Software Architecture Summit
Session Outlines

Strategy
Best Practices

KEYNOTES

Architecting for Scalability
Pat Helland, Amazon.com
Tuesday January 31, 10:30 a.m.
The first step to creating scalable apps is to learn how to think about creating them properly in the real world. For example, how do you to consider data access patterns, how should you approach messaging, and how do you ensure your application several critical goals that are critical to scalability. These goals include the assumption that no transactions across nodes because they are fragile). You must also be able to write your app with an eye toward changing its deployment later to cope with increased scalability requirements (you don’t want to change a single line of app code, just redeploy). This talk will explain the characteristics required by such an application, as well as walk you through the design patterns you must employ to achieve this kind of effect.

Deploying Oracle Database 10g on the Windows Platform
Mark Townsend, Senior Director of Database Product Management, Oracle
Tuesday January 31, 11:45 a.m.
All businesses today are faced with the technology challenge of meeting higher service level objectives and the economic challenge of reducing IT costs. How can IT architects get the most of out their resources and take advantage of advances in hardware and software architectures? Oracle's commitment to Windows and .NET enables customers to take full advantage of their .Net development resources and take full advantage of the performance, reliability and scalability of Oracle Database 10g on the windows platform. Join us and learn how to architect Oracle Database 10g deployments for the windows platform. During this session, we'll discuss customer case studies and demonstrate the tight integration between .Net and Oracle Database 10g.

Business Process Modeling
Ted Buszkiewicz, Hewlett Packard
Wednesday February 1, 10:30 a.m.
Real life business processes are complex and require intelligent decisions on the part of their participants at each step of the way. But modeling and execution language, combined with service components and service-oriented middleware, are making it possible to automate even large and seemingly ambiguous business processes. This talk examines the technology advances that make this possible, describes how specific techniques are applied to major steps of the business process, and brings them together to deliver the big picture of modeling and automating seemingly difficult processes. The talk draws from real life examples of how architects have applied specific design principles to successfully overcome hurdles to build complete software systems based on legacy business processes.

Software Architecture on the Edge: Moving Beyond SOA
John deVadoss, Director, Architecture Strategy, Microsoft Corporation
Wednesday February 1, 11:45 a.m.
The software landscape is rapidly changing, and the need for a new architecture to accommodate these changes is rapidly emerging. The emergence of the software as a service (SaaS) paradigm has created opportunity for development of powerful applications that operate on the edge as we as within the cloud.  The business and social models that drive software and commerce are changing as well. All of this means that software architects have to take a step back and think about what lies over the horizon. To move beyond SOA means finding a way to connect the Edge to the existing services infrastructure. This talk will take a look at a new architecture to address this issue.

STRATEGY TRACK

Workflow-Enabled Services
John Evdemon, Architecture Strategy Team, Microsoft
Tuesday January 31, 3:15 p.m.
Most systems today are integrated by exchanging well-defined messages between services. The traditional method for building a service requires a developer to use various abstraction techniques and ensure that business logic is not hosted directly within the service itself. While this approach helps make the service more flexible it does not address the biggest architectural gap facing web services today: service interaction patterns (SIPs).

A SIP occurs when services engage in concurrent and interrelated interactions with other services. Traditional web service architectures are designed to accommodate simple point-to-point interactions - there is no concept of a logical flow or series of steps from one service to another. Workflow-enabled services provide extensible, rules-driven service interactions using a highly scalable workflow engine. Workflow-enabled services are short or long running processes that act in concert to achieve a specific set of objectives. Service interactions are modeled as one or more composable activities that may exist within a workflow. Workflows may also be exposed as services, providing a fractal model in which one set of
workflows triggers another (perhaps as a set of compensating processes for a business exception). Designing workflow-enabled solutions for short-running processes can be relatively simple. Designing workflow-enabled solutions for long-running, multi-organizational processes can be challenging, especially when one realizes that compensating processes may be insufficient for some types of business exceptions.

Case Study — Moving an ERP application to SOA
Paul Knopf, Director of Architecture, QAD
Tuesday January 31, 4:30 p.m.
Your application is your company’s lifeblood, but you know that to keep your business growing you have to break it apart into a collection of services.  How do you do that while keeping your business on track?  QAD’s Paul Knopf explains his strategy for taking his company’s ERP package, which is based on multiple software platforms, to an all-services product base, sharing critical decisions and why those decisions made a difference.

Developer 2.0: Finding Your Way in the Future of Software Development
Harry Pierson,, Microsoft
Tuesday January 31, 5:45 p.m.
The one constant in software development is change. Software development in 2005 is dramatically different than it was in 2000, which was in turn dramatically different than in 1995. You can be guaranteed that the platforms, languages, and tools will continue to evolve. Learn how a key member of Microsoft's Architecture Strategy Team believes software development is going to evolve in the next five years and what you must do today to remain competitive.

Panel — Architects in IT: The Struggle for Relevance
Wednesday February 1, 11:45 a.m.
Software architects have one of those jobs people just don’t understand, and are perpetually being asked to justify themselves or on the verge of being cut. This roundtable discussion helps you make your own best case for why your role is essential for your company's success.

