All posts by : steve maines blog

51 of 135 | All quiet on the Western Front - A tumbleweed rolls by... Been awfully quiet around here lately. I've been really busy getting some cool stuff ready for the upcoming Mix '06 conference. I'll have lots to talk about very soon. On a completely different note, I'm stoked to see that WS-Transfer made it to the W3C. This has already sparked some interesting conversations, and I'm sure there will be more to come. Eventually I'll get around to joining in :) ...

52 of 135 | HttpMappingMode.Soap vs HttpMappingMode.AnyXml vs MapAddressingHeaderToHttpHeaders=true - If you're doing POX/REST programming using the WCF HTTP Transport on the Feb CTP, you need to use the following setting for HttpTransportBindingElement.MappingMode: On the client side, use HttpMappingMode.AnyXml On the service side, use HttpMappingMode.Soap Ultimately we plan to have HttpMappingMode.AnyXml be the thing to use for POX/REST on both sides, but unfortunately it's not that way right now. In case you're interested, here's the long story behind this knob. Back in the Beta1 days of Indigo, we had a knob on the HttpTransportBindingElement called MapAddressingHeadersToHttpHeaders. Setting this to "true" on......

53 of 135 | Handling large data in Indigo - Kenny's got a good blurb about how Indigo thinks about streaming. The thing to remember about streaming is that we have support at the programming model layer (take a Stream/return a Stream) and at the transport layer (don't buffer on send). If you're sending titantic.wmv across the wire over Indigo, you probably want to use both :) Based on conversations I've had with customers I know there's a lot of people who are very interested in getting more detail about this topic. Rest assured we're working hard to improve both our conceptual documentation as well as our samples around this for upcoming releases. ...

54 of 135 | On WSDL and silos - Paraphrasing Mark: Apps do not become magically interoperable simply by exposing a WSDL document. True interoperability is directly a function of the number of clients that can understand the application protocol encoded in that WSDL. (Insert obligatory reference to the REST principle of constrained interfaces). Is there a RESTful corollary? Something like: Apps do not become magically interoperable simply by exposing representations of their internal resources in a RESTful manner using HTTP as the application protocol. True interoperability is directly a function of the number of clients that can understand the representation of a resou......

55 of 135 | Recycling (AppDomains, not cans) - There are two core concepts when it comes to understanding the shared application hosting model of ASP.NET and IIS: you’ve got Applications, which correspond to individual AppDomains and Application Pools, which correspond to the worker process instances in which those applications live (forget about Web Gardens for a moment, which lets you have n number of worker process instances servicing a particular App Pool – it’s easier to talk about this stuff when you assume that AppPool == worker process).   One of the nice things about the shared hosting infrastructure is that (unlike, say, a console app) the li......

56 of 135 | REST, POX, AJAX, ASP.NET and WCF (with code) - I've boxed up my AJAX-enabled "Web 2.0 Business Idea Generator" demo from VSLive! San Francisco. If you're feeling anxious, you can skip all this and just download the code from here. I've tried to comment the interesting bits fairly liberally. This sample is built on the Nov/Jan releases of WCF -- either one should work. There are two solutions in the .zip. PoxService.sln has just the service and the client. PoxService_With_UnitTests.sln has the client, the service, and a VSTS unit test project as well (take a look at that if you want to see one way WCF services can be targeted by unit tests). To run the demo, just load it up in Visual Studio a......

57 of 135 | Speaking at VSLive San Franscisco next week - I'm getting ready for my quick visit to VSLive San Francisco next week.  I'm doing a talk on Tuesday as part of the Middleware Summit. The title of the talk is WCF for ASP.NET Developers. I've been putting the finishing touches on the demos this weekend, and it should be a really fun time. Major highlights will cover the ins and outs of hosting WCF in ASP.NET, interoperating and migrating from ASMX, and what the heck to do about all those "Web 2.0" acronyms (REST, POX, AJAX oh my) that seem to be so interesting today. If you're going to be at the conference, you should stop by and say hello. ...

58 of 135 | WCF and WF "go live" release! - There's now a go-live license available for both WF and WCF: http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/getthebeta/golive/default.aspx If you've got a WCF app itching to go into production, now you can. Today also marks the launch of the community site for WCF: http://www.windowscommunication.net/. Very cool to see this happening. Just that much closer to shipping... ...

