Click the links for the real reasons why the TechEd Israel and NT Konferenca parties rocked.

I am back home from San Diego now. About 3 more hours of jet-lag to work on. This will be a very busy two weeks until I make a little excursion to the Pakistan Developer Conference in Karachi and then have another week to do the final preparations for TechEd Europe.

One of the three realy cool talks I'll do at TechEd Europe is called "Building Proseware" and explains the the scenario, architecture, and core implementation techniques of Proseware, an industrial-strength, robust, service-oriented example application that newtelligence has designed and implemented for Microsoft over the past 2 months.

The second talk is one that I have been looking forward to for a long time: Rafal Lukawiecki and myself are going to co-present a session. And if that weren't enough: The moderator of our little on-stage banter about services is nobody else than Pat Helland.

And lastly, I'll likely sign-off on the first public version of the FABRIQ later this week (we had been waiting for WSE 2.0 to come out), which means that Arvindra Sehmi and myself can not only repeat our FABRIQ talk in Amsterdam but have shipping bits to show this time. There will even be a hands-on lab on FABRIQ led by newtelligence instructors Achim Oellers and Jörg Freiberger. The plan is to launch the bits before the show, so watch this space for "when and where".

Overall, and as much as I like meeting all my friends in the U.S. and appreciate the efforts of the TechEd team over there, I think that for the last 4 years TechEd Europe consistently has been and will be again the better of the two TechEd events from a developer perspective. In Europe, we have TechEd and IT Forum, whereby TechEd is more developer focused and IT Forum is for the operations side of the house. Hence, TechEd Europe can go and does go a lot deeper into developer topics than TechEd US.

There's a lot of work ahead so don't be surprised if the blog falls silent again until I unleash the information avalanche on Proseware and FABRIQ.

Only this week here at TechEd it became really apparent to me how many people read the things I write here. I've had dozens of "strangers" walking up to me saying "Clemens, I read your blog. Thank you for the things you write.". It's great to meet the real people behind the numbers  (I get an insane amount of hits each day for what is effectively a personal opinion outlet)  and it's absolutely fantastic to hear when people tell me that I am helping them to do their job better. So what I wanted to say is ... "Thank you for stopping by every once in a while and for helping me to do my job well"

All the wonderful loose coupling on the service boundary doesn't help you the least bit, if you tightly couple a set of services on a common store. The temptation is just too big that some developer will go and make a database join across the "data domains" of services and cause a co-location dependency of data and schema dependencies between services. If you share data stores, you break the autonomy rule and you simply don't have a service.

Separating out data stores means at least that every service has it's own "tablespace" or "database" and that in-store joins between those stores are absolutely forbidden. If you have a service managing customers and a service managing invoices, the invoice service must go through the service front for anything that has to do with customer data.

If you want to do reporting across data owned by several services, you must have a reporting service that pulls the data through service interfaces, consolidates it and creates the reports from there.

Will this all be a bit slower than coupling in the store? Sure. It will make your architecture infinitely more agile, though and allows you to implement a lot of clustering scalability patterns. In that way, autonomy is not about making everything a Porsche 911; it's about making the roads wider so that nobody (including the Porsche) ends up in a traffic jam all the time. It's also about paving roads that not only let you from A to B in one stretch, but also have something useful called "exits" that let you get off or on that road at any other place between those two points.

If you decide to throw out you own customer service and replace it with a wrapper around Siebel, your invoice service will never learn about that change. If the invoice service were reaching over into co-located tables owned by the (former) customer service, you'd have a lot of work to do to untangle things. You don't need to do that untangling and all that complication. As an architect you should keep things separate from the start and make it insanely difficult for developers to break those rules. Having different databases and, better yet, to scatter them over several machines at least at development time makes it hard enough to keep the discipline.

Omar has already posted the announced fix for version 1.6 and has updated all the downloadable files. Go here to get the updated versions. If you run 1.6, get the hotfix, otherwise just get one of the full archives. We should now be stable again. Thanks to Omar and Erv Walter for providing the fix and the repacking so quickly (while I am busy in San Diego at TechEd).

We'll have a fixpack for dasBlog 1.6 within the next two days that will roll back a few internal changes that had been made to improve performance, but unfortunately caused significant instability. The code is already checked into our tree and we're going to have the fix packaged up for download very soon. If you don't have 1.6 installed yet, wait until we have the fix. Within a week we are going to replace the 1.6 verson available from the Gotdotnet workspace with a version that incorporates the fix.

