Getting to Denver hasn’t been easy at all. The flight to Chicago has been delayed for several hours and as a result I missed my connection.
I finally managed to get to the hotel in Denver at 11:30pm local time and, although I was in a terrible state, my body just refused to fall asleep.

In the morning, I met Erik Doernenburg at the lobby and together we drove back to the airport to join Niclas Nilsson, Arjen Poutsma and Mike Roberts.
With the exception of Mike, everybody else is a survivor of the expedition to Cortina early this year so I’m sure that Jimmy Nilsson (who co-organized the event in February with Andrea Provaglio) will be proud of us.

With two cars available, we finally started our trip to Crested Butte and I took the chance to know a bit about Mike’s work, my co-pilot in this circumstance.
Given his involvement in the development of CruiseControl.NET, it was natural to talk about software configuration management systems and the possibility of using Windows Workflow in this context.

We also went to a bit of discussion on the topic of graphical languages and code generation.
Considering my background in electronics and my experience in automation where graphic languages have been successfully used for years, I’m often surprised to see how much resistance I encounter on the subject.
The future will tell if finally some form of model-driven development will reach the maturity and the widespread adoption that I believe it deserves, but it is clear that a lot of people are currently very sceptic or quite simply indifferent.

Code generation is another controversial subject as many see it as a workaround to a fundamental issue with code intensive frameworks and languages.
I’m certainly keen to explore both subjects in the next few days.

Driving to Crested Butte is quite an experience as the scenery is absolutely breathtaking.
In fact, since we reached an altitude of about 3900m, the body requires a bit of adaptation. We kept drinking a lot of water to avoid dehydration, which apparently is the main enemy in these cases but I must say that at some point I really started falling into pieces given the combination of jet leg, lack of sleep and scarcity of oxygen.
After 7 hours (yes we took it very easy) we finally reached our final destination, a fantastic house that Niclas booked for all of us a few weeks ago.

Finally, we ended the day into Bruce Eckel’s house where some of the other delegates convened for a little party. I was pleasantly surprised to see Philip Nelson again, another friend from Cortina. We had some little “geeky” conversations but quite honestly I was so tired that I doubt I made any meaningful contribution.

Tomorrow I will hopefully be able to describe what happened the following day, during the official opening of the workshop.

Add this post to:             

I feel a little bit strange writing a post after such a long time. Some say that a blog is like a shark: it has to keep moving all the time to stay alive; I’m afraid the shark is long dead.

I often wonder how certain people keep up writing so often and consistently. Does everybody else have so much more time and talent than I do?
Of course not. It would be such a self limiting belief that I just refuse to consider the thought.

Some people are fast writers; clearly I don’t belong to that category, which is pretty peculiar considering that my very first job was as technical writer! (That was a long time ago, before I managed to decisively follow my heart and start earning a living in software development).

Sure, expressing my thoughts using a foreign language is slightly less immediate, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I really find the act of writing only moderately pleasing and tremendously painful.
In fact, I find so hard to choose the right words, that in the process my entire body often saturates with anger and frustration.
I get grumpy, my beard grows twice as fast and only my cats dare to stay close to me :-).

My wife once said that she would divorce immediately if I ever dare writing a book. She was joking, but it should give some idea of what I’m capable of becoming.

So why am I writing today? Well, there are things I just have to report.
I am now flying to Colorado since I am one of the few lucky delegates of this year’s software architecture workshop in Crested Butte, a beautiful place right at the heart of the famous Rocky Mountains.
I will certainly meet some old and new friends in the next couple of days and I’m sure you will soon wish you were there as well.
Stay tuned!

Add this post to:             

Pleasanton, CA - August 8, 2006 - InnerWorkings is delighted to offer developers the ability to purchase Drills (2+ hours coding time) online for $29.95.

