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Description: Thoughts and experiences from an enterprise software architect. This is a personal weblog by Jorgen Thelin. I am a Program Manager for Connected Systems Standards at Microsoft in Redmond. Previously I was Chief Scientist and Chief Server Architect at Cape Clear Software Inc. The opinions expressed here represent my own views and not those of my current, prior or future employer(s).
Last Update: 18:15:50 05/25/2006
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Additional Info
First Fetched: 00:18:32 01/31/2004
Last Updated: 18:15:50 05/25/2006
Headlines
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Microsoft's Developer Solution team has recently announce the Shared Source release of a number of v1.0 Power Toys for Visual Studio on CodePlex. CodePlex is the cool new community development Web site for distributed and collaborative software development. The Power Toys for Visual Studio Collection includes many widely requested tools and utilities for enhancing and customizing Visual Studio, including: MSBee - an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications in Visual Studio 2005 that target .NET 1.1 Team Foundation Server Admin Tool - allows a TFS administrator to quickly add and modify user permissions to all three platforms utilized by TFS. Managed Stack Explorer - a lightweight tool that provides a quick and easy way to monitor .NET 2.0 managed processes and their stacks. Each VS Power Toy release contains Well-documented source code for community members to jump in and start coding Unit tests for all mainline functionality Build and Test scripts, ...
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Scoble talks about today's internal "employee town hall" meeting. These are not small little tweaks. They are wholesale changes to how Microsoft treats its employees. You will probably read about all the details of these changes (collectively known as the "My Microsoft" initiative) in the industry press over the next few days / weeks. How significant are the changes announced today? I think they will probably result in the biggest shift in the Microsoft culture in the last 30 years! These changes make the clear statement that delivering what you promise matters again rather than just being crudely stack ranked against the rest of the cogs in the machine. In other words, working with a great team will no longer be a curse, and can be the blessing it should always be. Undoubtedly there will be some growing pains with this transition, but in a few years I think we will look back on this point as a big turning point in Microsoft's history. I suspect we will be seeing many more greater ...
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Anne Thomas Manes writes on her weblog: People accuse WS-* of being too complex. (Somewhat remarkable when you think back to 2000 when everyone was extolling SOAP's simplicity.) Well -- if, as a developer, you need to understand the details of all 60+ WS-* specs, then, yes, WS-* is way too complex. But that's a symptom of WS-*'s immaturity. If we had proper tooling, the only folks that would need to be concerned with all the 60+ specifications are the folks implementing the WS-* toolkits. Developers should really only need to be concerned with a handful of the specs: SOAP, WSDL, and XML Schema--maybe WS-MetadataExchange. Everything else should be handled transparently by the toolkits. I think we'll get there. Microsoft's WCF ("Indigo") demonstrates how easy it can be to use WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConversation. All you have to do is specify an annotation, and everything is automatically implemented behind the scenes. +1. All the ...
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The online real estate site Zillow.com is now using Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping technology and birds-eye view aerial photography to allow potential home buyers to more clearly see architectural design, landscaping, neighboring properties and other factors. Of course, I'm sure most of the initial traffic to Zillow.com will be homeowners wanting to see the current valuation of their real estate using the Zestimate models - and probably being pleasantly surprised if they bought even just 1 year ago! There is certainly a wealth of data about an address, bringing together property tax valuation, historic sales data, recent sales, market comparison information and per-square-foot cost data in one place that will increase the transparency in the real estate market. Of course, there will always be other market factors and interior property improvement factors to be considered, but at least Zillow.com is a great starting point and a reasonable framework for prompting further ...
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Some people are still debating exactly what Second Life is or isn't, but clearly 2L they are doing something right because they just got their hands on another big wad of VC money....
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In case you haven't received this through the other distribution channels, the invitations are now out for the WS-Policy Interop Workshop to be hosted by SAP in Walldorf, Germany on 25 - 27 April 2006. Full details are available in the invitation pack download from MSDN. This workshop is highly significant in many ways. It's the first WS-* Workshop we have held outside the USA, and is for the last remain spec in the core WS-* Architecture stack that will be submitted to a standards organization shortly after we complete this step in the WS-* specification development process. We've already received lots of interest from participants of this event, and I hope you can join us too....
