Brian Loesgen's Blog

I'll be at the SOA Symposium in Amsterdam next week, and am really excited about it. Amsterdam's a great place, I've been there a few times, and this is looking like it will be a really good event. I could do without yet-another trans-Atlantic flight, but, I'm getting pretty good at doing them.

At the Symposium, I'll be doing:

• My first-ever public-facing Oslo presentation, and to the best of my knowledge the second-ever conference presentation on Oslo by a non-Microsoft person (my friend David Chappell was first with one at TechEd this year). This is huge, and a major milestone that I can now talk about at least some of the vision (more will become public at PDC).
• A panel on the future of ESBs
• Visiting a user group in Utrecht and doing to do a BizTalk Development Best Practices presentation/workshop

I also plan to do Oslo presentations at a couple of locations in SoCal after PDC (I promise!), including my own user group in San Diego, and the L.A. CodeCamp. More on that later, I have to somehow make it align with a near-100% travel schedule, which will be a challenge, but I think/hope November may be slower, with hopefully "only" 50% or so travel.

As we head towards the PDC later this month, Microsoft today pre-announced some of the things you can expect to see there.

To meet the evolving needs of service-oriented applications, Microsoft is extending the capabilities of Windows Server, by adding a set of capabilities, "Dublin", aimed at making it easier to deploy, manage and monitor WF/WCF applications. For developers creating WF-based solutions, this is great news, because it means you will get an enterprise-grade runtime environment to host your WCF/WF. Prior to this, the only WF host from Microsoft was MOSS, you would have had to write your own host, which is a non-trivial task. Now, Microsoft has solved all those hard problems for you. If you're a BizTalk developer, then rest assured that you will get a host too that will run in this platform, and that all your investments are protected, BizTalk Server 2009 and the roadmap was announced recently, I blogged about it here.

I'm also excited about the enhancements to WF: workflows become declarative, and are XAML-based. You get a new flowchart workflow style. This is all building towards the future, and gets even more interesting with the  Oslo modeling platform. I'll have a lot more to say about that later, starting after PDC.

I'd also like to clarify something that may be, or could become, a source of confusion for you. There has been a subtle morphing recently of what the code name "Oslo" means. When there was just the vision, "Oslo" was used to refer to the entire spectrum of technologies that needed to be built to support the vision. Now that we are further along in the lifecycle, and bits are becoming real, those bits are naturally migrating towards what will ultimately be their ship vehicles.You can see some of that now, with the enhancements to WF/WCF that will be in .NET 4.0, and the process server capabilities that will be in the OS: these are things that used to be part of what "Oslo" was. So to be clear, when we say "Oslo" today, we are now referring ONLY to Microsoft's modeling platform. I like this shift, and it makes a lot of sense, although I find myself saying "Oslo and related technologies" a lot now when I refer to the whole vision.

Some early bits will be made available to PDC attendees, with betas to follow some time in the future. You can get an overview here. Steven Martin, Senior Director of Product Management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division (CSD), wrote about it this morning here.

We're in for an exciting ride folks, this is just the start....

I'm a bit late because of my extended bout of 100% travel, much of it disconnected, but I thought I'd do a post about this anyhow because it is a very significant piece of news.

Microsoft has announced that what was previously being called BizTalk Server 2006R3 has been renamed to BizTalk Server 2009.

Why is this announcement important? Because, if you've been following my blog and others, you know that Oslo and a wave of other technologies is heading towards us, and that there will be a first-release of some of this at the PDC in October. Many people are probably wondering: what does this mean to existing BizTalk customers? Are their investments protected? Is there a migration path? Is migration something that needs to be done? The BizTalk Server 2009 announcement should go a long way to reassuring people that their investments are protected, and that there is a BizTalk future in Oslo-land.

In the announcement, Microsoft also reaffirmed their commitment to continuing to release new versions of BizTalk Server at 2 year intervals.

