This post is technical content-free.  If you're a serious content type then I suggest moving on to another post.  Some of us moved off to the pub afterwards ... 

• There was a straw poll.  Everyone at the bar read The Scobelizer.  Apparently there was an advert in the mens toilet that talked to you as you entered the room.  A surprisingly large number of people believe that Rory would be interested in it.  I wonder if Robert and Rory realise their impact on global culture?
• Ian Griffiths and his co-author Matthew Adams were there.  I hadn't seen these guys together since the PDC.  They are a brilliantly funny pair: think of them as the .NET equivalent to the old guys from The Muppets who throw in comments from the balcony.
• Two guys from Microsoft US who work in the Policy and Strategy group were there.  I asked them what they were working on.  Basically it turned out they'd have to kill me if they told me.  They mentioned cryptic clues about w3c choreography and a public presentation from an early session by a guy with Meridith as a surname.  Apparently it could change the future of computing, work and life as we know it.  I felt like I was in an X-Files episode.
• Chris Anderson spoke about his wife experiencing his Geek Fame.  There was a lot of 'we're not worthy' stuff going on.  Apparently she was only a little impressed.  I'm just glad I never relied on blogger/geek fame to attract or impress women.
• Someone knew who Scott Hanselman was by asking 'isn't he the guy who has a photo of him in his wedding tux on his blog?'.  I've never admitted this, but my photo at the top of this page is from my wedding photos.  A sort of homage to Scott.
• James Clarke was there with a nifty mobile phone and camera, moblogging the whole evening in real time.  He was pretty impressed to meet his first Microsoft Regional Director (I think it was the beer).  Here's his photo of me.

Here's me with Chris Anderson.  Another one for the photo blog roll:

Tonight was my first bloggers dinner and quite a night.  I was the first one to sign up and the last one to arrive as Chris Anderson worked out.  What was most surprising was that other than Chris, Don and Ian 'I have no blog comments because I hand-coded my blog myself' Griffiths, I only met a few other bloggers (Chris has a better list).  A lot of blow-in blog readers!  But all are welcome and everyone's company was appreciated.

By the time I rolled up the only chair left was next to Don himself.  Luckily I'd boned up on things to talk about (John 'Policy' Bristowe also primed with a couple of last questions via instant messenge) and managed to garner the following:

• I started off with asking how do you communicate semantic intent with policy?  Don's response was: you don't.  You do it out of band with the telephone.  It's what humans are for.  There are a lot of people trying to apply formal methods to determine the structural correctness of the messages, but the intent is something that humans will work out.
• WS-Addressing.  I raised my beef about it being all well an good to have an opaque string as the address, but where was the protocol binding.  Apparently Indigo is going to use the simple URL style scheme, so a tcp address will look like tcp://domainname etc.
• The important of the Endpoint references is to provide a SOAP cookie style mechanism without having to get into the URL hackery such as query strings.
• Someone said "it just felt unusual to send text-based messages around - isn't that slow?".  Don's response was that the first time he had sex it felt weird, the next time better and now he couldn't imagine it any other way.
• What's different between the M4 and M5 releases of Indigo (Clemens seems to know a lot about this)?  Apparently the programming model has been refactored toto make it more unified and simpler (great news here).  The System.MessageBus.Servicess library has changed significantly because what was there was just not as good as it could have been.  I hope this means better terminology than DatagramPortTypeAttribute and DialogPortTypeAttribute, which always seemed a bit complex to me.
• What's the best way to approach Indigo today?  If you want to learn about indigo today in a way that will pay of in the future, don't worry too much about the high level details.  If you work from the wire level back up it will be most useful (this is least likely to change). 
• The focus with V1 of Indigo is proving that they can get great performance with messaging.
• We discussed Clemens' idea that because Indigo uses a streaming reader over the message body, it may be possible that on intermediary/endpoint may start sending onto another intermediary/endpoint before the full message is received.  Don mentioned that there's no reason to think that the message may ever finish.  Queue zen-like moment of poignant reflection and silence.  'Sort of like one giant Congo-line of a message throughout the Internet' I said.  Don didn't say it but I felt him think 'Yes, Grashopper'.
• We spoke about the fact that my pregnant wife who has always been worried about the size of my head, thought that Don was the only person I have on my PDC photowall that had a larger head than me.  Don said his head was larger than mine in more ways than one.  We agreed that his head was impressive, but he was leaning forward in the photo and clearly his head was not awesomely large (at least physically).
• I suggested Don try the Cinnamon Club for dinner.  We had the Axxiant Xmas dinner there and it was very good (though it was late and I had been drinking ... ).

Afterwards some of us moved off to the pub ...

January 26 is Australia Day.  It's a special day for me as well.  On this day three years ago I met my wife on a train to the Big Day Out in Sydney.

I'd moved to Sydney from my home town, Adelaide in South Australia to take advantage of the dot-com boom.  It was a pretty simple decision really: move states and triple my income doing the same work with bigger and better companies.  It had also coincided with the end of a five year relationship.  I'd decided to have some quality solo time (re: I discovered alcohol) and do things I enjoyed doing, with the hope that I'd find someone who shared my interests without too much work.

This strategy worked well.  I did the usual life-enhancing things like drawing classes, voice training, dance classes at the Sydney Dance Company studios, bushwalking.  I also did all the things you see in the classifieds 'movies, walks along the beach, good restaurants'.  But it soon became clear that while I was having a good time I wasn't meeting anyone.  When I went bush walking I had some picture of a bunch of Elle McPhersons who loved to hike in the Australian bush.  It turned out to be a 70 year old woman ('Roma by name .. Roma by nature ...') and a couple of 40 year old guys who still lived with their mums.

The prospects at work weren't any better.  Unfortunately there just aren't many females into IT.  I was working at the Sydney Morning Herald, which did have a large marketing department that had the reverse gender balance to the IT department, but I soon worked out that chances were slim.  Whenever a new female did arrive it was like throwing mince meat in shark infested waters.  Sizing up every female colleague as a potential partner just felt predatory.  It was clear I need to re-think my strategy.

After a lot of soul searching I realised that my chances of meeting someone were pretty small as long as I never spoke to anyone I didn't know.  Using my psychology and social science training I hypothesized there was a correlation between the number of women I spoke to and the likelihood of getting a date.  So, it was clear, I just had to approach strangers and try and strike up a conversation.

My greatest fear was making a fool or myself, or worse, approaching a woman who had  a boyfriend and ending up in a punch up (I could clearly visualize this happening).  I began researching how I might locate someone and make an approach.  If women were in pairs then it was a pretty hard ask, women in groups of three were just impossible (three legged chairs are the most stable).  It was clear: It would be easiest to do this if I found a woman on her own.  The challenge was how to do this without being creepy.

I continued going out and enjoying myself.  Eventually I was out dancing at shows by the Sydney Opera House and saw a woman who was on her own.  I struck up a conversation - 'Good DJ hey!' - and had to confront my worst nightmare: a boyfriend.  Strangely, nothing bad happened.  My confidence levels shot up.

The Big Day Out is a travelling rock concert that goes through most Australian capital cities and even a couple of days in New Zealand.  In Sydney it's hosted at Homebush, the Olympics venue, which is serviced by a train from central station.  I had been to quite a few events at the Olympics and had enjoyed the atmosphere on the train, where everyone had started talking to each other.  While I was walking down the platform I noticed this very attractive woman looking out of the door to see when the train left.  'She's more attractive than anyone I'd normally talk to' I thought.  Then the cognitive-behavioural psychology part of my brain started saying things like 'why not talk to her?' and 'which part of turning around and opening your mouth to make sound are you unable to do?'.

So, feeling my heart in my throat, I turned around.  The first question is the key I thought - it has to communicate interest without looking desperate or creepy.  It can't be a 'line' or too cheesy.  So I thought about what I was generally interested in knowing about someone else.  I walked into the empty carriage and sat in the seat across the aisle from her and opened with 'Is this the first time you've been to the Big Day Out?'

I later realised that this was dangerously close to 'Do you come here often?' but luckily we managed to get over that first hurdle, got talking on the way out and ended up agreeing to meet up later in the day 'in front of the sound desk before Coldplay'.   I was pretty excited from that moment on.  Enough that I even sat through a Rammstein performance (I was the only guy laughing at how funny these right-wing German rockers were).  In fact, I was so excited, and I'm so bad at hiding how I feel, that I ended up showing off like a teenager, performing a cartwheel and losing my sunglasses. Tragic, but true.

Anyway, later that year we ended up moving to London together.  I proposed in Paris under the Eiffel tower (another story), we got married last year outside Sydney and are now expecting our first child.  All this from the second stranger I'd ever spoken to.

In preparation for the London Bloggers Dinner with Don Box and Chris Anderson on Monday (see the report of this dinner, and what went on at the pub afterwards), I thought I’d get up to speed and make some notes of the key points made in Don’s interview on the ServerSide.NET.  To my mind this is the best interview I've seen or read about Indigo.

I'm posting these notes mainly so that I can have them handy in SharpReader when I'm offline and in case others might find them useful.  You can see the interview and download the full transcript on the ServerSide.NET site.

What is Indigo? 

• A connective tissue between programs.  It makes it simple for developers to put a message oriented façade on the edge of your application to allow easy communication with others.

Positioning Remoting and ASMX web services

• The problem with .NET remoting was that even though it supported interfaces, it really worked best when both ends of the pipe shared code such as assemblies or DLLs to integrate.  Sharing types like this turns out hard to manage because you often don’t have control over the deployment versioning and testing at each end of the pipe.
• ASMX Web Services (including WSE) are more flexible because they use WSDL and schema which is more adaptable to change than the OO style type interface used in remoting.  ASMX is proving more popular than remoting in the field because it is actually a simpler model and simplicity is a feature.
• Developers should go down the path of integration using messaging because it is simpler and more flexible, but support for remoting won’t go away.
• You don’t have to use XML Schemas and WSDL to describe structures and contracts, but that’s the practical way that everybody does it.
• The problem with components was that they tried to do the right thing separating interface and implementation, but it was too easy to ‘leak’ object concepts and require the sharing of types.

Do components have a place in the world?  

• Don argues that the world is simpler if you think about objects, which are great for programming software that gets integrated, tested and deployed, more or less as an atomic unit and services, which are the central abstraction for deployed, autonomous pieces of software.  Given this perspective he suggests there may not be a place for components.

What’s the difference between service-oriented programming and service oriented architecture?

• SOA is the buzz word du jour, system message bus will probably be next, whereas service-oriented programming is more focussed on the reality of the code.
• Service oriented programming is about four ideas:

1. Boundaries are explicit.  In Indigo you have to place attributes on your code that you want publicly exposed
2. Services are autonomous.  Indigo doesn’t assume you’ll deploy a whole system as a single unit.  Each service should be secure and reliable as a stand-alone unit.
3. Share schema and contract, not class.  It’s too easy to mix up interfaces and implementation, so it’s a better idea to separate schema and contract into two distinct ideas.  Schemas are defined in XML Schema language, and contracts, which are message exchange patterns, are defined in WSDL.
4. Compatibility based on Policy.  To know that services are compatible you have to care about other things than just the signature of the messages.  WS-Policy is supported in Indigo and provides a way to share this over the wire in an interoperable way.

Does Policy impose versioning restrictions?

• Policy is similar to marker interfaces in Java or C#.  You have to have a stable name that is immutable that is decoupled from the actual signatures.  Both parties have to agree on the name and it has very strict version requirements.
• WS-Policy provides a way to declare compatibility with any number of versions of a given policy assertion.  The logic engine is able to determine if party A’s assertion lines up with party B’s assertion.
• In the PDC bits you can see the first message sent on the wire is a ‘get policy’ message.

Can policy be used to create versioning schemas?

• There are three policy specs:

• WS-Policy which is the XML form for writing a logic expression
• WS-PolicyAttachment, which provides a way of taking those expressions and applying them to a particular domain
• WS-PolicyAssertion which contains a small number of concrete assertions that plug into the expressions defined in WS-Policy.

• WS-PolicyAssertion contains an assertion called Spec Version that can be used to determine compatibility at the naming level.  It’s looser than strict or nominal type equivalence that is used in C# and Java.  It provides some flexibility, not complete flexibility and Policy is used to do the version negotiation.

Are there situations where the Indigo approach doesn’t work well?