A short background reading link list for my CTS404 session at TechEd that I'll do in Room 10 this afternoon (Monday, May 24) at 5:00pm at TechEd San Diego:

Stateless?!
(About the uselessness of the static "statelessness" of a component as an indicator for its scalability)

Dealing with distributed transaction anomalies caused by web service calls from within transactions
(I'll show an updated version of that approach) 

Just in time activation proxy pooling
(Client side "connection pooling" for Enterprise Services)

I am looking forward to the session, because it's another one that challenges established beliefs (such as "stateless"="scalable")

Now that we're getting close to the dasBlog engine's 1st birthday, I'd like to know how people use it. I am seeing quite a few blogs out there who run the software, but it's just as interesting to know how the engine is used in corporate Intranets and whether you use it as a tool to help coordinate projects, share knowledge about certain topics or .... how would I know?

If you use dasBlog, it'd be great if you could share with me how you use it, how you like it, and what you don't like. If you've warped the engine into something totally different or if you have some really cool design but it lives hidden inside the corporate firewall, I would appreciate getting a screenshot (blur out the secrets). None of the information will be published unless you allow me to do that.

I am also interested to know whether and how you've used snippets from the blog code for your own projects and/or products. Knowing what pieces are valuable to you would allow me to isolate them and put them into some isolated "goodies" library down the road.

Scott Hanselman ran into a critical bug in dasBlog 1.6 that has to do with the new caching logic that the folks in the GDN workspace came up with (I didn't do it, I didn't do it!). We've both sent email to those who know about this issue and will see who will look at it and when. Apparently Scott posted something using an external tool and a couple of things were happening in parallel around that same time and that got the caching mechanism confused. If you get unexplicable errors and all you get is the "error page" , go ahead and delete the files entryCache.xml, categoryCache.xml, and blogdata.xml; then open and save (touch) web.config. that should get the blog back on its feet.

If you are on version 1.5 or earlier, stick to it while this is being checked. If you are on 1.6, have some tea or a lightly alcoholic beverage and don't panic.

It's rare that I give "must have" tool recommendations, but here is one: If you do any regular expressions work with the .NET Framework, go and get Roy Osherove's Regulator. Roy consolidated a lot of the best things from various free regex tools and added his own wizardry into a pretty cool "RegEx IDE".

The four fundamental transaction principles are nicely grouped into the acronym "ACID" that's simple to remember, and so I was looking for something that's doing the same for the SOA tenets and that sort of represents what the service idea has done to the distributed platform wars:

• Policy-Based Behavior Negotiation
• Explicitness of Boundaries
• Autonomy
• Contract
  Exchange

This here reminds me of the box that's quietly humming in my home office and serves as my domain controller, firewall, RAS and DSL gateway. I upgraded the machine (a rather old 400 MHz Compaq) to Windows Server 2003 the day before I flew to TechEd Malaysia last year (August 23rd, 2003). I configured it to auto-update from Windows Update and reboot at 3:00AM in case updates have been applied.

Guess what: I got back home from that trip (which included 4 days touring the Angkor temples in Cambodia and another 10 days hanging out at the beach on Thailand's Ko Samui island) and realized that I forgot the Administrator password. Tried to get in to no avail. I've got rebuilding the box on my task list, but there's no rush. I haven't really touched or switched off the machine ever since. It keeps patching itself every once in a while and otherwise simply does its job.

Want to win an XBox? You run dasBlog? Michael Earls shows you how.

[I just knew that the <%newtelligence.aspnetcontrol("TechEdBloggersFeed.ascx")%> macro would eventually be good for something ]

Omar Shahine, who took the role of the "Program Manager" for dasBlog 1.6 added a new macro feature (I am actually not really sure who added it; someone correct me if I am wrong; at least Omar OK'd the feature) that totally rocks and put us on par with MovableType in terms of easy access to older entries:

<%newtelligence.drawarchivemonths()%> 

The macro creates a list of links for all months that have blog entries and if you look at my site (not at the RSS feed), you'll see it on the left-hand side of the page just under the "What's News" section. Thanks! Now I can find my old stuff again.

if you haven't see it already; Omar's comments about the 1.6 drop and links to release notes and binaries/source are on his blog.