Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

Some great information architecture stencils for visio can be found at the following link

I've managed to get my mits on an iMate SP6 pre-release model. It feels nice and solid and has some improvements. Some initial things: It's got a 2 Megapixel camera and is 3G capable. Two cameras with one dedicated for video calling, so yes the first imate smartphone with video calling! No Wifi (I suspect it's pushing sh*t uphill to get Wifi and 3G radio stacks into a unit so small). Check the pictures out (thanks to supermondo camera phone photographer Adam Green) for some pics of yours truly with it. This is the first full featured Microsoft smartphone in my opinion. Not only is it an amazingly compelling application platform but with a high spec'd camera and a decent data connection some very interesting applications are possible!

I've been confirmed for "Implementing a Successful SOA - Realising Service Orientation" - A two day SOA workshop I'll be giving in Auckland and Wellington during Oct/Nov in association with BrightStar training. BrightStar are the wonderful folks who ran the three conferences I chaired in the last few years (two SOA and one general Architecture). Rather than being a conference this is a two day workshop to really get your head into SOA with yours truly. It represents over 4 years of active experience as an Enterprise and Strategic architect implementing real world SOAs for several key New Zealand companies such as Farmers Trading company and NZ Immigration Service. It brings all my thinking on SOA into two days of theory, background and practical advise on how to get into SOA. If this interests you jump along to the Brightstar site and register. There is a good discount for early bird registrations.

The course outline is as follows:

COURSE OUTLINE

Day One

What is Service-Orientation?
• Industry trends over the last five years
• Fundamental service orientation principles and tenets
• The relation of service-orientation and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• The definition of SOA from multiple viewpoints
• SOA as an IT philosophy

Service-Orientation as a Practical Theory
• What are services?
• The theory and detailed breakdown of a SOA

SOA - What are the Standards?
• Implementing SOA with web services
• Web services - standards and current status
• Technology implementation of these standards

Model-Driven Development and its Relationship to SOA
• Exploring model-driven development
• Detailing model-driven architecture
• What is contract-first development?
• Pros & cons of contract-first development
• The application of model-driven development of SOA

How SOA Affects your Architecture and Development Team
• How developers and architects need to think differently
• Training, personal development and SOA skills training
• Gaining buy-in from your IT team

Day Two

Prescriptive Guidance - The Microsoft SOA
• The Microsoft Technology Stack
• Microsoft SOA philosophy
• Practical guidance

SOA Case Studies: Objectives, Obstacles & Solutions
• Review of several NZ SOA case studies
• Issues and challenges
• Lessons learned: What went right? What went wrong?
• Identifying patterns which will work for you

Service Oriented Architecture and the Open Source Community
• The Open Source Technology Stack
• The Java Technology Stack
• Practical guidance

Service Oriented Management (SOM)
• Revealing SOM
• How does SOM affect your current IT operation?
• Successfully aligning SOM to your business

Aligning Architecture, Management and Governance
• Understanding the holy grail of implementing  SOA
• What is SOG (Service-Oriented Governance)?
• Realising service-orientation - Architecture, Management and Governance

As promised, here is my presentation from TechEd 2006 - How to Get Your Grandmother Building Missile Defense Systems. The files are 2 Meg downloads each.

ARC213-SVOBODA-Part1.zip (2.1 MB)

ARC213-SVOBODA-Part2.zip (1.97 MB)

Just putting the finishing touches on my presentation for TechEd. I'll be doing it on Wednesday at 3:45pm. A preview of my opening slide:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are over 2200 people at Microsoft's New Zealand TechEd. This makes it the biggest TechEd world wide per capita of developer head population! As TechEd was sold out over 6 weeks ago, Microsoft NZ has created a real-time updated site to give non-attendees insight into the goings on over the next three days. Find it at TechEd Live: http://www.techedlive.co.nz/

 

One of the lovely aspects of dasblog is the mailto: client. i.e. you can setup a pop3 account which it polls for blog entries. This means you can happily send mails and have these appear on your blog. Love it... Great when I can't be bothered logging into my website!

via GotDotNet, here is a link to the recently released patterns and practices for Mobile clients. I haven't looked at it but it includes patterns for lots of common compact framework issues including detecting what network connections are availible and working out which ones to use. Great for working out whether you have a cheap connection (desktop, WIFI) or expense (3G etc) and working out which one to communicate over.

Okay, Day 1 at NZ Microsoft TechEd 2006. I'm presenting day 3 at 3.45pm on the following topic:

"How to get your Grandmother building missile defense systems".

Great title, but what does it really mean? So the abstract is as follows:

How do you create the conditions where moderately skilled developers can build high quality software?

Join Lukas Svoboda as he examines several case studies at Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner Optimation where they built and consulted on high quality, self-sufficient software architectures that could adapt to changes in staff, requirements, and budget.

Lukas shares what Optimation learnt, and explains how they approach projects using tools and techniques such as Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio 2005, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and the Microsoft Software Factory initiative.

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In addition to this I'm going to extend the concept of "Grandma" to more than just moderately skilled developers - I'm going to talk about aligning your whole approach to technology and making sure both ends support each other. So the grandma concept extends to everyone involved in the software project right from your business stakeholder through to your architects, developers and testers. I'll finish up with recent and emerging MS technology that supports gets things done better and then close with some case studies from the past year.

Hopefully my philosophical thinking should be useful information for people who are stuck trying to get meaningful software development while finding their way through all the new MS Technology.

Welcome to my new blog folks. I've decided to take down my old svoboda.co.nz site and start to rework things. Firstly I wanted to use some sort of "standard" blogging software as the software I originally wrote a few years back is dated and doesn't support all the good stuff blogs are meant to support these days. Secondly I want to have a proper place to display all my photos, music and videos.

So this blog will be my professional, work focused blog - i.e. all things Microsoft from an Strategic/Enterprise Architect's perspective. Expect to see philosophical items such as architecture in general, governance and my views on where Microsoft is going through to such things as the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies such as MOSS, WSSV3, VSTS, .NET 3.0, Mobility and many more. 

Technology for this new blog I've moved over to dasblog for the moment. I'll probably end up moving to WSS V3 later on this year depending on how things go.