• In future the service-oriented programming model may be a practical way of doing things like cross-process, cross-app-domain or even within a single exe.
• The focus is making sure Indigo has a solid model that can be implemented and scale down well.  Objects took a ‘near’ metaphor and tried to stretch it out, Indigo is trying to take a ‘far’ metaphor and shrink it.  Indigo is striving to have very low performance costs within a single exe.

What are the performance optimizations being worked on now?

• The team is very focused on make sure that the I/O implementation is as well tuned as possible.  They want to make sure we can get bytes in, in XML and other forms, in to and out of an app domain as fast as humanly possible. 
• They want to make sure that it’s not tied to a specific protocol, such as HTTP.
• The idea is ‘I create a message here, I need it to appear in your program as fast as possible’.
• Performance is an important goal for the first release.

WSE and Indigo

• WSE is the vehicle to give developers access to implementations of the WS-* protocols as quickly as possible.
• The goal is still to integrate them into the .NET platform, but sometimes the platform has to ship before standards are set, which is why WSE will have a future post-Indigo.
• Post-Indigo WSE may be used to track protocol evolution on top of the Indigo infrastructure rather than just the ASMX infrastructure.

Will Indigo do anything new at the wire level?

• Indigo is about the software productization of ideas (such as the WS-* specs) rather than interesting new wire protocols.  For example, transactions on the wire will use WS-AtomicTransactions but within the service they are doing a lot to make transactions easier to use from managed code with extremely efficient implementations.

What's a Microsoft Regional Director?  Fellow RD Jon Box answers this well.  Clemens also has a good post. Basically Microsoft Regional Directors are independent developers and architects, volunteers chosen for their leadership in their local technology circles. You've probably seen many of them at conferences, read their blogs, or heard them on .NET Rocks.

I'm looking forward to continuing to spread the word about .NET, web services and Indigo in the coming year.  As shown on my presentations page, I'm doing a talk on WSE to the VBUG group in Ipswich on Feb 3, then a talk on Indigo in London to the .NET UK user group on Feb 23.

John Bristowe, recent MVP, fellow YAWP'er and lover of Australian Red Wine posts about his conversion of another person to the love of WS-Policy.  I've been a long-term (well for around six months, which qualifies as long-term in WS-* land) lover of Policy. Policy just keeps getting better in Indigo with metadata exchange in Indigo, but the movement needs to start now.  I think we need a slogan or song.  'People for Policy' or something like that.

John also cheekily suggests that I may have a 'showdown' with Klaus Aschenbrenner after his article on WSE 2.0 security.  I'm more that happy to share the SoapContext with anyone else who's into WSE - there's always room for more pipes and filters in the message pipeline!.  Also from John's blog I've discovered Morten Abrahamsen is doing a great job blogging about WSE topics.

Wow.  4 posts in a single evening - I'm feeling a bit Robert Scoble all of a sudden.

If you care about designing web services and believe in the 'share schema and contracts, not class' mantra then you'll be interested in XML versioning.  I mentioned pre-PDC that this was a big issue.  At the PDC Doug Purdy presented one approach that Whidbey Indigo will use to enable versioning with web services.

Just this week Dare Obasanjo has published 'On Versioning XML Vocabularies' and tonight I noticed that Dave Orchid from BEA also attacks the topic with his post 'Providing Compatible Schema Evolution'. 

In fact Dave Orchid's whole site seems excellent (it's my weekend homework since I've only recently subscribed and his feed doesn't contain the full articles so I can't read him on the train).  One good point I noticed was in this post:

'Schema authors tend to make tightly coupled Web services because they can't fully version or evolve them'. 

Avoiding this problem will be key if web services are to realize the promises they are offering today.

Russ Lewis blogs about David Sussman's ASP.NET 2.0 talk at the London DNUG last night.  I was off on a Microsoft Solution Framework training course with Axxiant so I couldn't make it, but Russ has done a great report.  In the comments he left on my site Russ says that it was one of my YAWPs (Yet Another WSE Presentation) that made him start blogging. 

Good to see that I'm encouraging the community in my own small way.  Keep up the blogging Russ!