59 of 135 | On the last couple of months - It`s been really quiet around this blog lately. But`s that not to imply that I haven`t been doing anything; quite the opposite, in fact. Since the beginning of November, the Indigo team has been focused on making the most of the last major opportunity to do feature work before we ship this thing. We locked our bits from the last milestone around the end of October, and since then we`ve been working hard to identify a small set of strategic DCR`s (Design Change Requests) that we can take within the small amount of time before we run up against a hard internal date that is quickly coming up.   This DCR period started with a product-wide planning effort, with ......

60 of 135 | You really should come be a PM on the Indigo team... - Yasser has blogged about how we’ve got room for a few more PM’s on the Indigo team. If you’ve got a passion for distributed applications and want to help us make the world a better place for distributed app developers, you should send us your resume. We’re looking for technical program managers to help us drive the evoloution of the distributed Windows platform…if you think it might be up your alley, you should send a resume our way. I can tell you that it’s definitely one heck of a ride… It’s funny…about a year ago this time, I was struggling to decide whether I wanted to pursue a job with Microsoft. It wasn’t an easy decision — I had a sweet job at a......

61 of 135 | A little bit about async in WCF - There are three types of ‘asynchronous’ things in Indigo: Async on the client. The client thread that starts a long-running operation returns immediately. The operation completes in the background and the client`s application code is notifed of completion via a callback. Async on the server. The server thread that receives the request starts a long-running application operation and returns immediately to the thread pool. The application code calls back into Indigo when the operation completes, and then Indigo sends the response message. Async on the wire. Two servers communicating via a correlated series of one-way mess......

62 of 135 | Another Indigo Hosting Blogger - Wenlong Dong, our fearless hosting developer, has started up a blog over on MSDN. Wenlong has a unique perspective on hosting, since he`s the guy who`s actually implemented our ASP.NET and IIS integration code. Check it out! ...

63 of 135 | Request/Reply and SMTP - Heh. Mark Barker noticed that my SMTP transport implementation also supports request/reply MEPs and comments (in his usually contrarian fashion) that SMTP was one-way for a reason. Layering two-way communication over a fundamentally one-way transports is a really common pattern. People do this all the time over SMTP the number of mails in my inbox that have subjects starting with RE: is testament to that. Request/reply is a very useful (and prevalent) abstraction. Most applications (including HTTP) are built on a request/reply pattern. Sending a message, receiving a response, and being able to match up the request with the response in som......

64 of 135 | Soap.SMTP for Indigo Beta 2 - A while ago, I wrote an SMTP transport for WSE 2.0. Aaron Skonnard was kind enough to port it to WSE 3.0, and now I`ve finally gotten around to porting it over to Indigo Beta 2. If you want to just cut to the chase, the code is here. If you want to use this transport, I should point out that I built this against a random sync of the Indigo sources from late last week. It`s basically Indigo Beta 2, but I haven`t tried to use it against any of the builds that are currently available publicly. You might be able to use it with the PDC CTP, but I haven`t tried it. But don`t worry -- Beta 2 will be along Real Soon Now so just keep this around for future referen......

65 of 135 | Welcome, Ed - I had dinner with Ed Pinto tonight, who just got done with his first day as a PM on the WCF team. Ed’s one of those guys who I normally only see at conferences and such things, so it will be nice to see him around the halls of 42 on more regular basis. Welcome to the team, Ed. Now all you have to do is start a blog J ...

66 of 135 | WAS 101 - an IIS review - As the PM for hosting and activation on Indigo, I basically own the process model for Windows Communication Foundation services. One of the things that makes my job interesting is that WCF does not, by itself, actually define a particular process model. So I end up spending most of my time thinking about all the various places in which you can run Indigo services. Of the three options (app hosting, managed Windows services, and IIS/WAS), the latter is by far the most interesting, and I intend write in some depth about it here over the coming weeks.   What is WAS, you ask Put really simply, WAS enables ......

67 of 135 | PDC videos are now live! - Heck yeah…video streams from every PDC ’05 session are now live at http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/. One of the nice things that you can do with these streams is to listen to them at ultra-fast playback speed. This reduces the amount of time it takes to get through a session and also adds an interesting dynamic to the speaker’s presentation style. I find this technique particularly amusing when applied to the folks on my team, with whom I interact usually only at normal speed. However, with these videos, you get a sense of what life would be like if someone snuck into the office and secretly replaced Steve Swartz’s re......