We’ve created a special category of Personal Use Licenses for individual developers. For each Drill purchased online, you will receive the following:

• 6 month Personal Use License
• Email technical support (product setup and installation)
• Immediate access to .NET challenges

Simply click the following link to browse our entire library of coding challenges for the .NET Framework:

Launch Online Catalog

Each Drill is accompanied by a detailed description page, complete with audience profile, pre-requisites, difficulty level, and skills coverage. In addition, we’re offering our Pick of the Month for a selected Drill on the latest and greatest technology (such as WCF or Atlas) for just $24.95.

The online payment process is very simple and we accept all major credit cards. For international visitors, the transaction will be billed in U.S. dollars and converted to your local currency. Check it out today!

Add this post to:             

I was an attendee at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference which was held in Boston last month amid torrential rain showers and lethal tunnel collapses. If only the partner conference was half as eventful! Maybe I expected too much, but there wasn’t exactly a torrent of earth-shattering announcements coming out of Microsoft during the event.

To some degree, this was due to the whacky world of Microsoft’s product release schedules - there just isn’t a lot happening this summer. Both Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 were released with much fanfare last November, drawing crowds of 225,000 attendees across 247 cities (according to Sanjay Parthasarathy, who ought to know). The guessing game of Windows Vista release continues although Microsoft still insists that it will release the business version of Vista in November 2006 and the consumer version in January 2007. Bill Gates added to the uncertainty by offering his 80 percent analysis, while Steve Ballmer insisted that Microsoft would never again leave such a long gap (5 years) between releases of its core operating system. “Count on it” he yelled - it’s probably best not to contradict him when he’s in that mood onstage.

In other conference news, Microsoft is clearly taking aim at its Office constituency of 400 million licensed users. Perhaps the most impressive push at the conference was the company’s “Unified Communications” strategy. Although it was limited to a breakout session at the conference, the presentation was so popular it became standing room only. In fact, the speakers asked all Microsoft employees present to identify themselves and then vacate their chairs to make partners comfortable - proper order! The showcase of Unified Communications across multiple devices was really well conceived and made me consider the Office 2007 beta for the first time. Microsoft’s vision for integrated office communications certainly isn’t new, but it’s clear that they have secured the basic elements to make it a reality (rather than a marketing spin to buy some time). The acquisition of Groove Networks certainly helped the cause, as new functionality seemed to spring from everywhere.

With such a pervasive product in the end user category, Microsoft is perfectly positioned to deliver integrated communications for information workers. As the presentation unfolded, many good working scenarios were explored - imagine combining all the most common software tools onto a single collaboration platform and blurring the distinction between each mode of communication. Take e-mail (Outlook), instant messaging (Messenger), video (Media Player), VoIP (Communicator), and web conferencing (LiveMeeting). Why should you have a separate contact list across all these applications and devices - isn’t each one just storing and accessing the same data in separate locations?

Furthermore, shouldn’t all your applications and devices be able to detect your real-time profile and route incoming messages accordingly? For example, if you’re out of the office at the Microsoft Partner Conference, why couldn’t your VoIP phone recognize your status is set to “On the Road” and route all voicemails to your PDA or email client? Why must we go through the routine of calling someone’s office phone, then their cell phone, then their IM, then leaving an email? It’s basically the same message each time, so shouldn’t the system be able to pass you through to the correct device depending on the recipient’s active profile? Sadly, Microsoft has given this very useful concept the horrible name of “Presence Awareness”. Somebody in the Marketing department should be boiled in hot oil for that linguistic monstrosity!

As if to drive the point home, most of us returned from this year’s partner conference to a slew of voice mails from family, telemarketers, and work colleagues that are dated and pretty useless by the time we receive them. One of the nice things about this Unified Communications strategy is that this level of ineffective communications will be exposed as laughable in a few years - just you wait. Of course, we need developers to build connected applications and ISVs to innovate around this notion before it can ever become a reality. This is why I came away from the conference thinking that developers should be looking at Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) with a fresh pair of eyes. Extending the Microsoft Office 2007 suite and building on the Unified Communications platform could well be the next wave of real innovation in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Now where did I put that stack of Post-Its with scribbled notes from all my deleted voice mails last month? Hmmmmnnnn….

Add this post to: