It's not quite the end of January, but there's already alot of "new" in my new year.  There's a  new car, some new gadgets, and on the work front a new project and a new team.

As you may have heard, Charles Fitzgerald, left Microsoft to head to a startup. Charles was the GM that my old team, platform incubation, reported into. Charles set the mission for that team, and was the major stakeholder for Tafiti and several other internal facing projects that I worked on. Charles was a great GM, and while this is a loss for MS, I'm confident we haven't heard the last of him.

With Charles' departure, Scott and I will be moving to different roles in the company. I am happy to report that I am now officially part of Simon Guest's team.   

One of the few negatives about my last role in incubation was that it was inherently secretive, as parts of the work could be patented. As a result, after delivering my book on CardSpace I mostly dropped off the public scene, save for promoting Tafiti. With Simon's team having a key focus on talking about architecture with the broader community, this is something that will change, and you'll see me engaging more publicly on architecture related subjects. Simon's team has a big focus on Software+Services, which if you've read the blog for awhile know is something I've been looking at for some time in and outside of Microsoft. Expect to see me blogging more, podcasting/screencasting more, and writing the odd article or two. (No more books for awhile, though. Having written or co-written 3 books in 2 years, I've committed to my wife not to start another one until 2009)

I also mentioned there's a new project. I'll be carrying over a project with me from incubation to Simon's team as well. Nothing I can share at the moment, other than it will be public focused and it's going to be a key focus for me for a good portion of 2008.

While this project is big, there's another project I'll be working on that's even bigger.  This is a longer term project, estimated to last decades with a budget estimated to be in the seven figures. Oh, and it has nothing to do with software. My wife and I are expected our first child, a son, to literally arrive any day now. While there's alot of great 'new's in 2008 already, this will surely be the best.

Here's hoping your 2008 is going well, and I look forward to engaging with the community more broadly once again.  If there's anything you'd like to see me engage on - be it in blog, article, or podcast, let me know. As always, I can be reached at mmercuri@microsoft.com

Being on an incubation team, many of the projects I'm attached to are not discussed with the public. Today, however, is a great exception to that rule.

I'd like to introduce you to Tafiti.

Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search.

You can try Tafiti following these steps:

·         Go to http://www.tafiti.com

·         Enter a search query

·         Drag interesting results to the shelf on the right.  Each box on the shelf can be used to save a related set of results.  Shelf contents can be saved and shared. 

·         Use the carousel at the bottom left to do different types of searches (image, blog, etc.)

·         Visualize your results using the Tafiti Tree View.

I did a video interview with Channel 10 on this that has just been posted here.

http://www.on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-tafiti/

I also did a standalone walkthrough you can get to here:

http://www.tafiti.com/walkthru.html

More to come as the week progresses....

Speaking of folks that I got to work with last year, I had the opportunity to work with Alberto Arias on a major WF project in the UK (the first Fortune 500 WF project in production, I believe).  Earlier this fiscal year, Alberto crossed the pond and took a job over in the Connected Systems Division.

He's been working on activities for BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) for awhile now, and while chatting with him tonight, he told me that with today's announcement on Paul Andrews blog, it was now cool to talk about the BPEL support externally. He and I then booted up Meeting Space in Vista (if you've not used it, check it out, it's quite cool), and he stepped me through how it works. 

Having spent alot of time with customers and partners last year, I regularly heard requests for BPEL support. The implementation is very clean, very straightforward, with capabilities to import and export BPEL. BPEL 1.1 wil be supported in the March CTP, and 2.0 will be supported after it is ratified by OASIS.  I think people are going to be happy with it, it's very cool stuff - hats off to Alberto and team! 

Just about a year or so ago, I was down in Tulsa working with the good folks at Dollar Thrifty Auto Group, who were doing some great stuff with WF and WCF.  If it sounds familiar, I chatted about what they were doing in an ARCast wit Ron Jacobs, and Ron also did an interview with them from Tulsa. (both recordings are available over on http://channel9.msdn.com or http://www.skyscrapr.net.)

Earlier in the week I was talking to Jim Arrowood, a friend and architect at Dollar, and he asked how I'd like a free trip to Tulsa.  A s I told him, there are no free lunches in life, and I'm sure no free trips to Tulsa.  It turns out there's a CodeCamp event coming up (http://www.tulsacodecamp.com) and was curious if I might be interested in speaking. 

A couple hours later I had a ticket to Tulsa and was slotted in for two sessions, an hour in the afternoon and the closing keynote. 

I'm looking forward to it, as codecamp is focused much more on code. Last year ,when I was speaking at events, I had to spend a good amount of my sessions doing intro stuff. With the framework having been released for awhile now, I'll be able to dive right in and show some cool stuff I've been working on. If you've seen my previous sessions, expect all new content for this.

The timing of the event is literally days before the release of the updated WCF: Unleashed and I should be wrapping up the Understanding CardSpace and Information Cards book.

If you're going to be in Tulsa and there are particular aspects you're interested in, let me know and we'll see if we can squeeze it into the sessions.

As you're likely aware, we've had a new RC1 release of Vista, and along with it a RC1 release of .NET Framework 3.0. 

I've gone ahead an updated the code for several chapters from the book WCF: Hands On to be compatibile with RC1 changes

You can find the code for Chapter 6 on Legacy Integration. In addition to ComPlus and MSMQ which were in the book, I've also added another sample that shows how to call WCF from COM. This allows you to empower legacy applications written in Visual Basic, vbscript, Lotus Notes to now consume WCF services.

You can find the updated samples here:

Some people have asked for a consolidated file with all of the updates for our book, Windows Communication Foundation: Hands On!

You can get the full set of samples here:

http://www.marcmercuri.com/Downloads/junectpupdate.zip

WCF and WF in Public Sector.PPT (2.16 MB)

I did a webcast today on WCF, WF, and Infocard in Public Sector today.  For the Retail and Fin Serv webcasts I'd done previously, I'd had great scores (>8/9 in some cases), but there were always requests for additional vertical content after the fact.

I tried switching it up today for the pub sector session (more vertical, less core wcf/wf/identity), but the presentation just didn't click. I think I'll re-record and post a link to it when it's available, I'm pleased with the InfoCard demo, though, as I think it provides additional value. 

I've attached my deck to the start of this post, as I wanted people to see the legacy empowerment section that we didn't get to review.

If you're new to the blog, I wanted to point you to some of the demos I've got online, including:

http://www.marcmercuri.com/ct.ashx?id=d0cffe95-b683-4f7c-b883-44feeb0afd43&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.marcmercuri.com%2fDownloads%2fFinServDevCon.zip

As well as a syllabus for learning InfoCard:

http://www.marcmercuri.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=eae5a6ef-a12e-4cfd-bd65-56fdf0b103f4

Cheers,

Marc

As you know, I work with a number of companies who are adopting WCF, WF, and Infocard.  Up until this past week, the names of the customers has been a well guarded secret.

With WinHec just passed, TechEd coming up in a few weeks, and launch not too far off on the horizon, the names of these customers and their projects are now starting to be revealed.

Last week at WinHEC, Ami Vora spoke to PressPass about a project at one of my customers, Tyco.

Yesterday, I blogged that one of my other customers, Leslie Muller from Credit Suisse will be doing a must-see chalk talk at TechEd 06 in Boston.

Today, we launch a new site, http://www.seewindowsvista.com, to highlight some companies that are using WCF, WF, and WPF on the client. Check it out to hear about one of my other customers, Dollar Thrifty Auto Group.  They're listed under “Managing the Big Picture.”  They're using both WCF and WF in a number of areas, and we'll be following up soon with a whitepaper on the use of WF in the UI, with specific references to their project.

If you only go to one Chalk Talk at TechEd this year, check out this one. 

Anyone who's worked in a large Enterprise is familiar with the challenges of getting new machines provisioned and available in a reasonable amount of time. Typically the wait is days/weeks/months. Credit Suisse has solved this problem, and Leslie Muller will be discussing the Virtual Machine Provisioning System that was built and deployed  earlier this year using WF, WCF, Virtual Server, ASP.NET, and AzMan.

I've had the privilege of being involved in this project, and I think this session will be great in a couple of respects. It's an opportunity to go beyond the samples and the case studies and listen to an Architect at a Fortune 50 customer who's developed and deployed WinFX successfully. It's also a great opportunity to connect with Leslie, who is a thought leader and is doing some very interesting, very impactful work that transcends verticals.

Full abstract and location details below: 

Abstract: Credit Suisse Group is a leading global financial services company, providing clients with investment banking, private banking and asset management services worldwide. Like in most enterprises, Credit Suisse provided their developers with physical machines for development. Issues such as combination of authorization, physical delivery times and compliance-related workflows led to slow development timeframes. Their R&D group built an extremely extensible self-service virtual-machine provisioning system that enables software developers in a fraction of the time to easily, securely and rapidly provision on-demand disposable workstations, servers, and multi-tier environments. Credit Suisse will exponentially increase software developer productivity, drastically lower IT costs and ensure compliancy with continuously stringent regulatory requirements. The solution uses Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and Virtual Server.

Speaker: Leslie Muller (Architect - Credit Suisse Global R&D)

Location: TechEd Boston, Thursday 6/15/2006 from 10:15-11:30 in Theatre 2.

If you're like me and wanted to go but missed it - good news.  The sessions have just been posted online for free view/download.

Sessions here: http://sessions.mix06.com/

NGW034 - From "Username and Password" to InfoCard

DIS003 - Today's Identity Crisis, and the Identity Metasystem

For those unfamiliar with MIX, here's the pitch -

“

I had the opportunity to present a session “WCF and WF in Financial Services: Notes from the Field” yesterday to a great crowd at the Financial Services Dev Con in New York.

For those who have seen my sessions on MSDN, those have focused on getting people up to speed on the two technologies. This session presented very brief overviews of the technologies (3 slides for each) and then delved into real-world scenarios where people were using them, complete with demos.

This session focused primarily on scenarios where Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation could provide the ability to enhance what was already in place, enable new scenarios around connectivity and workflow, and overall take advantage of the features of WCF and WF regardless of where they're at today.

I've uploaded the deck and the presentations here http://www.marcmercuri.com/Downloads/FinServDevCon.zip, and the good news is that other than the one COM interop demo for Lotus, every demo here can be run on your own machine. In cases where there's a use of Domino server - you get to take advantage of the domino services set up on the public web by my colleague, Gary Devendorf.  For the Java examples, I used the basic samples that came with Java Enterprise Studio 8 which is now a free download.  A note for VS developers - the Java environment may look similiar to VS, but it's different. To make it easy to run, the only thing you need to do is install, load the sun blueprint sample, and change the URL to point to the WCF service.

The demos posted include:

• Taking an existing, unsecure web service (in this case using Lotus Notes Domino as a source), placing a WCF front end on it, and exposing a WS-* service beyond the firewall.  The benefit here is obviously security, and the ability to extend what you may have in place already to accomodate external customers.
• Taking a Windows Workflow Foundation, exposing it as a web service, and consuming it via an existing java application.
• An example of using a UI driven by workflow
• Using the workflow engine provided as part of workflow foundation inside of Excel.
• Using WF to coordinate multiple services. This includes a standard ASMX service, as well as Domino web service located remotely.
• An example of the flexibility provided by data contracts. The demo consisted of a service and client based on version one of a data contract, and the data contract is then modified to support a new data element (a URL for an RSS Feed). Even though the data contract has changed, the client continues to work.

Demos from my WCF/WF session on MSDN are posted.

You can find them here:

www.marcmercuri.com/downloads/netunwrappedwfwcf.zip

Please respect the copyrights on the demos, as some of these were MS samples.

If you're looking for more samples, please check out our community sites at:

http://www.windowsworkflow.net

http://www.windowscommunication.net