68 of 135 | What does RunOnUIThread=True really mean - It was raining today, so I spent some time with Indigo figuring out the answer to this question. Turns out that it really means "Post() a message to the ambient SynchronizationContext from the thread that created your ServiceHost at the time your ServiceHost was constructed". This is a very challenging thing to compress into an attribute name. So we squished it down into RunOnUIThread since that`s what it effectively means most of the time. ...

69 of 135 | Indigo and Visual Studio - Michelle Bustamante (a.k.a Das Blonde) takes us to task on the Indigo tooling story. One of the things I really like about Indigo is the fact that our programming model is by and large agnostic to the application model in which it is hosted. That`s a fancy way of saying that we don`t really care where our worker process and AppDomain come from -- Indigo will quite happily live in any managed AppDomain. That frees you to choose a hosting model that meets the needs of your particular application, and you won`t have to learn a new programming model to make Indigo work in that environment. I agree with Michelle`s point that our current tooling story does not rea......

70 of 135 | Meijer on VB on LtU - Erik Meijer`s guest blogging over at Lambda the Ultimate, talking about linguistic pedigree of the new VB.NET / Linq features. Fun read for PL geeks. VB9 is making me (almost ;) ) want to be a VB programmer. The coolest VB9 feature in my mind Dynamic interfaces, hands down. Dynamic interfaces are a way of declaring your expectations to the compiler without actually asserting demands about the concrete type of something. The compiler uses the dynamic interface to give you statement completion and design time IntelliCrack, but everything is late bound at compile time so you`re really building a dynamically typed system. In his post, Erik refers to this as......

71 of 135 | MVP Summit Meet-up - If you`re going to be in town for the MVP Summit next week and are interested in having dinner with Savas, myself, and possibly a bunch of other XML-ish type people, leave a comment here or on Savas`s blog. ...

72 of 135 | On JSON - JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data exchange format that’s becoming increasingly popular among the AJAX crowd. Several AJAX frameworks (e.g. Ajax.NET and Microsoft’s ‘Atlas’ project) are embracing JSON on the wire because it’s very simple to produce and consume from a JavaScript-based browser environment. JSON and objects Linguistically, JSON is nothing more than JavaScript’s standard object initialization syntax. JScript has long has the ability to initialize objects using a lightweight syntax similar to the following:      var person = { name: “Steve”, age: 27,  jobTitle: “Program Manager”  }; When the JScript interpreter evaluates thi......

73 of 135 | PDC Retrospective - PDC 05 is in the books, and it’s time for a big exhale. I’m spending the weekend down in Santa Monica with my friend Barret, and then it’s back to Redmond to get Beta 2 out the door. This was a very, very big PDC for me this year. I had some code demo’d in Jim Allchin’s keynote (I did the Indigo/Atlas interop code…expect to see some posts here detailing that implementation). It was my first time as an expert at ‘Ask the Experts’. And it was definitely the first time I’ve given a talk at a conference of this magnitude. What an amazing week. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat. The fates did not align in the exactly the way I wanted to and I could nev......

74 of 135 | Windows Communication Foundation Forum - Cool…looks like the WCF Forum is now up and runnng. RSS feed is here. This is the best place to post general questions about Indigo and WCF. See you there! ...

75 of 135 | PDC Cometh... - Last time around, I was excited about PDC because I didn’t know what was coming and I didn’t know what to expect. This time around, now that I’m inside the belly of the beast, I’m excited precisely because I do know what’s coming. That’s all I want to say, because I don’t want to spoil the surprise J I’ll be at the conference all week, so if you want to talk about hosting WCF services or just generally geek out, stop by the Communications track lounge and say hello. It’s going to be a great week. I’m looking forward to being able to blog about some of the stuff that I’ve had to keep under my hat for a long time now, so expect to s......

76 of 135 | Structured data and nominal typing - John Cavnar-Johnson wrote a piece called “Mort gets the message” over on Pluralsight, where he talks about how Indigo looks at structured data. He’s absolutely right when he says “We need an easy way to send and receive structured (but not necessarily typed) messages”. I think the reason people like Tim and Steve advocate the bare-XML approach is because that’s the only programming model that lets you work directly with the data in a purely structural manner. When you think about your data as “an element named Foo, whose children are Bar and Baz…”, you don’t think about Foo being an “instance of” some nominal type. Taking a nominal type system out of ......

