I just received a new ObjectWatch newsletter by Roger Sessions and it really struck a cord with the Enterprise Application Fabrics Scalability Simplified message that I’ve been evangelizing.
The latest newsletter describes a process coined by Roger called Simple Interactive Partitions (SIP). The basis of which is a process based on a mathematical model for simplifying enterprise software's architectural complexity.
I'm attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this week in
I've been following the infrequent posts of Werner Vogels from Amazon in All Things Distributed and came across his pointer to a book by Scott Berkun the Myths of Innovation. I ordered the book, but what really grabbed me in the book description was the statement around "Why problems are more important than solutions " for innovation. What stuck me about the statement was around why the fabric was created. It was created in an effort to simplify developers lives. It was created because some very talented developers created a payment-gateway that was very scalable and reliable, and it was a difficult thing to do.
I'm a big user of high-density travel friendly computing power. And I've been criss-crossing the country with five Mac Minis in a Zuka cart for close to a year now. (I'm the guy you never want to be behind in the security line at the airport, but I can completely disassemble this whole cart in a matter of minutes.)
In the 'How to create a fabric task' I described how you can annotate your existing .NET classes with fabric attributes to create fabric applications. So what I wanted to do here is walk you through how you could create a .NET client application to call your fabric applications.
Appistry enables calling fabric applications from a client .NET application via a thin API. What this API provides is a mechanism by which the client can identify the fabric to connect to, and which application you want to execute in a synchronous or asynchronous way.
Finally some code! What I wanted to show you here is how we can take a .NET Class and include two libraries, Appistry.Task and FabricHelper and add .NET annotations to expose the relevant parts of the class to the fabric. - So here is the before:
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace HelloWorldObject { public class Class1 { private int myVar; public int MyProperty { get { return myVar; }
I've been explaining and demonstrating what a Enterprise Application Fabric is now for about eighteen months now. During this time I have had the opportunity to attend several Gartner and Microsoft industry trade shows shows from coast to coast. I've presented to dozens of corporations, and to every major computer operating system vendor and hardware manufacture. It's been an incredible opportunity to talk about a product that I'm deeply passionate about.
What I have come to realize, which may not be much of a surprise for some, is that coming to a common understanding concerning a new computing paradigm takes more then just 'speaking the language'. It really comes down to finding some common reference point, a common context that can be used to build on.
Yes, I've decided to start my Appistry blog in the same way I've started learning every new programming language I have ever learned in my life, with the obligatory 'Hello World'. We certainly have many more choices today for creating hello world programs then I did back in the 70's on the IBM 360 we had at school. While we did have Basic, Fortran and Cobol, I think the only productive thing we did back then was to generate a much 'yellow punch tape' as we could, when we weren't playing a mainframe version of StarTrek.
Mark Sundt joined Appistry from the Microsoft Corporation where he spent fourteen years focusing on consulting services and developer evangelism. Mark’s services and product sales experience included leadership positions within Microsoft's Business Solutions Consulting organization and architectural positions focused on the sale and deployment of .NET solutions in the Microsoft Enterprise Customer Channel. During this period of time, he provided practice management, project management and architectural guidance to a number of financial services, retail, manufacturing and healthcare companies throughout the United States.
