion about Web Service architecture.
Beside all the new technologies which are shown at TechEd I mostly like these smaller sessions where interesting discussions can happen.
During the session a lot of interesting topics were adressed although not answered. What you can see are the new issues which arise when trying to set up a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Every new technology solves some problems but at the same time raises new questions.
That’s the great thing about information technology, isn’t it?

Let me give you a short summray of the most interesting topics:

– Generic service interfaces
– Dealing with referenced and replicated data
– Different service levels, service categorisation
– Service versioning
– Service contract lifetime
– Distributing service semantics
– Universal entity modeling

I would be happy to hear your ideas about these topics.
Feel free to contact me if your are at TechEd or anywhere else.

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 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 😉

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.