77 of 135 | Structured data and nominal typing - John Cavnar-Johnson wrote a piece called “Mort gets the message” over on Pluralsight, where he talks about how Indigo looks at structured data. He’s absolutely right when he says “We need an easy way to send and receive structured (but not necessarily typed) messages”. I think the reason people like Tim and Steve advocate the bare-XML approach is because that’s the only programming model that lets you work directly with the data in a purely structural manner. When you think about your data as “an element named Foo, whose children are Bar and Baz…”, you don’t think about Foo being an “instance of” some nominal type. Taking a nominal type system out of ......

78 of 135 | Thoughts on the new name - It’s been a little bit since Indigo was officially renamed “Windows Communication Foundation.” I’m slowly adapting. I wonder if we have plans to continue bring some of the rest of our groups in line with the new name: Longhorn Display Driver Model (LDDM) -> Windows Presentation Foundation Foundation User-mode Winsock -> Windows Communication Foundation Foundation Kernel-mode Winsock -> Windows Communication Foundation Foundation Foundation Hopefully not.   ...

79 of 135 | Thoughts on the new name - It’s been a little bit since Indigo was officially renamed “Windows Communication Foundation.” I’m slowly adapting. I wonder if we have plans to continue bring some of the rest of our groups in line with the new name: Longhorn Display Driver Model (LDDM) -> Windows Presentation Foundation Foundation User-mode Winsock -> Windows Communication Foundation Foundation Kernel-mode Winsock -> Windows Communication Foundation Foundation Foundation Hopefully not.   ...

80 of 135 | Squint until you see the Infoset - One of the great things about Indigo is that it’s built on top of the XML Infoset, and not any particular encoding of it. One of the great things about System.Xml is that you can make pretty much any structured data format look like an XML Infoset by implementing an XmlReader that speaks the format. This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, with which I’ve been having a lot of fun lately. I love this stack. ...

81 of 135 | Squint until you see the Infoset - One of the great things about Indigo is that it’s built on top of the XML Infoset, and not any particular encoding of it. One of the great things about System.Xml is that you can make pretty much any structured data format look like an XML Infoset by implementing an XmlReader that speaks the format. This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, with which I’ve been having a lot of fun lately. I love this stack. ...

82 of 135 | Where HTTP fails SOAP - Via Steve Vinoski: Where HTTP fails SOAP It’s the little niggling details (like being able to multiplex requests over a single network connection) that bite you when you try to use SOAP/HTTP in certain scenarios. SOAP over HTTP is a great protocol for interoperability, because everyone speaks it. But inside the firewall, in back office scenarios, there are other transport protocols that make more sense. Ideally, you want a messaging stack that hides these details from you so that switching between SOAP-over-HTTP and SOAP-over-Blah is transparent to your app code. Oh, and to avoid the standard “HTTP is an application protocol/no, it’s a transport pr......

83 of 135 | Where HTTP fails SOAP - Via Steve Vinoski: Where HTTP fails SOAP It’s the little niggling details (like being able to multiplex requests over a single network connection) that bite you when you try to use SOAP/HTTP in certain scenarios. SOAP over HTTP is a great protocol for interoperability, because everyone speaks it. But inside the firewall, in back office scenarios, there are other transport protocols that make more sense. Ideally, you want a messaging stack that hides these details from you so that switching between SOAP-over-HTTP and SOAP-over-Blah is transparent to your app code. Oh, and to avoid the standard “HTTP is an application protocol/no, it’s a transport pr......

84 of 135 | Syndication and the enterprise - Bill deHora: I don`t see why [syndication] would not be a good basis for enterprise concerns like messaging, authentication, or management interfaces. Atom, RSS and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) as a complement to REST could disrupt SOAP and WS. He makes five arguments as to why he belives syndication and microprotocols (“namespaced module extensions that inform and affect application behaviour”) will challenge SOAP in as an enterprise messaging platform. 1) Microprotocols are independent of each other I’m not convinced that defining a bunch of small formats independent of each other is necessarily a good thing. Such an approach leads to redundancy a......