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It's been another busy few weeks in the Web Services Standards Team at Microsoft recently! Last week, we did another republication of the Devices Profile and WS-Policy specs. Today the W3C acknowledged and published our Member Submissions of the WS-Eventing, WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration specifications, along with a big list of co-submitters. The W3C Staff comments on WS-Transfer make interesting reading - and really summarize what WS-Transfer is all about: WS-Transfer can therefore be seen as an underlying protocol-independent version of HTTP, i.e. bringing the capabilities and properties of the Web and HTTP in contexts where HTTP is not used. While the resources manipulated are entities that provide an XML representation, the use of the SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism along with WS-Transfer would allow one to efficiently manipulate other types of entities such as binary ones. WS-Transfer does not have all the features of HTTP regarding the manipulation of ...
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Today we republished the Devices Profile for Web Services spec based on community feedback received and implementation experience. Mostly it's to clean up some things around device metadata, plus some other minor housekeeping. This version of the Devices Profile specification is expected to be the last revision before submission to a standards organization, and it matches what will be shipping in Windows Vista. The Change Log from the previous version is below, for those who are interested....
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Today I'm hosting the second plug-fest for Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation product on campus in Redmond along with Kirill. The low buzz of engineering discussions fills the room, and we hope to capture some of that atmosphere tomorrow when we have Robert Scoble scheduled to pop in with the Channel 9 camera crew. In preparing for this weeks event, Kirill and I went over to Building 18 to discuss Channel 9 with Vittorio Bertocci and Marc Mercuri, and we ended up doing an impromptu webcast (now ported on the Channel 9 website) where we talk about the background of the workshops and plug-fests. Meet Kirill Gavrylyuk, Interoperability Program Manager on the WCF team, and Jorgen Thelin, the Program Manager responsible for the Workshops and Specification processes here at Microsoft. Kirill and Jorgen explain what is the spirit of WCF Interop Plug-Fest, an event regularly kept in Redmond during which different partner and competitor WS-* stacks are tested for interoperability ...
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MSR-TR-2006-08 Ripple-Stream: Safeguarding P2P Streaming Against DoS Attacks by Wenjie Wang; Yongqiang Xiong; Qian Zhang January 2006 http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=1050 Abstract: Compared with file-sharing and distributed hash table (DHT) network, P2P streaming is more vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks because of its high bandwidth demand and stringent time requirement. This paper studies the design of DoS resilient streaming networks using credit systems. We propose a novel framework---ripple-stream---to improve DoS resilience of P2P streaming. Ripple-stream leverages existing credit systems to introduce credit constraints in overlay construction such that malicious nodes are pushed to the fringe of overlay networks. Combining credit constraints with overlay optimization techniques, ripple-stream can achieve both DoS resilience and overlay efficiency. Our evaluations show that ripple-stream can effectively reduce the convergence time of ...
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This article by Kevin Hench pretty much sums up the feelings of many people in Seattle about Sunday's Superbowl game. I've been shrieking hysterically about the terrible officiating in the NFL and warning that some day the brutal calls were going to affect the outcome of the Super Bowl. That some day was Sunday. Every single questionable, marginal or outright bad call went against the Seahawks. [ Kevin Hench / FOXSports.com - Refs were far from Super in this one ] There is a little consolation for the SeaHawks in this analysis of the game: In case the football fans of the Pacific Northwest aren't sick enough in the aftermath of the big game, they may want to know that no Super Bowl loser has ever dominated a title game like the Seahawks did on Sunday. I was so sure that Seattle's edge in total yards, time of possession and takeaways in a losing effort was unprecedented that I scoured all 39 previous Super Bowl box scores to prove it. Yep, just as I suspected, no losing team had ...
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Happy Chinese New Year. 2005 was the Year of the Rooster. 2006 is the Year of the Dog....
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Study: Internet Expands, Not Limits, Social Contact [via Associated Press] Rather than fostering isolation, the Internet expands people's social networks and even encourages people to talk by phone or meet others in person, a new study finds. I've certainly seen that to be the case with my kids as they have grown more used to the internet and connectivity features like e-mail, IM and XBOX Live....
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You are cordially invited to attend the next Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) Interop Plug-fest at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond on Tuesday March 7, 2006 to Thursday March 9, 2006. The full text of the invitaiton is on the WS-Builders mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WS-Builders/message/56 The Microsoft interop endpoint is live, and is available for any pre-testing that interop partners might want to perform. http://mssoapinterop.org/ilab/ Hope to see you there!...
