For TechEd, we got a big banner to hang in the lunch room to advertise Architecture Center. When we got it back, we hung it in the atrium of building 18 – our new home. Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? In the pic, from left to right, are my boss Adam Denning, yours truly (in desperate need of a haircut) and John deVadoss. Massive thanks to Richard and Megan who got the banner hung in the first place.

We just published a white paper about the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table. Basically, this is a table for categorizing architectural artifacts such as patterns. It owes a great deal to Zachman, but really builds out the concepts of roles and viewpoints. In addition to the white paper, you can get a PDF of the table itself.

What’s ultra-cool about this table is that it’s what the p&p group uses internally. The white paper maps every pattern MSFT has published into the table. You can also see the EASOT viewpoints in action in the Project Notebook section of Integration Patterns. When I saw a print of the table hanging on the wall in p&p’s building, I knew I wanted to see it published online. Love it or hate it, it’s real.

What do you think? Obviously, we’re planning on building on EASOT going forward. Is this useful? Valuable?

Now that I’m back from vacation, I got my VS2005 Beta 1 VPC’s up and running. I have two – one for Express (VC#/VB/VWD) and one for the Enterprise Architect. I installed Express because I wanted to see how realistic they are as day-to-day dev tools. So far, I’m pretty impressed. I’m going to use VC# & VWD to build a distributed genealogy data management system with my cousin Dave and my dad. Genealogy is pretty interesting problem domain that can touch on many SOA data management issues such as ownership, publication of reference data and federated identity so I think it will be pretty cool.

Of course, I also installed the full-blown VS2005, primarily to get access to the new modeling tools (i.e. Whitehorse). BTW, there’s a relatively new whitepaper on the System Definition Model (i.e. the meta-model that the Whitehorse app designer, data center designer and deployment designer modellers are based on) available. It was published in late April when I was to busy w/ TechEd prep to notice. The whitepaper describes the SDM meta-model, the SDM core models and partnership opportunities.

In addition to being a history buff and architecture expert, Pat likes to sing – typically parody songs of his own creation. He’s written many, but we actually broke down and got a license for Don McLean’s classic “American Pie“. Pat performed his version – a speculative retrospective titled “Mr. CIO Guy” – at the end of his TechEd Europe architecture track general session. You can watch a streaming version on Channel 9. Lyrics are posted on my MSDN Blog. Major thanks to Breakfast of Champions for getting it encoded so fast and to Jeff for getting it posted so fast.

On a more serious note, we are recording all of Pat’s TechEd sessions for the Architecture Strategy Series. Watch this space for details.

Julie, Patrick and I had dinner with my cousin David Schaffer tonight. David is a research fellow for Phillips and is an expert on genetic algorithms. He was one of the founding members of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation and an editor for Evolutionary Computation Journal. He was in town for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference 2004 (i.e. GECCO – cute). It was funny that we are both software experts (though he is much more expert than I), but had to explain to the other what we did. I explained SOA to him and he explained genetic algorithms to me. We didn’t into too much depth over dinner – it was much more fun to watch Patrick try and feed himself noodles and talk about family stuff. However, I think I want to learn more about this – I’m thinking there will be applicability of genetic and evolutionary computation to SOA. Maybe I can get David to write for my JOURNAL.

David is also into genealogy, and he gave me a copy of the family tree he’s been building up over the years. It’s all 20 year old console apps and text files, but he wants to bring it to the web in order to better enable collaboration among family members. Of course, David’s never built a web app before. Sounds like a job for Visual Web Developer 2005 Express! (BTW, what’s the abbreviation for that? VWD?)