Key highlights of what will be in BizTalk Server 2009 are:

• Support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio .NET 2008 and SQL Server 2008
• Support for Hyper-V virtualization
• A new version of Microsoft's ESB Guidance (more on this later, it's an impressive release)
• UDDI 3.0
• Team Foundation Services integration (MSBuild)
• EDI Enhancements
• RFID support for LLRP protocol, TDT standard, and Mobility stack
• New SQL and Oracle Apps adapters
• Upgrades for .NET 3.5 compatibility
• SWIFT enhancements

For more info:

• You can read more about this at the press pass interview with Connected Systems GM Oliver Sharp 
• You can read more about BizTalk Server 2009, and beyond, at the BizTalk Roadmap page

OK, keeping with the recent theme, here's another entry in my travel blog :) Very soon I will get back to technical posts, I have some pent-up ones waiting to be written, some about BizTalk and some about Oslo, so stay tuned!

We recently completed the design/planning stage for the Jordanian government ESB project. It has been an honor to work with such a talented team, and as part of the planning process we did a non-trivial amount of development, solving some very tough problems along the way. I made several trips to Amman over the past year, and took full advantage of being there by seeing as much as I could of the country in the time I had. I have been saying that I have seen more of Jordan than most Jordanians have.  A Jordanian challenged me on that, and I started listing off some of the things I'd done, and.... well.... it sounded like a blog post, particularly when he agreed that he had not seen many of these places :) It's was quite difficult for me to pick "high points", as I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see the country and region. However, I did it, and here is my list (photos below) of "do this if you go" for Jordan:

The Jordanian people themselves were awesome. I had heard before going there that most Jordanians speak English, and those that don't will still invite you into their homes for tea. I found them to be very kind, generous and helpful. The only possible exception to this is the taxi drivers who always seem ready to play "shaft the tourist", however, once I got the hang of how to deal and they saw I was a pseudo-local who knew how to play the game, they got more pleasant. Also, as I just recently found out, the Jordanian taxi drivers are really laid back and friendly compared to what I saw in Egypt!

I have a bazillion pictures of everything I did, here are some of the highpoints:

From Wadi Rum:

From the Amman Citadel

From Jerrash:

From Umm Qays, the middle photo shows the Golan Heights behind me, with Syria just to my left:

I had to work on my TechEd presentation one weekend, which sucked, but hey, if you HAVE to work a weekend, then why not do it at a really nice hotel on the Dead Sea? The first picture is that weekend, the others are from another visit to the area.

Pictures from Petra:

From Wadi Mujib:

Lastly, in case you were wondering about American cultural exports, you can find things like the Colbert Report, the Daily Show and Family Guy in Jordan. Here's Jon Stewart, with Arabic subtitles:

I'm not sure when my blog turned into a travel blog, but I think I may have found what I'll do as my next career :)

I've been very fortunate that work has taken me to interesting places, and I am able to jump off and see other interesting places. A few weeks ago I went to Dubai on my way home from Amman Jordan (where I'm working on a country-scale ESB project for Microsoft and the Jordanian government). I'm writing this in a taxi as my wife and I head to Petra (Jordan) for the weekend, then I work for another week in Amman before we head off to Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt) where I'll be doing more scuba diving in the Red Sea, and we'll be doing a side trip to Cairo for a few days to see the Pyramids and Sphinx.

But those are all future posts, this one's about last week when I went backpacking in the Sierras with my son.

A few years back my daughter and I backpacked out of Mineral King up to Franklin Lake (I did a post for that one too, which is here). I was inexperienced so we had far too much stuff, and to make it worse, we had more food than would fit in our bear canisters, so we had no choice, we had to make it to the lake where there were bear boxes. In my naive inexperience, my stretch goal was that the following day we'd keep on going up over Franklin Pass and down to the lakes beyond. The trip up to Franklin Lake almost killed us. We needed a day to recover before we could even day hike up to the pass, and we never went over.

This year, armed with far more backcountry experience, better gear and an insatiable drive to finish what I started, I went back with my son, determined to make it to the other side. And we did.

Here's the route we took:

If you can't read a topographical map, this one basically say "ouch". Every time you cross one of the bold lines, it hurts :)

The Mineral King valley is just perfect, very picturesque. If I set out to design "the prefect mountain valley", this would be it. Here's a picture of me as we're just starting out:

Then we began the climb up, this is the valley as seen from above (which gives you a great sense of the altitude gain):

We made it up to Franklin Lake in pretty good time, we had lots of daylight left.