85 of 135 | Syndication and the enterprise - Bill deHora: I don`t see why [syndication] would not be a good basis for enterprise concerns like messaging, authentication, or management interfaces. Atom, RSS and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) as a complement to REST could disrupt SOAP and WS. He makes five arguments as to why he belives syndication and microprotocols (“namespaced module extensions that inform and affect application behaviour”) will challenge SOAP in as an enterprise messaging platform. 1) Microprotocols are independent of each other I’m not convinced that defining a bunch of small formats independent of each other is necessarily a good thing. Such an approach leads to redundancy a......

86 of 135 | On the utility of .svc files - I could really use some customer feedback here. In the Indigo Beta 1 code, when you’re hosted in IIS Indigo requires you to represent the service on disk as a physical file with a .svc extension. Most of the time, that file just contains one line of code:     It’s currently possible to put code in there too. What if instead of the @Service directive, that file just has a comment that said something like: //This file represents a service. The contents of this file are completely unimportant and are //ignored by Indigo. In fact, the file itself is completely unimportant and you can delete it if you //want. //It’s just here to remind y......

87 of 135 | The Indigo Tent is a Big Tent Indeed - Im not a fan of technology stacks that come complete with their own ideologies. I think theres a somewhat common misconception about me people think Im a SOAP-only sort of guy and that Im really not a fan of REST. Thats not true at all. First off, as Don points out, REST is an architectural style, not a protocol. Its true that the HTTP protocol is a restful implementation but thats not to say that non-HTTP protocols cant be done restfully. Where I disagree with the RESTafarians is that I dont think HTTP is that last application protocol youll ever need. I do think there a lot of interesting ideas and scenarios enabled by  RESTful usage of HTTP. I also think th......

88 of 135 | Request/Reponse != RPC - Savas is having a conversation with Michi Hennig about the definition of RPC. Michi arguest that web services are essentially RPC because they use request/response messaging. The line between RPC and request/response messaging is subtle. In fact, RPC can be considered to be equivalent in capability to request/response messaging — but only if you assume that all of Deutsch’s Eight Fallacies are actually truths. ...

89 of 135 | HOWTO: Use Class Library Projects to build hosted Indigo services - If you’ve downloaded the Indigo Beta 1 RC0 bits and the WinFX SDK, you’ve probably noticed that the tooling experience for building Indigo services is similar to that of building Web Sites. That is, you go File -> New -> Web Site in Visual Studio and one of the options is “Indigo Service Project”. The development environment for these types of projects is the same environment used to build ASP.NET web site. Some people naturally think of Indigo services as living in class libraries and not web sites. Although this is currently not a first-class scenario in the tools, it’s pretty easy to turn a class library (a .dll file) into a home for hosted Indigo services. ......

90 of 135 | Automation - I’ve been spending a bunch of time lately dogfooding some internal installation automation that our test team will use to get fresh bits of Indigo running on fresh bits of Longhorn and IIS7. I don’t even want to think about the number Virtual PC images I’ve created in the past couple of weeks. The automation that the IIS team has developed is really pretty sweet. With one command, I can run a script that does all of the following: Checks to see if Virtual Server is installed and installs it if necessary Creates a new virtual machine and empty .vhd Boots the VM into WinPE (the Windows preinstallation environment used by OEM’s) Fo......

91 of 135 | Cassini Tip #2 - Disable dynamic ports - Here’s another Cassini tip for you… By default, Cassini assigns a random port number to each website it hosts. This port number gets assigned the first time you start the site using the Visual Studio debugger, and then gets persisted for the life of the solution. You can disable this behavior by selecting the project node for your Web Project in Solution Explorer and choosing View->Properties Window (Ctrl-W, P). Change “Use Dynamic Ports” to False and then specify a TCP port of your liking (best to keep this between 1000–5000, but it can technically be any unused TCP port). This will give your Cassini-hosted site a deterministic port number, and make it e......

92 of 135 | Indigo and Cassini in Beta1 - Visual Web Developer (the part of VS2005) ships with a stand-alone development web server that lets you develop websites without requiring the usage of IIS. I think the official name for this thing is the “ASP.NET Development Web Server”, but I usually refer to it by its code name, Cassini. It’s possible to host Indigo services inside Cassini. However, there are a couple of “gotcha’s” about Cassini that you should be aware of. If you’re seeing MessgeSecurityExceptions on the client side to the effect of “The HTTP request is unauthorized with client authentication scheme `Anonymous`. The server authentication schemes are `NTLM`”,  you’re probably running int......