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Question: How do you win againsts a 12-man football team? Answer: You dont! Tonight Seattle is going wild celabrating the Seahawks 34-14 victory against the Carolina Panthers. The Seattle Seahawks dominated from the get-go, and looked like a team ready to win the Super Bowl. The Seattle Seahawks are totally undefeated at home this season for one very good reason: the twelfth man - the name given to all the Seahawks fans who are in the stadium actively supporting their team with noise, noise, and more noise. The 11 Seahawks players on the field played a great game (especially by covering the Panther's star player Steve Smith so tightly that he couldn't do anything), but the match was really won by the 12th Man overall. The atmosphere in the stadium was completely electrfying (Josh Brown described it afterwards as "enough electricity to jump start a car!") and the effect of the local support on the opposition team was noticable and decisive - the Panthers just couldn't get their game ...
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News today of another acquisition in Web Services land - Sonic is buying Actional Corporation Dave Chappell explains some of the background in his blog entry. Congratulations to Dave and the gang on the deal....
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The weapons, armor and gold pieces from online games are worth millions in real dollars. This article raises an interesting question - How much of a share will the IRS want? "From the standpoint of economic theory... there's no fundamental distinction between selling euros and buying magic wands," said Ted Castronova, an expert on virtual economies and an associate professor of telecommunications at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. "They carry value with them. If you're going to tax exchanges in the real world, you've got to tax exchanges in the virtual world, in economic theory."...
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Tickets for the next SeaHawks game on 1/22 went on sale today at 10:00 am. By 10:10 there are NONE LEFT - they are sold out at ALL price levels, and even standing room is sold out! Luckily I got in the queue at 10:00:30 on ticketmasters.com, so I'm happy to say I managed to get 2 of these golddust tickets. See you next Sunday at QWest Field. :-)...
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Catching up on news from last week, I see that Systinet is to be acquired for 105 million USD in cash by Mercury Interactive to "Capitalize on the High-Growth SOA Market". Congratulations to Radovan and Roman on the deal....
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The Seattle SeaHawks won their first game of the NFL playoffs today against the Washington RedSkins. Despite heavy rain making handling difficult, and Shaun Alexander leaving the field with concussion during the first quarter, the SeaHawks still dominated the game and won a very solid 20-10 victory. This win ended the playoff drought for the Seahawks - they had been 0-6 since their last playoff triumph on Dec. 22, 1984, the longest run without a postseason victory for any NFL team. As always, the home fans really got behind the team! The crowd support at QWest Field (the SeaHawks home stadium) was measured at 102 dB pre-game today - reportedly the loudest stadium in the NFL! This makes the Seattle "Twelth Man" a formidable extra opponent for opposing teams to contend with. Having home field advantage throughout their playoff run should really make a big difference to the SeaHawks on the road to the Super Bowl. So, next game is next Sunday (1/22) at home against either the Carolina ...
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MSR-TR-2005-179 BitVault: a Highly Reliable Distributed Data Retention Platform by Zheng Zhang; Qiao Lian; Shiding Lin; Wei Chen; Yu Chen; Chao Jin December 2005 http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=1035 Abstract: In this paper, we report the design and implementation of the storage layer of BitVault: a content-addressable retention platform for large volume of reference data - seldom-changing information that needs to be retained for a long period of time. BitVault uses "smart brick" as the building block to lower the hardware cost. However, the challenges are to maintain low management cost in a system that needs to scale all the way from one brick to tens of thousands of bricks, to ensure reliability and to deliver with a simple enough design. Our design incorporates P2P technologies for its self-managing and self-healing capabilities and uses massively parallel repair to reduce vulnerability window of data loss. The simplicity of the architecture relies ...
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Shaun Alexander could possibly be the greatest team player and most humble person on the planet with comments like this despite being the first SeaHawk to win the NFL MVP title: "I know the reason why I love football is because it's the ultimate team sport," said Alexander, the 19th pick overall of the 2000 draft after a record-setting career at Alabama. "You get 10 guys to work together to get one person to score points. It's the only sport, even if you're hot, if everybody else is not hot, then it doesn't work. And that's the great thing about football. It takes all 11 to make things happen." "For me winning this, it's really saying how well my line's played, how well my receivers have played, how well my fullback has played, how great Matt's audibled, how great Mike's called the game. It's an exciting award for all of us." [ SeaHawks - Shaun Alexander Named the NFL's Most Valuable Player for 2005 ] Shaun Alexander led the NFL in rushing yards this season (1,880), and set a ...
