Sorry it’s been so quiet around here. And I just had a meeting with a few days ago with Sara Williams where we talked, among many other things, about the need to blog regularly…

I’ve been heads down on final TechEd prep. I’m fairly certain that I’m the only track owner who is also presenting. I know I’m the only track owner who is also doing a track general session. If you keep a close eye on the list of breakouts, you’ll notice that I’m not only presenting ARC 402 (Data in SOA) but I’m now also presenting ARC 300 (Metropolis). Unfortunately, Pat had to cancel his trip to TechEd at the last minute for personal reasons. So, in addition to all the normal last-minute billion details that a track owner has to deal with (most of which would have slipped thru the cracks with out the help of my trusty cabana cohorts Ed and Richard – thanks guys!), I’m also putting the finishing touches on my own session and having to prepare to do Pat’s. I’ve presented Metropolis many times before, most recently last week at the P&P Summit, so presenting ARC 300 isn’t a huge deal. However, we did have to cancel ARC 303 and are still figuring out if we can cover ARC 302. I’m bummed about that, but we’re going to try and get that material recorded at TechEd Europe next month for inclusion in the Architecture Strategy Series.

Even without ARC 302 & 303, we still have a great track. One thing we really tried to do is cover all categories of architecture. Most of our track covers application / solution architecture, but we also have several sessions on infrastructure architecture. I’m really looking forward to ARC 404 – Managing SOA Using Existing Platforms. We had a bit of a crisis on this session a few weeks ago, but we took care of it and the session looks great. I’m guessing lots of people will be interested in “how Microsoft is internally managing Services using current Microsoft technologies”. ARC 304 (Bridging the Gap) and ARC 403 (Defense in Depth) also cover infrastructure architecture and should be really good. We’re also have a session on Business Architecture. ARC 301 (Service Oriented Business Architecture). It’s really interesting to think about how SOA is going to affect the business as well as the application architecture.

See you in San Diego!

Update: for ARC 302, we’re going to have a Metropolis Discussion where we can talk about the Metropolis overview as well as drill down on how applications learn and how data interoperates (i.e. the combined contents of the original ARC 302 & 303 talks). I’ll be moderating and several members of my team will be on hand, but we’re hoping to listen as much as if not more than we talk.

TechEd is almost upon us – just over one week to go. We had our last track owner meeting yesterday. I’m chasing down speakers for slides (I actually have some already!) and figuring out what seems like a million final details for our track cabana. In addition to the great sessions, we’ve got some cool stuff happening at TechEd this year. Some I can’t quite talk about yet (watch this space) but I did want to remind all TechEd attendees about the Architect Road Rally happening Sunday night, after the precons. Space is limited and subject to first come, first served registration, so register right away!

Since this blog is now being syndicated on Architecture Center, I thought I should repost links to a recent pair of entries I wrote entitled “Is the Middle-Tier Endangered?” and “The Endangered Middle-Tier, Part 2“. The basic premise of the posts is that as computer hardware gets faster and service-orientation aims to carve our course-grained applications into finer-grained services, the value of running the business logic on a separate tier diminishes greatly. Add an improved programming model to the database (such as the CLR’s addition to SQL 2005) and I feel that, eventually, it will make more sense to run the services in-process with the database instead of on a separate tier. We’re not there yet – in addition to continued hardware improvements, we need a major improvement to the overall management infrastructure – but I think it will happen. The question is, do you think it will happen?

From the one-less-thing-for-me-to-do department, Chris Dix has created a managed wrapped of the WinXP P2P SDK. He also has several sample apps, including a Scoble-inspired MagicFolder. According to his site, Chris plans to extend his library to support web services (WSE custom channels?) which should be very cool.

It’s funny, I used to get really sad when I discovered someone else had built something that I had started building. Especially if, as in this case, theirs was better. Now, I’m just relieved that I can reuse the library without having to build all the surrounding infrastructure. I’m glad I never released my managed P2P wrapper, it would be one more thing for me to kill. Like my HtmlReader stuff. I still get people looking for it even though I killed it a while ago. (Hasn’t everyone figured out they should use SGML Reader instead?)

The more I understand about Windows Media Services 9, the more I like it. I especially like the fact that can create your own data source plug-in as part of a custom broadcasting solution. However, one quick gotcha – you can only use custom plug-ins with WS03 Enterprise Edition. Didn’t realize until I had built and configured my virtual media server and compiled the sample data source plug-in. Annoying, but not the end of the world.