Mind the Gap: How the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Provides Mediation Between J2EE, .NET, WS-* and Other
Dave Chappell, Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software
Wednesday February 1, 3:15 p.m.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has arrived! Now it’s your job to make services based on Java, .NET or other development platforms work together within a consistent architecture and process model. First generation and Advance Web services specifications now emerging in 1.x versions, such as Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM), WS-Policy, WS-Security and WS-Addressing, hold a lot of promise to standardize communications between these services using more sophisticated message exchange patterns. But what’s the architecture that allows you to create and manage a set of complex service interactions that blend the variety of interaction models encompassed by the WS-* stack? How can you enable loosely coupled, flexible deployment models both inside and outside the firewall? How will you manage the SOA lifecycle from deployment to production across a distributed environment?

In this presentation, Dave Chappell will discuss how the enterprise service bus (ESB) can be used to mediate between a variety of invocation models and message exchange patterns,  ultimately deliver a normalized architecture to the enterprise. Chappell will also address the impact of various Java standards, such as Java Business Integration (JBI), and emerging open source initiatives, such as Synapse from the Apache Software Foundation.

Integration Strategy — When to Use What
Kris Horrocks
Wednesday February 1, 4:30 p.m.
Ever wondered when to use which integration technology? In this session you’ll learn and begin to understand the technologies in the Microsoft platform targeted at Integration including: MSMQ, Indigo, SQL Server Service Broker (SSB), Host Integration Server (HIS), BizTalk Server (BTS), SQL Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Replication. Come get a handle on the core use-case for each of these technologies, check out hello-world demos, and see it all happen inside Visual Studio .NET 2005. If you want to understand the breadth of technologies and when you should use which, you need to be here.

Panel Discussion — Key Issues Facing Architects
Tuesday January 31, 5:45 p.m.
Even though more vendors are introducing ESB technology, there remains substantial debate over its role in application integration and business process orchestration. What features are essential in enterprises, and how in general should architects respond to this issue —as well as defining their role in the enterprise? How do architects convince management that architecture matters; costs but has an ROI? And how do architects work with developers on standards and best practices?

BEST PRACTICES TRACK

When Do Smart Clients Make Sense?
Billy Hollis, Book Author, Consultant and Microsoft Regional Director, DotNetMasters
Tuesday January 31, 3:15 p.m.
Browser-based user interfaces were once a given in large projects, but increasing presence of the .NET Framework on desktops now makes smart clients an attractive alternative. How do you decide which is best for a given system? Or do you need to use both? This session discusses the questions to ask when making these decisions, and offers a decision-tree analysis that can help in some common circumstances. Factors such as increased productivity in smart client, difference in deployment costs, and availability of alternative interface technologies such as handwriting will be some of the decision elements discussed.

Integration, Service Orientation and Pattern Driven Design
Ron Jacobs, Product Manager, Patterns & Practices Team, Microsoft
Tuesday January 31, 4:30 p.m.
Enterprise Library was the sleeper hit of 2005 with nearly 200,000 downloads people all over the world are taking advantage of this library of source code that enables you to build enterprise class applications. This session will provide an overview of the library plus updates on the changes from version 1

Identifying and Leveraging Interaction Patterns
Peter Varhol, Technology Strategy Research, Compuware
Tuesday January 31, 5:45 p.m.
Architecting distributed applications takes on an added dimension when taking into account the value of server interaction in assisting the user. Having knowledge of past actions makes it possible to more easily respond to current and future requests. For example, search data can help make the correct decisions even if the query is misspelled. Choosing an interaction pattern also places constraints on architecture. This session describes models of server interaction and the architectures that result from those models.

Best Practices in SOA
Rocky Lhotka, Principal Technology Evangelist, Magenic Technologies
Tuesday February 1, 3:15 p.m.
In many ways SOA is a merger of prior concepts, including message-based, procedural, queued and component architecture and design. In this session you’ll revisit the past to learn best practices you can apply to SOA in the future. The last thing we all want to do is repeat the mistakes of the past, and we all want to apply the lessons learned from prior technologies to SOA going forward.

Practical Applied Behavioral OO Design
Rocky Lhotka, Principal Technology Evangelist, Magenic Technologies
Wednesday February 1, 4:30 p.m.
Everyone wants object-orientation, and truly OO platforms like Java and .NET has triggered a renaissance in OOD. At the same time, most OO designs remain very data-centric and are overly influenced by relational data design. Learn how to avoid the perils of data-centric thinking and truly embrace object-oriented thinking. The end result is that you’ll be able to truly enjoy the benefits of object orientation by achieving lower costs of development and maintenance!

Collaboration Software Factory
Mauro Regio, Industry Solutions Architect Developer and Partner Evangelism Architecture Strategy Team, Microsoft
Wednesday February 1, 5:45 p.m.
Solutions providers involved in large scale integration projects are progressively leveraging Web services to address technical interoperability challenges, embracing the new communication infrastructure that is standardized and interoperable by design. Successful adoption of Web services platform requires understanding of how to map the conceptual elements of business architecture into functional capabilities offered at the service level. That mapping should be done in a prescriptive way and, possibly, supported by automated specification and development tools. In this context, the Software Factories approach can be leveraged to provide solution developers with a domain specific development environment that inherits business specifications from vertical ontologies and supports orchestrated collaboration among applications on tops of Web services infrastructure. In this session we’ll discuss the proof of concept Business Collaboration Software Factory and learn the key lessons learned working with the current generation of Software Factories platform.