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Over the Christmas holidays, I took a serious look at the telephone charges we've been incurring (particularly for calls back to our family in the UK) and I decided to switch the VOIP. We've settled on the Unlimited World Plan from BroadVoice - basically giving us unlimited calls to USA, Canada and Western Europe plus an additional phone number in the UK for our family to call us on (at UK phone call rates rather than international rates) and all for less than 22 USD plus tax per month! Once the phone adaptor arrived, it was less than a 5 minute job to plug in everything and make the first phone call - and the majority of that time was actually spent hunting for an additional power strip! Looking at our recent land line bills, the new VOIP service should represent a significant saving each month, plus allow us more freedom to call our family in the UK more frequently, plus make it considerably easier and cheaper for family and friends in the UK to call us (once they get over the ...
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Happy New Year! And in true North West style, we started the new year with our first major power outage of the season. Power was off from lunchtime for about 5 hours yesterday afternoon. At least it gave our family a chance to practice with the generator we bought for just such an occasion. In the process, we discovered a problem with the transfer circuit for the range, so we were in the strange situation of having lights, heat and Internet connectivity, but couldn't cook any food except in the microwave. I guess that's some reflection of the priorities of modern life, but I'll need to get the problem fixed as part of our emergency preparedness plans this year. Here's hoping everyone will have a prosperous and productive year in 2006....
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It's great to hear the news from my friends Andy and PJ about their new alliance with Rogue Wave Software. Andy and PJ set up CodeFutures to pioneer the market for Java tools for advanced data persistence and code generation for Data Access Object and object persistence, and they are certainly delivering huge productivity benefits of persistence automation to over 150 paying customers. I'm expecting even greater success from CodeFutures in 2006!...
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Dare Obasanjo highlights the old Camel-Horse problem - this time related to OPML and extensions: "The Perils of Premature Standardization: Attention Data and OPML"...
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Microsoft has posted extensive details of its TrueSkill Ranking System, to be used on Xbox Live for automatic matching purposes in upcoming games, on the Microsoft Research website. The system is an algorithm designed to accurately report a relative skill ranking after a small number of games played through the service. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7142...
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This video from Microsoft UK has finally surfaced on the Internet, so now I can share details of a forward thinking project at Microsoft looking to improve our customer feedback systems. WSYP Project: leverage customer feedback for software quality Windows Server reliability advances are the result of a continuous process of improvement that began with the release of Windows NT Server. But to be effective, the engineering process needs to evolve and be connected directly to the customer in real time. We can then improve the overall customer experience by collecting, analyzing, and responding to customer problems & feedback as it is generated in real-time. Project 'WSYP' is a bold step in that direction - some call it a 'drastic' measure. It is however a promising technique! British humour (sic) at it's best! ;-)...
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The Call for Papers for the WWW-2006 conference is now out. I'm on the Program Committee for the Web Services track, so I'm looking forward to reviewing some interesting papers on the following topics, or indeed anything else related to Web Services: Convergence of XML and Database technology Large scale XML data integration Management of meta-data in the Internet Orchestration, choreography, composition of services Query processing over XML data and fault-tolerance Security and privacy Middleware for Web services Service intermediaries and routing Storage, compression, indexing of XML data Tools and technologies for Web services development Web services impact on enterprise application integration Web services performance issues The CFP Deadline is fast approaching - November 4, 2005 for Refereed Papers, so get those submissions in soon....
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OASIS has just announced the Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) Technical Committee to work on the WS-SecureConversation, WS-SecurityPolicy and WS-Trust specifications to be submitted by Actional Corporation, BEA Systems, Computer Associates, IBM, Layer 7 Technologies, Microsoft, Oblix, OpenNetwork Technologies, Ping Identity, Reactivity, RSA Security, and VeriSign. The purpose of the Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) Technical Committee (TC) is to define extensions to OASIS Web Services Security to enable trusted SOAP message exchanges involving multiple message exchanges and to define security policies that govern the formats and tokens of such messages. This work will be carried out through continued refinement of the Web Services SecureConversation, SecurityPolicy and Trust specifications submitted to the TC as referenced in this charter. That completes the hat trick of Secure-Reliable-Transactional Web Services submissions we have been busy preparing during the last few ...
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