Tech.Ed.Day.2.Track.Sessions

ARC312 - Enterprise Architecture
by Gurpreet Pall

Started day 2 with a dose of Enterprise Architecture. I like Gurpreet's example of the Winchester mansion - 147 workers and 0 architects, absolutely no blueprints. It is also interesting to learn about the approaches such as Meta, Zachman and BAIT. I do agree that different people with different roles in an organization look at a particular system differently, hence the context, conceptual, design and physical views.

Towards the end of the session, Gurpreet also explained that EA is required before we can apply SOA because the foundations of our applications should be using OO.

DBM309 - SQL Server 2005 Security Enhancements
by Joe Yong

Went over to this session to see how Joe is doing ;) It is nice to see the many security enhancements in SQL Server 2005 such as applying password policy restrictions, the new EXECUTE AS options and etc.

It is also good to get a clearer explanation on SCHEMAs, something more or less like what Oracle provided. Objects in SQL Server 2005 now no longer ties directly to a user (i.e. dbo) as schemas are used to group the objects and rights to the schemas are assigned to the users instead.

Managed to say "Hi" to Joe after the session ended.

ARC415 - Thoughts on Data in Service Oriented Architecture
by Harry Pierson

This is my disaster session. Was hoping to see some code examples on how to send data across SOA boundaries but the session was a typical no-code architectural session. And because I attend this session immediately after lunch, I find myself struggling to stay awake :)

But Harry did a good job in explaining stuffs like XML Infosets, Referenced Data and also when to use them (and when not to use them). He also reinforced what Gurpreet said in the earlier session that our applications should be using objects to represent our data internally and only expose them as XML when we need to communicate with other applications outside our application boundaries.

ARC310 - .NET Architecture Design Process
by Mike Smith

This is the most fun session for today. Mike is really a cheerful person. In the first part of his presentation, he introduced all of the Enterprise Templates to us and demonstrated how we can use them for our applications. However, he did not show us how to create the templates :( and leave it to ourselves to try it out when we have the conference CD.

The second part of his presentation was about diagraming with Visio for Enterprise Architects. Before giving us a demo, he went onto UML 101 and 'Use-case for dummies'. He also covered some basics in identifying nouns and verbs for our class diagrams which he candidly say Kata Nama and Kata Kerja. Later, he demonstrated how we can generate VB.NET codes from Visio.

Although the session was fun, I felt that it should be a level 100 session because what Mike covered was very very basic (to me). The audience for this session was overwhelming because the developer track were talking about Unix. ;D

ARC401 - Connected Systems: Using Web Services Enhancement 2.0 (WSE) to Secure Web Services
by William Tay

This session is the only one that captivated me from the start to the end. (Not sure whether it was WSE or William that captivated me) :P Here, William continues his saga in introducing more WSE cool stuffs to the attendees. In this session, he talks about WS-Security, WS-Trust and loads of cryptography concepts such as symmetric and asymmentric algorithms, digital certificates and stuff.

I find this level 400 session quite easy to follow.