People mean different things when they say "camping". To some it's "load up the RV", to others, "roughing it" means a state or national park where they have to line up for showers. For me, it means being as far from other humans as you can, being totally self-reliant, knowing that if you get in trouble you have to also get yourself out. Doing it my way takes you to much more interesting places! Here's our campsite overlooking Franklin Lake. There was another group (3 people) there that night, but they were far away and we never heard them.

And here's a view we had from our site. You can see we are almost above the tree line, and notice there's still snow around (in mid-August)

So, can you drink the water? Sure, but first you have to filter it, which is the hardest part of backpacking. I share the load with my kids though, here's Steven getting us our supply for the night:

Sometimes there are little surprises in the backcountry. Like a toilet. This one was probably built circa-1900, and has one and half walls still (barely) standing, but.... talk about a throne with a view!

The next day we hiked up to Franklin pass, given us a total altitude gain of some 5,000ft, taking us to 11,700ft, which means hiking with a backpack gets a whole lot more strenuous as the air is quite thin (particularly if you live at sea level like we do). Here's a view looking back at Franklin Lake, this again, gives you a great sense of the climb we did.

Then, looking over the other side of Franklin pass (roughly east-wards), we see where we're heading:

For two nights, this was our campsite at Forester. We had the whole lake to ourselves for those 2 days. I saw another group of people in the distance once, but they were just passing through on their way somewhere else. What really struck me about this lake was the silence. It was so absolutely quiet.

Here's another view of "our private lake":

Here's a shot of my "little boy" as we were chilling and enjoying our time at Forester:

And me taking a break on the way home:

We had planned to do the trip out in 2 days, but when the sky turned black and the hail started, we thought it would be best to do it all in one shot. That means we had an elevation gain of approx 2,000 feet (topping out at 11,700 feet, where the air is thin), followed by a drop of 5,000 feet  (yes, almost a mile of elevation loss, which is really hard on the toes and feet). And all that was over 12 miles, with lightening in the next valley over.  At the end of that, we had a 1.5 hour trip (about 25 miles) down a mountain road with 1.5 or so lanes, sometimes dirt road, lots of blind curves and multi-hundred-foot drops. It's a nerve-wracking drive, which acts as a natural filter as it keeps a lot of people out of the valley :) Then, thanks to various energy drinks and greasy food (pizza tastes incredible after a few nights of dehydrated backpacking food), we made the 6 hour drive home.

It seems I say this after almost every backpacking trip, but, this was the most physically challenging and demanding thing I've done in my life. And, I wouldn't have it any other way. The aches and pains have faded, but the memories we made will last our lifetimes.

And so it begins....

On October 8th, I will be presenting "A Preview of Microsoft Oslo" at the SOA Symposium conference in Amsterdam.

I have been fortunate to have been involved in the Oslo process since it began. And now, as we move closer to parts of it becoming real, we are allowed to talk publicly about it. I'm super-excited about this presentation, as I have been given permission by MSFT to present material that has previously only been shown internally, and I even have some tool prototype screenshots :)

This is the first of many many many Oslo presentations I will be doing over the next few years,  and I am honored to be one of the first in the world to be doing one. As far as I know the only non-Microsoft Oslo presentation that has been done at a conference so far has been by my friend David Chappell at TechEd US this year.

My session abstract is:

>>

Microsoft's Oslo project is a major initiative that represents a wave of technologies aimed at making it easier to construct, deploy and manage distributed applications and services. It is an evolution of SOA technologies, encompassing Windows Communications Foundation, the next version of .NET, BizTalk Server, Windows Workflow Foundation, Visual Studio and more. Using those technologies as a starting point and building on them, Oslo also introduces a suite of modeling tools and a repository that allow the creation of role-based tools that can be used throughout an application's lifecycle.

The impact Oslo will have on the developer community using Microsoft tools cannot be understated, and will be equivalent in orders of magnitude to the impact of .NET 1.0: it will be a game-changing revolution. In this session we will take a very early look at the architecture and some of the capabilities Oslo provides, as well as what some of the tools may be.

<<

If you're in the neighborhood, stop on by! The conference site is:

On my return home from Jordan last week I diverted through Dubai, because I was "in the neighborhood" and have long been curious about it. Several people that knew I was going have asked me about it, and as it's such a technology hotspot, I thought I'd do a short post as most people reading my blog are probably curious about it.

