San Diego Oslo Presentation — Oct 28 2008

by | Oct 25, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

The announcement has not gone out yet, but…. I will be doing an Oslo presentation on Tuesday at the main meeting of the San Diego .NET User Group. This is a bit impromptu, as it turned out I would be home the week of the meeting (somewhat a rarity as I have been home for one week out of eight), the meeting is on Tuesday, and on Monday Microsoft will start to talk about, and show, Oslo to the world. So, we looked at all those things and decided to modify the meeting. Thanks to Scott Reed of Developmentor for being accommodating and yielding a time slot for me to do this.

As far as I know, this is the first user group presentation on Oslo and the new wave of technologies that Microsoft has been investing heavily in. This is the same presentation I did a couple of weeks ago at the SOA Symposium in Amsterdam, only I will be able to speak a bit more freely. If time permits, I will even show some tools (live, running bits, not just PowerPoint!).

Joe McKendrick, an analyst who writes the Service-Oriented blog at ZDNet, blogged about the Amsterdam presentation here.

You can get time/location information at the website, session info is below.

If you’re in San Diego and work with .NET, you’ll want to see this as it affects you greatly (although you may not know it yet :))

Session title:
A Look at Microsoft’s New Wave of Technologies

Session abstract:
The technologies currently being built by Microsoft are a major initiative with a goal to make it easier to design, construct, deploy and manage distributed applications and services. It is an evolution of SOA technologies, encompassing Windows Communications Foundation, the next version of .NET, BizTalk Server, Windows Workflow Foundation, Visual Studio and more. Using those technologies as a starting point and building on them, the new “Oslo” modeling platform also introduces a suite of modeling tools and a repository that allow the creation of role-based tools that can be used throughout an application’s lifecycle.

This wave of technologies will have a profound impact on the way software is created and managed. In this session, we will look at what an architect needs to know about the various technologies, and gain an understanding of how they fit together.

Technorati Tags: Oslo,Cloud,Models,Modeling,SOA,BizTalk

Economy crisis 101

by | Oct 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Pardon for another non-technical post, but I thought it may be interesting. A friend of mine, a professor at the University of Texas, presented an article of his student, introducing some mathmatical theory explaining the roots of today crisis in economy. And I could not resist to answer. If you know all this, please, understand. Afetr all, if some professors don’t get it, it may be interesting to a fair share of people around…


So, here it is:



Do you think that may be this article is a little au contrare to Occam’s razor principle?

 

You see, subprime mortgages per se are not what’s the real reason of today’s crisis. If it would be so, the cost of handling it would not be $700 bln+, but only around $40-50 bln to help people stay in homes and let the real estate bubble go down slower without big economical or social impact.

 

The real problems is derivatives based on these subprime mortgages. You don’t need a mathematical theory or even Excel to explain it. Although, I admit, there was straightforward and intentional mathematical error in the middle, all right. In a case, somebody missed how it was done, let me explain with an example. Imagine a fleet of 1000 cars going over very long bridge which has a 50% chance to collapse in a next few minutes. Owner of this fleet, scared of the possibility, asks you to buy the whole fleet at a very attractive price. Now, you think, the chances that bridge will collapse is 50%, hence the chance to lose each specific car is 50%, now if I have 1000 cars then the chances that at least 10% of cars survive is much greater than that. You know, say for two cars probability that at least one to survive is p1+p2-p1*p2 = 0.5 + 0.5 – 0.5*0.5 = 0.75, that is 75%.  And for a 1000 cars it’s much much better. So if the part which will survive will cover the cost, you are good. You see the problem? Dependent events were represented as independent. A mistake unforgivable to a college student, but somehow ok for Wall Street CEOs.

 

If it’s still not clear, let’s say the fleet is 10 cars and owner offers you price of 10% of fair value. The chance that at least one car will survive if events are independent is 99.95%, so it looks like a sure shot. So you are entering the game with the expectations of 99.95% chance of not losing money and great expectation of making money. In fact, the chance of losing money is still 50%.

 

What they did was packaging a lot of subprime mortgages and applying the logic above. Then they issued the bonds based on, say, 10% of those mortgages, _whichever will survive_. And they got AAA rating to these bonds. And then, in expectation of profit, they issued bonds on these bonds with leverage ($1 in original bonds produced $10 in next derivatives) exceeding total annual planetary gross product in times. What was ignored is that the risk of subprime mortgages is not merely financial state of borrowers, but the state of the real estate bubble, which was going to burst with not even 50%, but with 100% probability, everybody knew that ahead. And financial state of the borrowers was not that independent either.

 

So, you see, no need for extra math or even Excel (although, I used it to calculate probabilities above). What we deal with is cheating and larceny, nothing a good cop could not handle in time without a need for extra math. Unfortunately, neither Greenspan, nor Bernanke proved themselves to be good cops.

Updated tool for undeploying BizTalk assemblies

by | Oct 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I previously wrote an article about a tool that could help you undeploy BizTalk assemblies with its references, without going through the pain of keeping track of all assembly references.

 

The tool has now been updated for better support of dependency tracking along with some other minor UI changes.