93 of 135 | Alpine - Very interesting paper from Steve Loughran about Alpine, his propoal for a Java SOAP stack to replace JAX-RPC. It`s very interesting to look at the design direction they`re taking this stack. It`s fundamentally a shove-the-angle-brackets-in-your-face sort of thing: If Alpine succeeds, it will be a SOAP stack that requires an understanding of XML before it can be used. This might appear to be a barrier to the widespread adoption of the tool, and perhaps it will prove so. Unlike commercial SOAP vendors, we have no financial incentive to make our product broadly usable. We will, however, have a SOAP implementation which all its users should be able to understa......

94 of 135 | Avalon and Indigo...get `em while they`re hot - The release candidate for Avalon + Indigo Beta 1 went live on MSDN today: Download the runtime Download the SDK These bits will work with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2! The SDK has really grown in this release. There are tons of great samples to learn from - some of them are small demonstrations of a particular part of Indigo, others are much larger scenario-based samples that demonstrate a wide range of features working together to solve an overall problem. Take a look at them and let us know if there`s anything missing! BTW, make sure to check out the UDP Transport sample if you`re interested in seeing how to imple......

95 of 135 | Travelling through hyperspace - “Travelling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy…without precise calculations you could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it”   – Han Solo, Captain, Millenium Falcon I was folding my laundry the other day, and had the audio commentary for Episode IV on in the background (I get bored with radio, and don’t have cable at the moment). I like audio commentaries because every so often you learn something you didn’t know before. True Star Wars geeks will know recognize the Millenium Falcon as “the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.” I never really understo......

96 of 135 | Fresh Indigo (and Avalon) bits coming soon - Looks like the Beta1 RC for Avalon and Indigo is available for download. It’s still making its way through the MSDN server farms, but this link looks like it goes directly to the executable. These bits will work on top of VS Beta 2, so have fun… ...

97 of 135 | Securing Indigo - I’m getting a great introduction to the security culture at Microsoft. One of the Indigo components that I have PM responsibilities for is a long-running service (of the NT variety) that listens on the network. Because it’s basically the front door of Indigo, we’re spending a lot of time making sure our threat models and mitigations stay up-to-date as the product evolves in its lifecycle. We have lots of threat models and mitigations in place to make sure that our component doesn’t get hacked. But even so, a lot of our threats start with “assume that the Listener gets hacked…” Why do we do this Defense in depth. We want to make sure that even if our compone......

98 of 135 | On Attribute-Based Programming Models - There’s an interesting back-and-forth going on between Rich Turner and John Cavnar-Johnson re: the Indigo programming model. In the lastest round, John sums up his asks for the Indigo programming model: “I want to design and build services with Indigo. I want services, messages, and operations to be first-class citizens in the programming model. I`m perfectly happy to use XML as the serialization format for messages and XML Schema as the schema language for describing messages. I`d rather not have to deal directly with the XML and Schema in the programming model. I want to work with a higher-level abstraction. Ideally I think this would be a new .Net type ......

99 of 135 | Interface Definition Languages and WSDL, and why SOAP isn`t object oriented - Dilip Ranganathan sent me mail asking me to blog about the “To Slice or Not To Slice” article recently written by by Mitchi Henning of ZeroC. The article positions WSDL against other interface definition languages (IDL’s) such as CORBA IDL and offers several critiques of WSDL specifically and IDL’s in general. Reading through the article I have several thoughts, but there are a couple of paragraphs I’d like to specifically respond to. A much more serious issue with WSDL, however, is that it lacks any notion of object-orientation. The reason for this is historical: one of the driving forces behind web services was a wish to integrate functionality provided ......

100 of 135 | ESB`s and centralization - I liked Richard Turner’s little rant against ESB’s. The thing that I don’t get about ESB’s is that they’re all about centralization. ESB’s are usually described as being the “centralized communication backbone for the enterprise”. If there’s one thing that the Internet has taught us about network architecture, it’s that decentralization is a good thing. The key is to get everything in the middle speaking the same protocols. WS-* is a big step towards that goal. ...