Way back in 2004, sitting in the “delta lounge” team room with Scott, Brian, Ed, T-Shak, Rohit, Prashant and Mani, I never would have believed that almost 5 years later, we’d still be shipping Enterprise Library (aka EntLib) or that we’d be up to version 5.0.

A few days ago, my good friend Grigori Melnik, who is the PM for EntLib over in Patterns & Practices, sent me an email reminding me that they are looking for planning input on the version 5.0 features.

He’s written it all up over on his blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2009/01/26/enterprise-library-5-what-s-on-your-wish-list.aspx

If you are a current or past EntLib user, please don’t miss this opportunity to help steer the product. As I tell my wife, “If you don’t tell me what you want, you shouldn’t expect me to get you the right thing.”

I don't know how I get myself into these things, but it looks like I'm hitting three conferences in three weeks, only two weeks after moving my family into a new house.

Foolish? Hell yeah. Fun? You bet!

I'm very fortunate this year to be one of the folks representing Visual Studio Team System Architecture Edition at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. PDC is always a special conference, because this is where we get to tell you what we've got coming up for developers. What is the next cool thing? Only one way to find out and that is come to PDC.

My talk at PDC is called "Architecture Without Big Design Up Front". It is a mix of agile development, architecture tooling, a little process, a real world problem to solve with real code (so made up samples here) and hopefully some fun.

The week after PDC I fly up to Redmond to kill two birds with one stone: my monthly visit to my team in Building 25 on campus and a stop off at the P&P Summit to talk again. I always  love the P&P Summit as a speaking gig. The audience is small, but not too small. The talks can be very interactive and you always get to talk about interesting things.

The following week, I'll be in Barcelona Spain for Tech Ed EMEA. I'll be repeating my PDC talk there for people who couldn't make it to LA, and I'll also be doing my classic "Agile Talk on Agility". (Thanks again to Brian Button from whom I stole this talk years ago). My wonderful, amazing wife Emily is coming along on this one (she never lets me go on trips like this solo), and it just happens to coincide with our 8th Anniversary, so we're going to do a little vacation while we're there.

Hopefully I'll bump into some of you on the road this tour. Please if you see me walking the hallways or in the hotel lobby or at one of the many social events, feel free to walk up and introduce yourself.

See you there!

My former team has released a new guide that is getting rave reviews from people called “Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF”.

Some juicy quotes from reviewers:

• “ I am new to WCF programming….The guide is very good, very useful and definitely saving us time.  It has become the central document from which we are developing. ”
• “…. you really did a great job!  I think that every WCF developer should keep your book as day by day reference…”
• “Very cool and extremely useful…. I can’t say enough good things about this … it’s an amazing work. ….”
• “Awesome, phreaking, colossal… the content is unique – there is no match of it…Very timely just as WCF becomes mainstream with my customers. … It is serious booster with real world projects…”

Download the Guide

• Guide Download: http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide

Contents at a Glance

• Part I - Security Fundamentals for Web Services gives you a quick overview of fundamental security concepts as they relate to services, service-oriented design, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA.)
• Part II - WCF Security Fundamentals gives you a firm foundation in key WCF security concepts, with special attention on authentication, authorization, and secure communication, as well as WCF binding configurations.
• Part III - Intranet Application Scenarios shows you a set of end-to-end Intranet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture designs with a focus on authentication, authorization, and communication from a WCF perspective for your intranet.
• Part IV - Internet Application Scenarios shows a set of end-to-end Internet application scenarios that you can use to jumpstart your application architecture design for the Internet.
• Guidelines, Practices, How Tos, Q&A show self-contained nuggets of information that present both developers and architects digestible pieces of specific guidance. Often code is included to illustrate important concepts and answer specific questions.

I can’t seem to find a link to a hardcopy source, but the PDF is free!

I've been collecting these in my Inbox and figured they needed to go out here. As you may recall, before becoming a "suit", I was the dev lead for the Composite UI Application Block (aka CAB) and for the first P&P software factory, the Smart Client Software Factory v1.

Here's what my old team has been up to lately:

• Announcing Web Client bundles
  http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2007/09/19/announcing-web-client-bundles.aspx
• What has the Web Client Team been doing recently?
  http://blogs.msdn.com/mpuleio/archive/2007/09/19/what-has-the-web-client-team-been-doing-recently.aspx
• The Contextual AutoComplete Guidance Bundle is Available on CodePlex
  http://blogs.msdn.com/mpuleio/archive/2007/09/19/the-contextual-autocomplete-guidance-bundle-is-available-on-codeplex.aspx

Enjoy!

Glenn Block has joined P&P, replacing Eugenio Pace as Product Manager for the UX Program (home of things like CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory and the Web Client Software Factory).

Please join me in welcoming Glenn to the team. He will be a great addition and I look forward to working with him.

See Glen's intro post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2007/04/21/my-new-role-in-p-p.aspx

A week or so ago, Rory Blythe from Channel 9 came by for a visit and an interview with me and Ed Jezierski. We had a great time during this interview and it is now up for your enjoyment (or torture... YMMV).

Enjoy!

I just wanted to share links to a few people who blogged the patterns & practices Summit earlier this month. The conference was lot of fun, I met a lot of interesting customers and had a blast giving my presentations.

• Steven St. Jean - Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4
• David Boss - Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, More Day 4
• The Server Side .NET - Mini Review, Interview w/ Me, Frameworks Review
• Michael Wood - Lots of notes here

Thanks to everyone who came out to Redmond for this. I think it was our biggest p&p Summit yet and I certainly enjoyed it. Hopefully the attendees did too.

Don Smith, one of our Product Managers, has put up a few blog posts looking for feedback about how we engage with you. He is asking questions about things like:

• How do you feel about the written part of our guidance?
• How do you feel about having to join a site to access our stuff?
• Do you want live source code access or just periodic releases?
• Do you want access to the work queue and bug list? Would you submit bugs and feature suggestions?
• Do you prefer web forums, mailing lists, or RSS feeds to stay informed and to talk to other people about p&p deliverable?
• How do you feel about wikis as a way of providing and managing documentation content?
• What can we do better to communicate more effectively with you, our customers?

Anyway, instead of posting a reply here, please go over to these two posts on Don’s blog and give him feeback on his questions.

• Post #1 – It’s all about community
• Post #2 – Written guidance neccessary?

Thanks for taking the time to help us out on this. It makes a difference.

At Tecd-Ed this year, Ed Jezierski and I sat down with Ron Jacobs and babbled on about p&p, agile development and other fun, random topics. The interview was recently posted to Channel 9.

Link: Catching up with patterns & practices

Want to see the Enterprise Library application blocks in action in a realistic service oriented application? And would you like automated guidance to help you build your own applications that comply with a proven architecture? Then check out the July Communtiy Drop of the Web Service Software Factory. In addition to providing a reference implementation, written and automated guidance around building service interfaces with ASMX, this latest drop includes a new data access guidance package that makes it easy to build a data access layer using the Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block.

Please visit the project site at GotDotNet.com to download it.