The application requires .Net 3.5, which, if you haven't got it installed, can be found here. If you choose not to run the application on the server, make sure the assemblies you're about to uninstall are deployed to the computer from which you're running the application. This is because the application needs to access the assemblies to get its dependencies.

Download

HTH

Survey about Business Rules Engine

by | Oct 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi all

The CSD/BizTalk Product Group is conducting a survey to assess customer usage of the
Business Rules Engine (BRE).

They have sent a link to us MVP’s to get our opinion, but would also like the opinion
of BizTalk consultants, BizTalk customers, and so on.

If you can spare a few minutes, please take the survey at https://live.datstat.com/MSCSD-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=BRE_Usage_Survey_Blog

—

eliasen

PDC08 + TechEd Emea 2008

PDC08 + TechEd Emea 2008

by | Oct 23, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Next week I’ll be off at PDC08, which is shaping up to be as good as PDC05 was, with a lot of sessions on Today’s hot topic: Cloud Computing. One week later, I’ll be at the Ask-The-Experts booths at TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers in Barcelona (my colleague and SharePoint God Ra%u00fal is also attending the conference), focused on making contacts and maybe attending some of the sessions missed from PDC that will be repeated there. Pedro Rosa from Microsoft Portugal is the owner of the dev track, and has some pretty good sessions lined up.

If you happen to be at any of the events and want to meet, contact me using the form on the blog.

You just gotta love technology 🙂 See you there.

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October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight

by | Oct 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I’ve done myself in the past.

ASP.NET

  • Building a Great ASP.NET AJAX Application from Scratch: Brad Abrams has a nice end to end application tutorial that shows off building an ASP.NET AJAX application from scratch. It covers ASP.NET, LINQ, Server and Client-side AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, jQuery and more.  A great end to end read.

  • ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 URL Rewriting Module: Scott Hanselman has a great post that shows off using the new IIS7 Rewriitng Module (which is free and very, very cool) to deliver great SEO (search engine optimization) for sites built with ASP.NET and specifically ASP.NET MVC. 

  • 7 of my Favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET: Dave Ward has a nice blog post that talks about 7 of his favorite jQuery plugins and how he uses them with ASP.NET.

  • Using jQuery to display a modal ASP.NET UpdatePanel confirmation: Dave Ward has another nice blog post that talks about how to use jQuery with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control.

  • Using jQuery Load with the ASP.NET MVC Framework: Jason has a nice simple sample that demonstrates how to use jQuery to load an ASP.NET MVC view remotely and populate a page on the client.

Visual Studio

  • VS 2008 Snippet Designer: A cool utility that enables you to quickly create re-usable Visual Studio snippets.  Very handy for automating common tasks.

Silverlight and WPF

  • XAML Power Toys Released for WPF and Silverlight: Karl Shifflett has released an awesome update to his XAML Power Toys download.  This is a must-have download if you are doing WPF or Silverlight development, and provides a bunch of great wizards and tools that help automating application development.  Very, very cool stuff.

  • WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library on CodePlex: .NET 3.5 SP1 added Pixel Shader support to WPF – which enables you to add cool DirectX optimized visual effects to any WPF control or surface.  This article from Jamie points to a nice new CodePlex project that is available that delivers a bunch of pre-built effects you can use.

  • Silverlight 2 UI Templates: Tim Heuer writes about some cool new UI templates available for the recently released Silverlight 2.

  • Viewing Design Time Data in VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight Designers: Karl Shifflett has another nice article that talks about some techniques you can use to see sample data in the VS 2008 WPF and Silverlight designers when building applications.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Upcoming BizTalk and .NET training classes

by | Oct 22, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

If you are looking for a deep dive or topic specific training on BizTalk or .Net, check out these new classes offered by our training partner Quicklearn:


 





























BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Developer Immersion


 

%u00b7         Cincinnati, OH – Nov 3-7, 2008


%u00b7         Boston, MA – Dec 15-19, 2008


%u00b7         Redmond, WA – Jan 19-23, 2009


BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Developer Deep Dive


 

%u00b7         Los Angeles, CA – Nov 3-7, 2008


%u00b7         Reading, UK – Dec 1-5, 2008


%u00b7         Redmond, WA – Dec 8-12, 2008


BizTalk Expert Series: ESB

%u00b7         Reading UK – Dec 8-9, 2008


BizTalk Expert Series: BAM

%u00b7         Reading UK – Dec 10-11, 2008


Building Healthcare Solutions with BizTalk – NEW

%u00b7         Redmond, WA – Jan 19-23, 2008


Building SOA Solutions from the Ground Up – UPDATED

%u00b7         Redmond, WA – Dec 15-19, 2008


Building .NET Framework 3.51 Enterprise Solutions using Visual Studio 2008  – NEW

%u00b7         Redmond, WA – Dec 15-18, 2008


Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Deep Dive – UPDATE

%u00b7         Redmond, WA – Nov 10-14, 2008


 


This schedule is subject to change. Please visit www.QuickLearn.com for current schedule.


 


Regards,


Ofer