Just thought I’d let you know of more doings in Birmingham. The SOA Society will hold it’s first meeting of 2008 next Tuesday, the 22nd. SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture, a methodology for integrating IT and Business. That’s a pretty broad simplification, to learn more about SOA you’ll just have to come to the meetings!
See the Society’s website at http://soasociety.com for more info.
The SOA Society is a group of professionals, gathered from both the corporate management and information technology areas. The purpose of the SOA Society is to educate and inform it’s members about the policies and practices surrounding Service Oriented Architecture. Further, the SOA Society seeks to keep it’s members informed by providing exposure to the tools and technologies available today, and to talk about the trends for tomorrow.
The SOA Society is in it’s early stages of being formed. Regular meetings will begin in January 2008. However, we’d like to invite you to an early meet and greet meeting. We’ll have a time for socializing and meeting one another, followed by a brief presentation to further explain the goals of the organization.
Location: 1800 International Drive, Suite 500, Hoover AL 35243
Time: Tuesday, November 27th, 2007, Social at 5:30 PM Presentation at 6:30 PM
More Info: Robert at 205-288-5713 or Johna at jledlow@axcan.com
Some miscellaneous topics to cover for today. First, I had the need to copy several thousand files from one machine to another, about 6 gigs worth. Explorer? No thanks, to slow and unreliable. Fortunately I had recalled reading a post on Scott Hanselman’s blog just the other day on this topic. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/XCopyConsideredHarmfulRobocopyOrXXCopyOrSyncBack.aspx
Since the machine I was using to do the copying was Vista, I used RoboCopy. Worked like a champ. The bad part was I didn’t even know I already had this tool until I’d read Scott’s post. Always nice when you go hunting for a tool only to discover you’ve already got it and it’s ready to go.
On the subject of SOA, Redmond Magazine released an article on Microsoft’s SOA strategy. http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=756
It was a long article and interesting, although it seemed to have an anti-Microsoft tone. I picked up a subtle, and perhaps condescending, knocking of Microsoft for not falling into lockstep with other industry players like IBM. While I do agree Microsoft sometimes comes a little late to the party, I don’t think it has to jump on the party boat to be an effective player in the industry.
Windows Communication Foundation Guru Jeff Barnes is planning on some new WCF posts in the near future, so be sure to keep an eye on his site if you play in the WCF realm. http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/08/08/coming-soon-wcf-3-5-posting-blitz.aspx
Jeff’s also working on a WCF Site (http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/08/06/planning-a-wcf-community-site.aspx), another good reason to keep an eye on his blog.
Finally, Scott Hanselman has opened up a forum area on his site, some good info and discussions can be found here. http://www.hanselman.com/forum/
I’m pleased to announce the formation of Alabama’s newest user group, the SOA Society. The group will focus on Service Oriented Architecture, and educate its members on all aspects of SOA including design, implementation, development, maintenance.
In addition the group will cover the business side of SOA. We seek to educate enterprise leaders on topics like return on investment, creating business cases for implementing SOA, and encouraging a culture of designing systems from the outside in.
Our audience will be broad, we want to appeal to everyone from developers to IT managers to business owners, evangelizing the benefits of SOA as not only an internal productivity tool but a sales tool for interacting with your customers.
We plan to hold our first member drive at Birmingham Alabama’s TechBirmingham (http://www.techbirmingham.com/) TechMixer in October 2007. Monthly meetings will then begin the same month, in the Birmingham area.
But you don’t have to wait! If you would like to get involved with the formation of the new group, or simply want to be added to the e-mail list shoot me an e-mail at arcanecode at gmail dot com. This is a community based group, and we welcome the involvement of the community!
For those in the Birmingham, Alabama area, some colleagues and I are in the process of establishing a new user group. This group will focus on Service Oriented Architecture – SOA. While we plan to cover all aspects, from the top level design down to the nitty gritty details, our main focus will be in the architecture area.
If you have an interest in SOA, experience with it, are passionate about it, or just want to learn more we’d love to get your feedback. We hope to finalize a group name, establish meeting locations and dates, and begin getting programs lined up in the very near future.
For more info just e-mail me, arcanecode at gmail dot com.
Arcane Code 