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Hooked on Skype

Today, Scott "the German who doesn't speak German" Hanselman introduced me to one of best pieces of software I've seen in the last time: Skype [http://www.skype.com]

Skype is a free, non-adware P2P voice over IP application (from the makers of kazaa) which doesn't force you to reconfigure your firewall and which provides voice quality which is better than, or at least comparable to a phone. With no noticeable lag and no blank-out periods like transatlantic phone calls.

It rocks for me because a lot of my friends are distributed amongst five different continents and Skype allows me to keep in touch with them better than IM would allow me to. Today I've already talked to friends in the US and Africa just as easily as using IM. I'm impressed.

thinktecture.com is online

It's been a long journey which took us several months, hundreds of emails, and hours of phone conferences and meetings throughout Europe. Today we've reached our most important milestone: thinktecture is going online.

Thinktecture offers in-depth consulting for software developers and architects. What we did was essentially to look at all the projects and customer with which we've worked in the previous years to distill a best practices approach for supporting .NET and web services projects. You can read more about this idea here. Our work is always focused on solving your current's projects needs while at the same time increasing your skill set.

We also wanted to allow for one thing: total confidence in our staff. We've therefore selected a team in which everyone has demonstrated his experience with writing successful books and articles, and in which everyone has excellent communication skills and is also a sought-after speaker for software development conferences around the world. Just check out our team and tell me what you think of our selection!

Even if you are not looking for consulting or support in your projects, we will have something for you as well: We've made arrangements with some international publishers which will allow us to continuously create and add new original, high-quality content to our site. I can't tell you too much right now, but the best way to keep informed about new articles is to subscribe to our new thinktecture blog using your favorite RSS reader.

I personally would really like to hear what you think of thinktecture. What do you think of our services? Do you like the team? Would there be anything your project needs which isn't part of our offerings? Do you have any further ideas on how we could improve our value for your - or others' - projects? You can reach me at any time by email or msn messenger at ingo.rammer@thinktecture.com or - for voice conversations - as "ingorammer" on Skype.

Two days to go ...

http://www.thinktecture.com. Two days to go.

More about changes

There are things, which I just couldn't do on my own. Four more days.

Big Changes in Five Days

Some big time changes ahead for me. Five days to go.

The Endangered Middle Tier

Harry has two interesting points at the end of his article which questions the middle tier as a necessary separate unit of physical deployment:

• Will a service-oriented approach likely result in of boatloads of independent services where today we have one BIG app?
• If yes, will the vast majority of these boatloads of independent services have modest enough scalability requirements to run on a single piece of hardware in the near future?

I'm personally not sure about the first one. Harry used the analogy of database tables which can run in one container if there are no special scalability needs, and which can be split out amongs multiple storage partitions if the need arises. In the services world - whatever that might be as of today - I don't see that we are there, or even near, yet. If you'd create the 100s or 1000s of services which Harry is referring to in his post, than you'll quite likely - as of today - and up in a maintainance nightmare. In fact, if a customer would walk up to me today to do a design review on an business application with 1000s of ASMX services, I'd quite likely point this out as a bad idea and would want to know about their motiviation for doing so.

However: I definitely see where Harry is heading to. I guess we'd need some sort of "container" - like the database server in his analogy - which manages the physical distribution of the services without changing any single bit of your implementation code. We'd need tools that allow administrators to do the equivalent of table partitioning to deploy the services.

This container however can not be IIS as it is today. It needs to allow the administrator to treat a service in a similar way a table is treated by a database server. As a unit of management and as a unit of deployment which might be concentrated on a single machine or split out amongs more of them if the need arises. (Just treating a service "as an ASMX file" is not enough) Furthermore, this new container must be *very* easy to use. A developer doesn't have to think too much (yes, I know, that's simplified and not 100% true) about the physical distribution of databases, logs, indexes, and tables amongst storage media when he issues his first "create table foo" command. If he follows sound development practices, a sysadmin will later be able to change this distribution depending on the scalability requirements. We'd need a similar container and administrative toolkit for service deployment.

For the second question, I think that, yes, most services which are used as backends for business applications don't have massive scalability requirements. But, you know, I still recommend most of my customers to run their services on a two-node W2K3 NLB cluster instead of on a single box. It's not that expensive. And it's not just about scalability. It's also about transparent failover and the ability to apply service packs and security hotfixes to single nodes in your cluster without taking down the whole application.

Your take on it, Harry?

