Brennan’s Blog

You can now get a stable release of the Service Factory for Visual Studio 2005. The release page shows a summary with many useful links for tutorials and videos as well as screenshots of the service diagrams. If you attended my presentation on code generation last month I mentioned that the modeling was not quite all there yet. Now it is. It is time to try this out and make use of it to rapidly build services (ASMX or WCF) as well as maintain them with this powerful tool.

The ESB term has been thrown around a lot lately. It stands for Enterprise Service Bus and from what I can gather it is a system for orchestrating services. It comes out of the push to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) which was hyped a lot in recent years and has started to mature most recently. Real world examples appear everywhere. Sites like Flickr have publicly accessible services that can be consumed to create composite applications with services from multiple sources. The success of these existing services and the application built to use them indicates to me that an ESB solution is redundant.

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I have watched parts of presidential elections and one comment which has come up a few times from both Republicans and Democrats that has stuck in my mind. The comment is about how much the cost of paperwork makes up the overall cost of health care. A study at Harvard Medical School shows that the cost of paperwork was $294.3 billion in 1999. The numbers from Bill Richardson's website show that administrative costs are at 31%. Much of it is the paperwork related to insurance forms. Since the cost of health care seems to have skyrocketed the past few years it has become a big issue that the candidates have to address and most of them say the solution is to reduce the administrative costs by leveraging IT, which means replacing the paperwork with electronic documents and software.

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On Tuesday Brian Morgan of Skyline Technologies will cover Lessons Learned Implementing Service-Based Applications at the .NET User Group meeting. In other words, this presentation will cover SOA. The term SOA has been used and abused heavily the past couple of years in relation to Web Services which is also heavily abused. In the context I have come to accept SOA means Service Oriented Application (and occasionally Architecture) which allows components to be directly or remotely connected by simply adjusting the configuration to suite the desired deployment scenario.

SOA with .NET means Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) which is a rich implementation of the WS-* specifications such as WS-ReliableMessaging. This is a timely topic for me as I have been preparing to make use of WCF for a few projects. I do not know the details of what is going to be presented, but I am certain they will review the common misconceptions of networked applications with network latency being one of the primary issues.

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Now that I have been through the WCF Master Class I have created a mechanism for loading and hosting multiple WCF services. If you have TortoiseSVN installed you can point it to my public project called SmallSharpTools.Services and get all of the source for the project. It is a provider implementation which defines a provider called ServicesProvider which has a couple of methods to control the hosted services, Start and Stop. I then implemented a Manager Service and a desktop application which interfaces with it to control the hosted services.

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