This week I’ve been attending Microsoft’s Tech-Ed 2007 conference here in Orlando at the gigantic Orange County Convention Center. A group of us from work ascended upon Orlando on Sunday and Monday to check out new Microsoft technologies, do some recon on products we’ve recently brought into our “enterprise” and to get out of the office fray for a bit and communicate the with the people that design the tools we use on a daily basis.
Besides the unbelievable amount of walking, which has left my left leg and right knee extremely sore and somewhat permanently damaged, the conference has been just okay.
With very high expectations, Monday was a complete downer for me. I arranged my schedule last week and quickly realized that I would need to reschedule on-the-go. Two of my sessions were in what they call “Interactive Theaters” which are like big cubicles with extremely limited seating. If you don’t arrive fifteen minutes early, there’s a good chance you won’t get a seat. And if you don’t get a seat you can’t see or hear anything. To me, this idea is incredibly stupid. I’d say there are 12,000-15,000 people here. There are going to be times where more than thirty people want to see one of these presentations. So I started avoiding the “Interactive Theaters” and opted for the breakout sessions in normal rooms with plenty of seating.
My primary focus for being here is to learn more about BizTalk Server practices specifically related to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the idea of message buses. My secondary goal is to learn more about Microsoft’s approach to SOA. Thirdly, I want to learn more about integration techniques with BizTalk, MS CRM and SharePoint.
I’m pleased with the amount of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) focused talks considering I’ve yet to meet anyone that is actually implementing WCF in production systems.
I’ve also had time to talk to a few of the Microsoft guys on the floor about BizTalk, which is interesting but I’m taking their recommendations with a grain of salt.
Perhaps the most interesting talk thus far was Rocky Lhotka’s talk on Object-Oriented, Service Oriented and Workflow. I’ve seen parts of this talk at VSLive just a month ago. The basis is somewhat common sense– use the best tool for the job. When I talk about SOA, I don’t even consider the strictest of implementations. To me that’s recipe for disaster.
SOA to me means loosely coupled systems and that’s it. It doesn’t mean everything in your environment has to be service-oriented nor should it be. Software architectures need to be flexible and extensible, but also practical. Service orientation, in most cases, is not practical. Currently at work we incorporate bits and pieces of service orientation where it makes the most sense. That doesn’t mean we’re an SOA shop. It just means we’ve concluded, before SOA became a buzzword, that sometimes it made a lot of sense to break up a workflow or process into smaller more granular applications (or services) that act like black boxes, constantly acting on messages (or data in our case).