Microsoft have four buildings on a large business park alongside Oracle (who have more buildings, highlighting one difference between companies).  The Microsoft campus is as much like a university as the real world can get.   I'm surprised by how much I enjoy being able to wear jeans to work, and how different it is to see everyone in casual clothes (too long around banks and large companies).

Ever since I read Peopleware I've been interested to see how quality companies organise their workspaces.  Joel Spolsky has written about the importance of developer offices and how an architect designed the Fog Creek offices.

The Microsoft buildings are light and spacious with desks around the windows of the building and meeting rooms in the middle of floors - so everyone has a good view of the outside world.  There's the standard (or dot-com standard) Aeron chairs and wireless networking inside the building.  I read somewhere they even change the air in the air conditioning system more regularly than most offices (so there is something in the air).   Perhaps it's no wonder Microsoft have won the number one place to work in the UK for the last two years.

There's also the standard Microsoft perks like the free soft drinks, several cafés, a pool table and table hockey (seeing all of this transported me back in my mind to my dot-com days around Sydney).  I found it hard to get used to the idea that it's probably a good thing for people to be able to relax and enjoy themselves at work.

As Matthew Reynolds reports, Microsoft have recently had Ricky Gervais, aka David Brent from The Office do a motivational video.  The large 'motivational' posters containing his photo and quotes in the hallways have distracted me several times.

Rory would be pleased that the toilets are very clean and pleasant consistent with his bathroom report from Redmond.

From Ted Neward's blog comes the news that he's now the Editor-In-Chief for the new .NET community site TheServerSide.NET.  It's the .NET port of the TheServerSide, a vibrant Java community, but it's backed by companies such as Microsoft and Developmentor.  Ted's aiming to do the following with the site:

1. Create a place where the hard questions can be asked.
2. Promote J2EE/.NET interoperability.
3. Promote open source .NET projects.

Some good points already:

• An excellent sets of interviews, with transcripts, such as Don Box on Indigo, Scott Guthrie on ASP.NET and some guy from Borland. 
• A good set of articles from DevelopMentor trainers such as:
  •  Justin Ghetland on Unit Testing in .NET showing a Visual Studio Addin that still has the NUnit green and red traffic lights.  Any thoughts Jamie Cansdale?
  • Stuart Charlton on Autonomous Services dealing with SOA and the ROX holy trinity of relational, object and xml technologies.
• Pre-release chapters from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group on Remoting and Managed Code Performance.

This looks like a great addition to the .NET community and already has some quality content.  The only downside, and this is a major one in my view, is the lack of an RSS feed - the front page only has an RDF feed that wont work in SharpReader.   What's going on there?

At last night's Extreme Tuesday Club meeting we talked about the use of Gold Cards as a way of handling problems that can arise in successful Extreme Programming teams.  The idea of Gold Cards was presented in this paper from XP Universe 2001 which came out of the original Connextra team (an early and influential London XP team).

When an XP team is functioning successfully and doing paired programming, frequent releases and working at a constant it can be difficult to find time to do individual investigation on new approaches to problems.  There are several difficulties for a successful XP team:

• It can be difficult to take time out and think about new and innovative approaches to a problem.
• Often innovative new ideas come from individuals thinking laterally rather than a team focussed on task completion.
• Sometimes pairing and the team work made it hard to highlight positive contributions of individuals, or to handle performance reviews.

The Gold Card was a way of overcoming these problems.  The index card is a core part of XP planning, used to write User Stories and drive development.  The Gold Card is simply an index card that allows a developer to spend some a day of solo time investigating a topic of their choice, ideally with some business benefits.  They used this system:

• Each developer had two Gold Cards each month, so about 10% of work time.
• During the morning stand-up meeting a developer could elect to use the Gold Card
• The developer writes on the card what they want to achieve and provides an update at the next morning's stand-up meeting as well as on the Wiki.

Part of the discussion last night was how one global financial bank allow their developers to do skunkworks style tasks on Friday afternoon.  Gold Cards provide a mechanism for time-shifting this idea.

Gold Cards helped promote a 'praise culture' within the group.  It also proved a successful motivation tool.  On top of this there were significant business benefits, such as reducing project risk, increasing development efficiency and most surprisingly, generating a business opportunity that became the company's major product.