My executive summary: "Like Vegas, only more so". More buildings, more money, more construction, and a very strong drive to be the first/biggest/tallest/fastest/best at everything. It was really eye-opening.

My first experience was on landing we were told it was 44 degrees C outside, and humid (in Fahrenheit that works out to "really really inhospitably hot", 112-ish). No problemo. I'm a desert person, and I'd been warned by several people ("whatever you do don't go during the summer").

I stayed at 5-star hotel, and hung out in the executive lounge for happy hour, so maybe my experience was not a typical cross-section of the population, but the snippets of conversation I overheard were fascinating. Everybody was negotiating *something*, even though it was the weekend. Dubai is a haven for type-A personalities, overachievers that's don't have an off switch or pause button. About 80% of the population is non-UAE, many of whom are just working there for a while and moving on. The feel of business in the air was palpable, and was everywhere I went. They've taken what I think was once a sleepy trade port and turned it into a technology and financial hub. Everybody who's anybody wants to be there, all major companies and banks have operations there.

Nothing happens at a small scale in Dubai. They are putting up the Burj Dubai tower (photo below), but for competitive reasons have not announced what the final height will be. Every few months they just say "yup, we're going up a few more floors". They're building a monorail that will serve the entire city, and it looks like they're doing it all at once. No 5 mile pilot projects here, it seemed like 50 miles or so at once.

Here's the Burj Dubai tower from afar, with the monorail in the foreground and lots of other cranes (I suspect that the cranes breed at night when nobody is watching :)). If you zoom in you'll see how many cranes there are, and this is just ONE PART of Dubai.

This was one of the highpoints of my whirlwind tour. Three days a week, and the city's main mosque, a volunteer group does a 2-hour presentation for anyone that wants to attend on Islam and what it means to be Muslim. The reason why they do this is all about building bridges between cultures, I thoroughly enjoyed it, learned a lot, and am very thankful that they're doing their part to try to help make the world a better place. I am very glad I went and would HIGHLY recommend this if you visit Dubai.

I visited the "Chill Out" lounge, where everything is made of ice. Inside temp was -6 deg C (21F), while outside was 40+C (105+F). Everything you see is made of ice, and the place was full of ice sculptures. They serve drinks in glasses made of ice.

I went on a "desert safari", which was "dune bashing", night in the desert, Arabian BBQ, belly dancing, etc.

Trade has always been an important part of Dubai's history. I went on a boat ride on the Dubai creek, where a lot of "Dhows" like this dock. They are actively in use, the docks were stacked high with cargo.

I did the mandatory trip to the Mall of the Emirates, which is the largest shopping mall outside the US (I'm not a shopper, I went to 2 of Dubai's biggest malls, and the week before did both of Amman's biggest malls, and bought, in all..... nothing). Dubai is not really a walking city, particularly in the summer, so if you want to walk, you go to a mall. And, if you want to ski, you go to Ski Dubai at the Mall of the Emirates. Here's a picture (poor quality because it's through a window, I didn't feel a need to go in having already seen a lot of snow in my lifetime :)) of the ski lift.

And, in case you're wondering what an indoor ski hill in the desert looks like from outside:

In a place where they build ski hills indoors, what else might they do? Well, how about air-conditioned bus stops (and, they really need them)?

This is the Burj Al Arab hotel, the (self-proclaimed) world's only 7-star hotel, where you're assigned a butler when you check in. The round platform is the helipad, they offer a helicopter limo to the airport. This is on the same part of the coast where they're building all the man-made islands.

I visited a local "souk" or market, a maze of alleyways that most tourists don't seem to brave. I went in deep, and bargained masterfully with a spice merchant (I think I won because he seemed quite annoyed with me). The photo below shows the entrance, once you go in there, you could get lost for hours.

Here's another angle of the main downtown. It's pretty much impossible to take a picture where without getting construction cranes.

Lastly, I got a chuckle out of this, as it pretty much sums up what Dubai is all about. In near where I live in California, we have things like "Stagecoach Park", and "Dog Beach". In Dubai? "Gold and diamond park"!

[[ OK, I am writing this with tongue-in-cheek, which for anyone not familiar with that term, means "not really serious"!!! ]]

Funny thing happened today on the ESB project that I'm on....