Thank you, "Compare and Merge Documents"

You've heard it before: "Microsoft Word contains hundreds of features most people never use. "

But then again, one day you might need one of them and just one single feature might recoup the complete cost of the Office System. Let's just suppose that you have written a 400 page document some years ago. This document went through several revisions (in DOC), has been typeset in QuarkXPress, and has afterwards undergone several more cycles of copy editing and proofreading in PDF format with the result feed back to Quark. Several months later, you did some more revisions based on the PDF documents. Everything was fine, the world was bright.

At some point however, you decide that your document has to undergo a major revision which will significantly increase the size of the document as well. You now face the problem that all these PDF-based changes (literally, hundreds of them) never made it back to the DOCs. Ok. No big problem: just export them from Quark to DOC and work on these documents instead. But hey ... where did your styles go? Where is your nice formatting? Why are there so many Quarkisms in your documents?

Ok. Two options: use the old DOCs or try to ignore all the Quarkisms. Quite frankly: the second options doesn't appeal too much if you've ever seen one of these exports.

Now, there's one of these features in Word which hardly anyone ever uses: "Compare and Merge documents." This amazing thing has allowed me to take all the formatting/styles from the original DOCs and merge them with the changed text which has been exported from Quark. Without taking all the Quarkisms along. Seriously, this is like merging changes you made in the IL code back into your original C# sources. I'm totally blown away.

If you know the person on the Office team who's been resposible for implementing this feature, could you please tell him/her that I owe dinner the next time I visit Redmond?

Au revoir, Casablanca!

Goksin, Clemens, Stephen, Malek, et moi

More details and photos here, here, here and especially here.

Favorite tech weblog these days

I wanted to say this for ages:

If you are interested in details about Sharepoint and BizTalk, the resource du jour is definitely Jan Tielens' blog. Truly insightful. Jan, are you writing a book on one of these?

Tomorrow: Casablanca

Next stop: Casablanca. Joining some friends to speak at NDC 2004 starting on Tuesday next week.

If you live in North Africa, you should really check out this conference's content. Normally, there either is no such thing as a free lunch or at least it seriously lacks in taste. This time it's totally different. Microsoft was able to assemble a group of extremely cool speakers. Next to some other great speakers, you'll meet the following Microsoft RDs: Andrew Brust, Clemens Vasters, Eric Groise, Goksin Bakir, Malek Kemmou, Scott Hanselman, Stephen Forte, Sylvain Duford, Yann Faure. Et moi.

Sessions will be in French or en anglais, avec traduction simultanée. (Yes, I learnt French for four years or so. No, really, my session will be in English. ;-))

Oh, and yes, it's free! [Registration.]

Update: I'm especially looking forward to Clemens' session on FABRIQ. This is going to be a world's first!

Upgraded

If you can read this, today's upgrade to W2K3 + EX2K3 seems to be at least rudimentarily successful.

I had some issues with Exchange 2003 and OLEDB which were easily solved - after hours of hunting - by following this description.

Welcome, Italy!

Alberto Falossi from the Italian Visual Basic and .NET Journal broke the news: We are proud to announce my exclusive Italian column starting with the current issue of VBJ! From today on, you'll be able to read my opinions and advice on software architecture and design in each issue.

[Read more ... in Italian]

This really makes me long for going to Venice again. Maybe in May ...

.NET DJ Reader's Choice Award: "Best Book 2003"

Thank you for your tremendous support!

Thanks to your votes, Advanced .NET Remoting became Best Book of 2003 in .NET DJ's Reader's Choice Award. Thank you. I am honored. Woohoo!

Slides and samples for my sessions at DevWeek London

I just uploaded the slides and samples for my talks at DevWeek London. If you attended one of my sessions, I'd really love to hear your feedback at ingo@ingorammer.com. Thanks!

Complete

• Complete (1338 KB. All five sessions as PDFs + samples)

Single sessions

• An "Alternative Introduction to Web Services" (285 KB, Adobe PDF only. Source code will be available right after the release of the Web Services Enhancements 2.0)
• Design and Development of Distributed Applications - Part 1 (388 KB, Adobe PDF)
• Design and Development of Distributed Applications - Part 2 (137 KB, Adobe PDF)
• Top 10 .NET Remoting Real World Issues (226 KB, Adobe PDF + Visual Studio 1.1 Solution)
• Dynamic Applications: Scripting, CodeDom and Reflection (304 KB, Adobe PDF + Visual Studio 1.1 Solutions)