Sam Gentile's Blog (if (DeveloperTask == Communication && OS == Windows)

Harry wonders if it has been a slow week. It started that way for me but its certainly not now with both work and the Orcas CTP release. I was getting so bored with .NET in general and even WCF/WF lately. Its really been a long time for me with something new. Vista is so one year ago, WCF too, etc. Last night/this morning when playing with the new Orcas bits was the first time I've felt that excited in months. The blogsphere has been busy to I think.

Architecture/SOA/BPEL/Workflow

• The first piece of great news, from Harry,  is that Architect Extraordinary, Pat Helland has retaken the Red Pill!
• Harry rightfully skewers BPEL as, "BPEL is just the latest attempt at "write once, run anywhere" and will meet with the same limited success of previous attempts." (Executable) BPEL efforts remind me of the awful committee mess that produced the vile Corba. I do think that Abstract BPEL is useful though to, as Harry says, "to exchange of the publicly viewable parts of a process with a partner in order to make two processes work together." There has to be some way to exchange Workflow definitions and it doesn't look like its going to be XPDL. BTW, this comes after a post from David Chappell, who stated, "no one should interpret the announcement as an embrace of BPEL-based development by Microsoft." Like David, I run across very few organizations (we actually have workflow in 65+ banks & hedge funds) that ask for or use BPEL.
• Bart talks about a WF scenario I am beginning to worry about: what about multiple workflows calling into the same Local Communication Service concerning possible threading and synchronization issues?
• J.D Meir announces PAG's first release of the Visual Studio Team System Guidance. This is really cool and really necessary as they will get guidance to Architects and Developers faster my updating emerging practices. I highly encourage all .NET developers to avail themselves of this valuable tool
• Via Frans, I found the blog of Jeroen van den Bos who has some nice posts on software maintenance and complexity
• Two articles on the Policy Injection Block in EntLib 3: Tom's Announcing the Policy Injection Application Block Ed's Policy Injection App Block - Behind the Scenes. This block looks very interesting to do some advanced things 

REST/Web 2.0

• Via Mark Baker, I found about two great looking REST books: RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby, and this one Java specific

Financial and Banking Architecture

• Mike Walker announces that both Wachovia and HSBC both have plans to build and deploy Mobile Banking Applications
• He also talks about specific mobile applications in banking

WCF/Indigo

• For those of us playing with the Orcas WCF bits, Dr, Nick reminds one and all, that WCF shouldn't make the jump right now as there are some issues with Generics and other changes that break things
• He also provides a discussion of A Trick with Faults

Visual Studio/VSTS/Orcas/WPF

• The Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0 is out [via Mike]
• David Kean introduces the new Code Metrics feature for Orcas that includes the useful Cyclomatic Complexity that we use in Agile circles
• Tim Sneath talks about some of the new Avalon features in Orcas
• Speaking of Avalon, fellow INETA speaker Dan Whalin has created a WPF Album Viewer app. Dan's album viewer sample that queries the Amazon.com web service for album information based on a given artist has now been posted live on his xmlforasp.com site [via Mike Harsh] 

I'm listening to Landlord (Live) by The Police on the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings