Tech-Ed 2006 is online

If you missed Tech-Ed 2006, or want to catch up on some of the concepts you learned in Boston, check out these webcasts covering Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, management and operations, security, server infrastructure, and more. Check it out here.

Master of Science - completed

Yeah, last week I defended my master thesis and hence I hold now a Master of Science degree in Computer Sciences from University Of Sofia "St. Kliment Ohridski". I specialized in Distributed Systems, although the official programme is announced as "Distributed Systems and Mobile Technologies". I want to thank my girlfriend Mira for all the careful reviews she has done during the course of the writing, and for supporting me by that time!

My master thesis was about "Distributed transactions in Service-Oriented Architecture". I personally adore the concepts that SOA proclaims. From scientific point of view, most business systems pose the requirement to guarantee to its clients atomicity and consistency of the operations carried out thru them. And here comes the need for transaction control. Fortunately, the guys from WS-TX group from OASIS (link) have done a great job so now we have a bunch of specifications aimed to provide a unified coordination framework for a set of Web services. Web services are actually one concrete programming interface that complies with the SOA concepts. They are very compelling with the fact that they rely on widely spread open standards like WSDL, SOAP and UDDI. I won't go into to many details here, but having all these things in mind I decided some time ago to implement the specifications, defined by WS-TX. Namely, I was interested at WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransaction.

The introduction of my master thesis reviews some of the most popular transaction processing systems realizing distributed transactions. We identify the common problems that they all have in regards to interoperability and platform independence. Nonetheless, one of the primary goals of SOA is to boost code reuse thru loosely coupled interfaces. And this may serve as a elegant solution in which we will be able to combine the existing business systems in a loosely-coupled manner and having transaction control over autonomous services. This was basically the goal of the practical part of my master thesis - to show a sample solution which will be based on the SOA principles, providing distributed transactions to its clients. As a result, I implemented WS-Coordination protocol so that the concrete transaction models have a unified framework for coordination. The concrete transaction model I used followed the principles of two-phase commit protocol (2PC), provided by WS-AtomicTransaction specification. However, I'd like to say that the other transaction protocol WS-BusinessActivity, defined by WS-TX, is really very interesting one. It is best suited for long-time business transactions, which consume lots of resources for a long period of time. It tries to "relax" some of the well-known transaction properties ACID such as atomicity and isolation. I highly recommend reading this standard as well as the following article (link), which will give you a very good perspective what all these standards are all about. Here is a good place to express my gratitude to Mr. Dan House from IBM, involved with WS-TX group, who has been very responsive to all the questions I got about these specifications!

My master thesis is in Bulgarian so far, but I am planning to translate it in English (if I have some spare time). However, if someone of you is interested, you can always drop me a line and I will do the best of me to reply you. Following up this link, you can see just a short annotation of my thesis, which I believe will throw you some hints what it is all about.

Bill Gates going to retire from Microsoft?

Today while I was reading Microsoft presspass, I ended up on this article from yesterday. According to it, BillG will step out the role of Chief Software Architect to Ray Ozzie, who is currently CTO. This not will be one-time shot, rather it will be gradual and it is expected that by July 2008, all of Bill's responsibilities will be taken over by his successor. How is this going to change Microsoft? Will Ray Ozzie be able to follow and drive Microsoft as successfully as Bill has? Time will say. For sure, Ray Ozzie is very talented - check out this article to get a close view of his background. I gotta say that it is admiring - just to start with, he created Lotus Notes and Groove!

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 - the idea

Today, I ended up on this interesting article, not suprisingly on Somasegar's web log (just for the record, he is the corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft). It shows what Microsoft plans are for the next generation of .NET platform. Put shortly, it will combine all of the existing .NET 2.0 functionality, but this time developers will have at their fingertips technologies like WPF, WF and WCF. According to this article, .NET 3.0 will be incorporated into Windows Vista, but for Windows XP and 2003 family - like an extension. Among these technologies, I am now reading about WCF - Windows CardSpace, formerly known as InfoCard. Put shortly, it is all about providing applications with standardized infrastructure for identity management. There will be some lectures on it on the incoming Microsoft Days on 21st - I hope that the presenters will give us a better and thorough view of this exciting technology.

Microsoft Days 2006 - Sofia, Bulgaria

Finally it is here! Every year Microsoft is presenting its newest technologies and platforms in a live exhibition here in Sofia, Bulgaria. The time has come . The event will be held on 21st and 22nd this month and will be in the famous movie theatre center Arena - Mladost. There we will be lectures showing great detail on Windows Vista, Windows Communication Foundation, BizTalk 2006, Microsoft CRM 3.0, so basically there will be something for each one beginning from IT administrators and ending up in hard core software geeks. Personally, I highly recommend this event, because after all we live in a technology era, where we should strive to be on the technology wave no matter of the specific vendor. I am always open to learn the innovative and new.

For those of you who can attend it, check out this site to see the program and the speakers. Keep in mind that the seats could easily run out, so don't hesitate to register ASAP here! :-)

Free download of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 RC2

I've been using Virtual PC for a long time. It is so useful when you want to test your app on different Windows-based plaforms and OS. Virtual Server is its successor, having far more sophisticated hardware support and capabilities. So far, only MSDN subscribers could have had access to it, but hey, here comes the good news - the latest release - namely Virtual Server 2005 RC2 is now for free. Download it from here.