Finally, Ian Griffiths has a blog (RSS).  For those not in the know, Ian is UK-based, a Developmentor trainer, an O'Reilly author, a co-author and friend of Chris Sells, an associate consultant with my company, Axxiant, and the guy who interviewed me for my job at Axxiant (there was a stressful interview).  Ian also writes great email.

Glad to see his great sense of humour is already shining through in his recent post:

"I used to know a lot about C++ ... not only did I buy my own copy of the C++ spec, I actually referred to it from time to time. How sad can one man get? Despite this, I continued to learn new and often surprising things about the C++ programming language on an alarmingly regular basis, right up until I discovered that I preferred C#."

I recently came across Fate Hani's Bile Blog on the Java Community (via Joe Walnes, an XTC attendee who's book was biled).  It's opinionated, rude, mostly negative, full of overgeneralizations and contains some foul language.  It is also sometimes informative, entertaining and funny.  Imagine a darker version of Rory who swears and has a bad attitude. 

Some topical posts that give a feel for the site's contents:

• Die petstores die.  The world has enough pet stores already.
• The codehaus of crack.  I mentioned this group in a list of things I liked (from afar) about the Java Community.  Seems that all communities have their good points and bad points.
• Mock obsession.  Mocking frameworks like JDBC isn't the way to go.
• FOAF can FOAD.   Echoing Jon Udell's thoughts that this isn't the way to go.
• ThoughtWorks: The new BodySnatchers.  "The training program at ThoughtWorks must be a modern day marvel of human engineering. It takes in as input fresh young bodies, and at the other end spits out those same bodies with their previous mental contents erased, to be replaced with one of the six possible variants of the MartinFowler template."

The Application Integration and EAI Architecture guidelines I mentioned in the last post seem to me to be an answer to Michael Earl's Plea to Microsoft Architects because they talk about problems that really matter today and how you can apply currently-shipping technologies to solve these problems.  The guidelines have contributions from a great bunch of Microsoft Architects (at least I think they qualify for this title) such as Maarten Mullender, Keith Short and Pat Helland (who have given some top presentations at TechEd and PDC recently).

Don Box has already responded to Michael by saying he'd like to see a list of top 10 MSFT bloggers who are focussing on helping people apply shipping bits to the problems that matter.  I agree, but think part of the problem is that many of these guys aren't blogging but are writing great content for MSDN Enterprise Development site (nice reorganisation) or the Patterns and Practices group.  For better or worse, blogging seems better suited to short, time-relevant information such as thinking about the design of upcoming technologies.   The problem is that blogging helps make a topic seem alive and current and creates a sense of community.  It would be nice to combine these benefits of blogging with high quality content already available.

Adding life to the Patterns and Practices content
I'd like to see some way of using blogging and the community to increase the value that comes from the Patterns and Practices and MSDN material.  Every time I go back to it I'm impressed with the content, but sometimes it seems impenetrable, and well, a little dull.  I wonder what can be done to bring it to life and get more dialogue going in the community? 

I know that the Patterns and Practices group are now doing webcasts (disclaimer: I haven't had a chance to participate yet). Perhaps there could be some more focussed community involvement or debate around the architectures or concepts?  I know that Shadowfax, the Patterns and Practices group's project to apply service oriented solutions with currently shipping technology, is available for download.  Perhaps there could be some key questions the group are looking for feedback on?

Perhaps there needs to be a pub architecture club, similar to the Extreme Tuesday Club (now open in Brisbane, Australia).  Either that or find some way to get the like of Pat Helland or Maarten Mullender to start blogging?

The ever-active Patterns and Practices group have released Guidelines for Application Integration focussing on EAI Architectures.   It provides useful coverage of all of many of the issues involved in integrating applications.

The guidelines covers the levels of application integration, such as business process, data and communications-level integration.  It defines the capabilities required at each of these levels.  It also covers security and operational considerations before finally showing how to map Microsoft Technologies to application integration capabilities.

The guide is useful because it deals with concepts from an abstract perspective rather than a technology-centric approach.  All of this is likely to be useful in a service-oriented (it's just not PC to say SOA anymore) world.  The architectural concepts and business issues identified are independent of the technical implementations such as Indigo.