After a day of hard work, solving some really tough technical challenges (the kind that makes your head throb, your eyes glaze over and make you think that becoming a carpenter could be a smart career move), I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the landscape (my desk). A piece of tattered paper caught my eye, the piece of paper the team had been using all day long to describe concepts, flow and "you are here" type information to ourselves. But, I saw it as if I was seeing it for the first time, and I was struck by what it had evolved into. Then I noticed that it was actually just the latest diagram in a series (we had no white board in that room). The first one was crisp, and not marked up, and on a relatively small piece of paper (could have been a cocktail napkin). All the others in the series (there were three more leading up to the final one) were progressively more marked-up, scribbled on, and tattered, and all on A4 size paper. So, I though I would share with you that vital piece of paper that some very bright people spent the day with. And, I'm not sure what happened to that bottom-left corner.

This my friends, is actually the architecture of a very cool world-class, country-scale ESB. It solves ALL problems associated with ESB and SOA architecture. It is a comprehensive solution that also even layers on end-to-end governance. We have intermediaries, bus services, generic on-ramps, SLA enforcement, itinerary repository... we have it all. In fact, if you have ANY questions about how all these things fit together, it's probably clearly explained in this diagram. This, in all its blazing glory, is real-world goodness I just had to share, for the benefit of the community.

Although this could be confidential in nature, I felt I was pretty safe posting it on my blog as the intellectual property is pretty much naturally protected. To the untrained eye, this looks like, well, I'm not sure what it would look like, probably just an unintelligible mess. But to us, it's pure gold, and the roadmap to success. Enjoy!!!

And no, I will NOT do a webcast to explain it. Tomorrow is a whole new day, and, who knows, maybe even worthy of a fresh piece of paper. This, however, is perhaps one of the finest pieces of "software architecture art" in existance :)

This article appeared in eWeek a couple of days ago, I wanted to ensure that people following Oslo's progress on my blog are aware of it, it's a good read.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Oslo-Road-to-Microsofts-Cloud/

We're in for a fun ride over the next few years, come PDC this October, it will get really interesting…

I have been playing around with the Live Mesh Community Techology Preview, and have been doing what I think is some pretty cool stuff with it (as a consumer), so I thought I'd post something about it.

First off, and let's get this out of the way up front, this is NOT "another Ray Ozzie Notes/Groove". What's available today looks and feels like Groove (or FolderShare), but that's only because this is the first implementation of something written on top of the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE). Today it gives you a way to synchronize files between machines and a "virtual desktop in the cloud", but this is just the start. There will be a developer SDK available down the road that will open up this distributed environment to what I think could be a very interesting new class of applications (all SOA course!).

It is not my intention to go into detail about what it is, see the link below to Paul's write-ups for that. It is my intention to share my experiences, good and not-so-good, and explain how I am using it.

Configuration

My configuration is:

• My MediaCenter PC (at home) is a Live Mesh "device"
• My notebook (also known as "my office" :)) is another Live Mesh device
• I have created some folders on my virtual Live Mesh desktop-in-the-cloud that are synched with my devices

Project documents and artifacts

I do all of my development work inside virtual machines. Plus, I'm very mobile, and am often working in a disconnected state. How I use Live Mesh for this is:

• from inside my virtual machine, I map a drive to a folder on my host
• I have Live Mesh running in the host
• When I drag project documents from inside the VM into the shared folder, they appear on the host
• Live Mesh detects the new documents, and synchronizes them to the cloud
• Live Mesh running on my MediaCenter PC detects the new files in the cloud and brings them down.

Presto... everything's in synch! Pretty cool that I can do something inside my VM and it just shows up at home on my MediaCenter (complete with an RSS news feed for the folder saying who added/deleted what).

Photos

Basically the same as above, except when I plug my camera into my notebook I drag the photos in a folder that's synched with my Live Mesh desktop. From there, they replicate down to my MediaCenter PC. I have my MediaCenter machine configure to automatically do backups to an external drive. Here Live Mesh gives me instant distributed backups, without having to think about it.

My not-so-great experiences

My not-so-great experiences were my own fault, nothing wrong with Live Mesh.

