Monday, October 14, 2002

Clemens Vasters is probably the most influential and one of the smartest folks I interacted with at the DevCon. He blew my mind a couple of times but one of the biggest revelations he gave me was convincing me of the importance and use of EnterpriseServices in .NET. Now, I knew they were there and I knew it wasn't like COM: dead but still COM+ is so 3 years ago you know? It was Clemens who convinced me that not only is a lot of that stuff useful but some of it is actually extremely vital and important. So thats where I'm going in my research.  The other thing is that Clemens is not even remotely (pun intended) worried about speaking his mind and is extremely smart. So I read with interest today as he skewers Roger Sessions (quite overdue): "Roger Sessions writes about WS-Transactions in his ObjectWatch news letter and the article shows that he shouldn't. First, his "Shootout at the Transaction Corral" has the most confusing lead-in story that I've ever seen for a story about transactions. It starts with how to get breakfast from two places at the same time and how that is a real life coordinated transaction -- it may be so, but why make a "real life analogy" if that by itself is so far fatched that it's losing the whole point." and  "That's a pretty short-sighted statement, because that says that a fortress (I personally prefer the cuter term "fiefdom" coined by the guy who actually came up with this model: Pat Helland) is always implemented as a homogeneous system. Not so: A "fortress" is a system which can very well be implemented as a heterogenous assembly of services implemented on different machines, different OSses and different platforms. If that's so, you will need AT to coordinate local, distributed transactions across, for instance, J2EE and .NET. Web Services are about interop, not the internet!" and: I can tell you what SHOULD happen. IBM, Microsoft, and BEA SHOULD redo their model and make three changes: eliminate the WS-C specification, remove the WS-T dependency on WS-C, and put atomic web service transactions (ATs) where they belong, in the trash. " Well, I think that Roger Session SHOULD try to understand web services, transactions and real world system complexity. Even inside the "fortress", interop counts. 4:56:22 PM

Andres Aguiar's Weblog: "When we looked at the application, we were surprised. The database design was really bad. There were tables with no primary key, referential integrity constraint missing, etc. So, we wrote the article focusing in the database design. You can find it in PDF here (304Kb)"   4:49:04 PM

Fawcette has an article on Dig Into WS-Security with the WSDK, immeditely relevant after Keith Balinger's talk.They also have an article on Use X.509 Certificates with the WSDK. Again, great timing-) 10:28:38 AM

Ingo and I started doing some research into the Rotor implementation of Garbage Collection Saturday night/Sunday morning in my office. We dived down into the assembly (language that is) and found some things. However, we don't have enough data to form any conclusions yet. We willl be continuing this in the next few weeks and wil report what we find. 10:21:03 AM