Spent a week in Redmond at the Publisher and Author Summit. This is a great event. Jan Shanahan and her group did a great job of managing the event (thanks again Jan). The great thing about this event is that it is small in comparison. For example Jack Greenfield gave a talk on software factories and there were 6 or 7 in the room. It's great to be able to ask a question or make a point in situations like this. This is the one thing that I don't like about conferences like TechEd. You don't have the...

Over the past couple of years I have been noticing a trend that concerns me somewhat. Developers and architects have been designing application architectures based on buzz-words instead of based on the requirements of the user or the system. SOA is a prime example of this. I look around our enterprise and I see hundreds of systems. Some would say that I need to hook some of these systems together (many do talk to each other) using a service based architecture. Now if I look really REALLY close at...