• I didn't understand the concept of a "device". It is a combination of machine+login. I have 2 logins on my MediaCenter, a low-privilege one for everyone in the family, and my admin login. I had set Live Mesh up, under both those logins, to synchronize the same folder to my virtual desktop folder. Perhaps it could be a bit smarter and detect that scenario, but it didn't, and the net effect was that I started getting duplicate file conflicts as the same files were being uploaded from different devices (even though from the same physical location) to the same virtual location. It turned into a real "Live Mess" :) Solution was to set the MediaCenter machine to login automatically on boot, so Live Mesh would always be running, and remove the admin "device" from my mesh.
• this one's kind of funny, and shows what can happen when you forget what happens when you drag things. I was in Jordan, and had spent a weekend taking a bazillion pictures with my 10 megapixel camera. I pulled the pictures off, and it took all of a second to drag them to my synchronized photo folder. The upload to my mesh completed 5 days later :)

Learning more

Live Mesh is really cool, and useful technology. My biggest gripe right now, and a constraint on my usage, is the 5 gig limit. As was said on CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast, and I love this quote, "we're going to need a bigger cloud".

I would encourage everyone to get the CTP, or get on the list, and start using it for real.

Last I saw there was a waiting list to get in to the tech preview. That may or may not still be the case when you read this.

If you search around, you'll find lots of info about Live Mesh, as a lot of people are (rightfully so) pretty excited about this. Some good starting points would be:

• The Live Mesh preview site is https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/Welcome.aspx
• The Live Mesh team blog is http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/
• Paul Thurrott did an excellent write-up, which you can find at http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/live_mesh_preview.asp and http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/live_mesh_preview_02.asp

I'm actually back in town for a couple of weeks. Good thing too, as tonight at the San Diego .NET User Group Mike Culver of Amazon will be telling us all about Amazon's efforts in cloud computing. If you haven't had any exposure to cloud computing, or don't even know what it is, you should look into it. This looks like it could be a Big Next Thing. Amazon, Microsoft and all the others are investing heavily in the space, and it really enables a bunch of things we never could have done before. For details about the meeting, visit the San Diego .NET User Group.

Then, this weekend, it's Code Camp time in San Diego. I'll be there, doing the same ESB Guidance presentation ("A Technical Drilldown into Microsoft's ESB Guidance") I did at TechEd a couple of weeks ago. It went really well, this has matured nicely, and now even includes a pretty cool governance section. Code Camp is always a lot of fun, hopefully you can make it!

During the Bill Gates keynote here at TechEd, and during Oliver Sharp's presentation on Microsoft's vision and strategy for Connected Systems, it was announced that there will be a public community technology preview (CTP) of *some* of the Oslo stack at PDC this fall. This is the first public announcement of any kind of release dates.

Before you get too excited, remember that Oslo is a very ambitious and far-reaching project. What will be released in the fall will likely only be step down that path, an early look at a few parts that will become part of a much bigger picture.

However, all journeys begin with a single step :)

I ran into an old friend tonight here at TechEd and he told me about an event he's hosting tomorrow night, pre-registration is done, but rumor has it there are still "ducks available", so... if you're here, you may want to swing by the Developer Tools and Languages info desk in the TLC.

The "rubber duck competition" sounds like it should be fun. If I'm happy with the state of the demos for my presentation, I'll see you there!

http://www.dougseven.com/blog/2008/05/geekfest-party.html

Next week marks the start of TechEd US in Orlando, which is always a fun conference to be at. I'll be there, presenting a session on Friday in the SOA track: "Technical Drilldown into Microsoft's ESB Guidance". The SOA track is packed with great sessions, this should be a really good TechEd. If you're going the following week to TechEd IT Pro, Allan Naim of Microsoft will be doing a session on the ESB Guidance.

Hope to see you at TechEd Developer, I'll be there all week, hanging out, seeing old friends, and also helping out at the MSFT booth.

I'm part of a curriculum  advisory panel for California State University for an upcoming SOA program. As part of that, I spoke with someone there recently, relating real-world experiences, in a rather wide-ranging conversation. I started thinking "gee, I should write some of this down, it could be a good blog post". So, here it is!

