For the last few months, we have had such compelling topics at VTdotNET that
I have seen many many new faces at the user group. In April, Robert Hurlbut came to talk about
Unit Testing - a topic important to all levels of developer. He definitely
demystified it for me, though I haven't had a chance to build unit testing into
any apps yet. In May, Thom Robbins
gave an overview of new goo in Visual Studio 2005 and explained what the heck
Team System is (and how much it costs - a very confusing issue).
Monday night was no different. Thanks to INETA, Sam Gentile came and talked to the
group about Service Oriented Architecture and Indigo (with wse3 in between). SOA
is one of the biggest buzziest topics on the blogosphere. He did not just repeat
some marketing definition of SOA. This is Sam, remember? Sam actually analyzed a
lot of the debate that is going on and helped us filter through what did and did
not have meaning. "SOA is overhyped, therefore ignore it" is one argument that
he suggests we ignore. 
He was also careful to state that this was his
own take on it.
I think this was the first time I have heard someone talk about SOA where it
really clicked, though I am looking forward to getting my paws on his deck as a
memory booster. We also had some discussion of contract first, which was great
timing from me based on the session by Tim Ewald I attended at TechEd. (Which
will be repeated at Vermont.NET on October 17th by Tim!!)
After this, Sam dug in to the hot off the presses WSE3 and showed how we can
implement SOA principals using WSE. Sam knew that I had given a detailed
presentation on WSE2 at the end of last year, but it was hard to skip over some
of the repeated stuff since there were so many people there that were knew. When
he got to the topic of the Turnkey scenarios, he heard me sigh and asked me to
elaborate the sigh. It turned out that Sam and I had a similar reaction to
them.
Here is my initial take on them. But I know this is based on my first
glance and I should hold off on elaborating until I explore them
further.
Finally Sam dug into Indigo, first explaining it from the 10,000
foot view, how it is encompassing the various methods of distributed
computing we are doing in .NET today (WSE, Web Services, Remoting, etc.) If
you haven't seen Indigo in a while, it is a very different beast than we saw a
year ago. They have really built an object model for it that is not as
declarative as it used to be. One fo the things that bugged many of us was that
it looks like Indigo is doing the same thing that Visual Studio currently does
in letting us pretend we are just writing OO code when building ASMX. Here I am
trying to wrap my head around contract first, but as one of the user group
members said "it's RPC all over again".
I wish we could have let Sam go on for a few more hours, but that's just
never working after 9pm in Vermont! So after we wrapped up, a bunch of us headed
over to Ri-Ra's in downtown Burlington for some more chat. This is one of the
few places that has a kitchen open late downtown. We seem to end up there a lot
- that's where we went with Robert when he came, too.
As Sam
and Roman
report, I went back into town the next day to have a late breakfast/early lunch
with Roman and Sam before Sam hit the road back to Nashua. Although this was an
INETA event, I still really appreciate Sam making the 3 hour drive each way. We
all had a great time. He is a lot of fun to have at our group.
And Roman and Dave Burke are both convinced about WSE finally! I think
WSE3 really is going to make a big difference in finally getting more people on
board with WS-*.
I have to point out Sam's pre-Burlington blog post which really had me
laughing. Sam thinks Vermont is just filled with hippies. "Break out the
patchouli oil" he said!
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