I was recently sent a copy of Ron Jacobs' presentation on Patterns for Service Oriented Architecture. It's not too deep, but I agree with it completely. And, clients who went to see him present it at the local DNUG said it helped them better understand how SOA is relevant to their enterprise. Every little bit helps.
A couple of days later I had the pleasure of meeting Ron and hearing him present on the Enterprise Library. While it's been around a little while, many still haven't heard of or at least used this collection of "application blocks". These components simultaneous add architecturally significant capabilities to enterprise apps easily while exemplifying via open source the MS way to structure code. Version 1.1 was recently released for compatibility with .Net v2.0. A new version of the library (v2.0?) is due out in a few months, implemented in .Net v2.0 and exemplifying its use.
Ron's a fun presenter and apparently shares a disdain for Typed DataSets being used in all MS developer tool presentations. "They have their uses", he allows, implying not many. My question is, when will the rest of MS start evangelizing good architecture instead of just binding user controls straight to SQL queries or Typed DataSets? Layers, people! Layers!
On the (sort-of) cutting edge, Ron very briefly showed the practices and patterns team's up-coming Guided Automation Tool (GAT, as in "I got my GAT and I'm not afraid to use it"). Didn't see much other than yet-another-code-generator for Table Data Gateways, yawn. When I inquired about the now defunct ObjectSpaces he said, "This is infinitely more flexible." Uh-huh.... Infinity is a very big number. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
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