I'll start off by saying that I could probably write a book about this, and there's likely a bazillion of my peers that could co-author. Many have already written books about this. However, instead, I'm going to distill selected thoughts down into a soap box-ish ranting blog post. I have boiled down some key points into just a few phrases. Maybe it works, maybe the value gets lost in a haze of over-simplification. Maybe I should do a series of posts (but I have NO plans to do so!).

Think big, do small

I'd say the single most important factor is planning. And by that, I don't mean lock a bunch of smart people in a room for a year and have them emerge with a detailed waterfall Gantt chart. I mean realizing that you're embarking on a path that will transform the way you create, deploy and manage your business-critical applications. Done right, your enterprise becomes more agile, cost and time to deploy new functionality decreases, and you achieve the nirvana of code re-use we as an industry have been seeking for decades. Done wrong, and you'll squander precious people resources and budget on an initiative with little or no return.

Mitigation: "boil the ocean" approaches fail. Think it all through, and then select some small services, then gradually pilot/deploy/build-up from there.

Think across the enterprise

In a large company with multiple IT sub-organizations, you need to have enterprise-level vision. Create a governing body. Identify a services portfolio. Without this, you could be doomed to costly inefficiencies such as duplication of efforts where multiple departments create different variants on a service, inconsistent naming, and eventually, a maintenance nightmare.

Mitigation: If you don't already have an enterprise architecture group chartered with setting enterprise-wide standards and policies, form one.

Take a holistic view

A developer will write 12 lines of super elegant code and say "there, the service is done, you can deploy it now".  It's no fault of the developer, in their opinion they are done. The problem of course is that you need a services management strategy, and that goes far beyond the realm of what the rank and file developer sees, or in most cases, beyond what they need to see, and certainly beyond what they usually think about.

Mitigation: Think about the entire lifecycle of a service. How will you deploy it? Is there an approvals process? How will you secure it? How will you manage it? How will you monitor it? How will you retire it?

Recognize the people challenges

SOA thinking moves people into the realm of message-oriented, or contract-first if you like, architectures. This requires a different mindset than traditional object-oriented or procedural architectures. You're in a realm where everything is loosely-coupled, and operations often become asynchronous. I have seen firsthand at challenged client sites just how horribly wrong things can go if you try to apply object-oriented thinking and functional decomposition in a message-oriented environment.

Mitigation: recognize this paradigm shift, and invest in your people (architects and developers) to help them make the transition. Get them training and mentoring.

Recognize the infrastructure challenges

Creating an efficient operations environment for services is something that will be new to many IT folks. Your SLA's will drive requirements such as high availability and response times. Policy-driven SLAs and policy-driven security add a layer of indirection that result in a more change-tolerant and resilient infrastructure.

Mitigation: Plan for the near-term future, but look to the long-term future to ensure the environment you are putting in place will be able to scale to meet future demands. Your tooling may be great when you have 6 services in production, but how will it be when you have 1,000?

Think beyond the technologies and into the processes

Today's fast-paced world and rapidly changing business requirements of course lead to rapidly changing needs from the applications we create. Back when applications were monolithic silos, change came slowly, and evolution and deployments occurred at the monolith level. In a services-oriented world where there are numerous services acting as cogs in the machine, the new unit of deployment is at the service or service-composition level. Change is assured, and solution subset deployments become normal. "cowboy deployments" although almost always bad, in this type of environment become disastrous.

Mitigation: recognize Application Lifecycle Management as a key part of your process, and invest in it. Put procedures in place to assure repeatable, reliable builds. Have a testing strategy. Have a versionning strategy. Code migration should not be something people are afraid of.

Plan for disasters

An interesting side effect in the reuse of code assets by implementing intelligent stratification is that you inevitably build dependencies. For example, if all your services use an exception management service to log and respond to exceptions, what happens if that service is unavailable? The impact of a single service outage could ripple through your entire environment.

Mitigation: Think carefully about the dependencies, and architect and build robust services that incorporate mechanisms to respond to outages.

Benefiting from a successful SOA strategy is possible, but it's something you (as an architect) need to think about. As technologists, we often naturally gravitate towards and get caught up in the technologies. However, there are many touch-points beyond just the technology decisions, what I've listed above are just some of the things I've observed out in the real world, out where people are actually implementing SOA-based initiatives. I'm hoping by posting this that I'll help ease the path for some of you....