VincentH on .NET

When I read Clemens’ post "Autonomous Develop Services for SOA Projects with Team Architect and Service Factory", I realized that part of his approach may integrate very well with the Macaw Solutions Factory.

Clemens describes how to enable each service in a SOA to be developed by a different team while still keeping the overall SOA design in one place. He partitions the SOA implementation across separate Visual Studio solutions (a single master solution containing the service models, and a separate solution for each service).

The Macaw Solutions Factory has had autonomous service development designed in from the start, it is a core concern addressed by the architecture style MAST (Microsoft .NET Architecture Style) that is at the heart of the factory. MAST also supports distributing a single large service across multiple solutions, and it specifies a standard pattern for dependencies within and across solutions. The factory supports independent versioning of each factory instance together with the service/application it is building while still using shared DTAP environments for the SOA. This makes service maintenance even more flexible and autonomous. So we got that part covered, it proved to work fine for a couple of years now.

Dependencies across projects and solutions in Clemens’ approach

Dependencies across solutions within a MAST service / application (dependencies across projects are standardized on the three-layered services application pattern).

However, Clemens also devised a way to keep the overall design of the SOA in a separate solution, by means of clever application of the P&P service factory and the distributed system designers in VS Team Architect. Overall SOA design is an area not yet addressed by the Macaw Solutions Factory (the focus is on building services and applications that are first-class SOA citizens, not on maintaining overall SOA design), and Clemens’ approach for that may integrate very well into our factory.

We already plan to integrate the Orcas version of the P&P Service Factory into the Orcas version of the Macaw Solutions Factory (we actually prototyped the approach during the Service Factory Customization workshop, Don and Olaf were a great help there). Thanks to the excellent extensibility of the service factory this is a real breeze (great work, guys!).

The extensibility built into the service factory looks to be a real enabler for the composability of a certain class of factories. It’s great to be able to combine approaches pioneered by different people in the factory community. Sometimes life is real easy

More goodness for factory builders: you can now start to target non-technical factory users with Visual Studio 2008 Shell, it was released on 2007/11/21. For details and download links see the post on the VSX Team Blog.

Use DSL’s and other Visual Studio extensions without scaring people with all the “developer UI” in Visual Studio, while retaining full integration options within Visual Studio.

See also my original post on using the shell for factories.

Some time ago, Jezz Santos blogged about how the software factory community, as he knew it, seemed to be contentrated in the Netherlands. That he mentioned me made me feel good of course, but I also realized that being close to so many leading people in the software factory field (outside MS that is), is a great opportunity to participate in a vibrant community.

Anyway, here I was six months later, at the Service Factory Customization workshop which is held in the Netherlands, which a good portion of the Dutch software factory community used as a pretext to exchange experiences and look at each other’s factories.

I had a great time there, some of the attendees were even allowed to present some of their own factory work (Don and Olaf were very accommodating to doing whatever gave us most value, which was really nice of them). I also presented a short flyby of the Macaw Solutions Factory (look for more posts on our factory here soon… no really). For some more details on the workshop and what we demoed to each other, see Serge’s post on it.

After the attendees presented their work, I asked Don about how the Dutch compare to what he had seen in the factories area globally, and Don confirmed what Santos said: the Dutch are at the leading edge. Sweet

So, I consider myself lucky, being at the right place at the right time. I’m really looking forward to what all these smart and passionate people are going to do to realize the factories vision, which is also my mission / job / hobby . We live in interesting times…