Wednesday, November 25, 2009

What I Learned from PDC - An Overview

I attended MIX07, PDC07, MIX08, PDC08, and MIX09 online, so I have been following the Microsoft technical narrative for the last 3 years. I attended PDC09 live. One of my goals was to organize the technical narrative, which is normally presented product / technology centric into the components of a single application centric model.

For the past decade, my customers were looking for applications that offered the best of all experiences. Because they were unconstrained by technology in their thinking, they asked for features that were an amalgam of Web, Phone and Desktop applications, their ‘ideal’ application. I have been looking for a set of technologies that can deliver all these features from a single code base. I could see Microsoft was approaching such a solution, and at PDC09 many of these pieces came together. I created a diagram to help navigate the changing face of Microsoft technology in the light of customers’ Web/Desktop visions.


If you find this diagram hard to read, don't worry -- it will be broken down into readable pieces in the blog posts that follow.

The ‘ideal’ application in my customers’ eyes can run over the web, or run disconnected on a laptop without changing the GUI or user experience. Being connected to the internet should only be necessary to read or share data, but not a requirement to complete work. It should also be able to run on nearly any device with any screen size, a server, desktop, laptop, or a phone. Software components must be agnostic of where they are running (client or server) and cannot duplicate logic. The software community describes this style of application as Line of Business (LOB) apps; I do not like the term but it looks like it is getting a lot of traction on the web. Two archetypes for this LOB style of application are a traveling salesman and a soldier deployed in Afghanistan.

The diagram above is used to map the Microsoft technologies to support the LOB application. Not everything discussed at PDC09 has a place in this mapping, but I think you can get more out of the talks if you keep this diagram in mind while you pick and choose among the talks. The diagram shows, on the left side, the breath and depth of an application, on the right side, the technology and tooling available to construct, maintain and deploy the application. The functional layer (vertically down the center) was extracted from and reinforced by many of the PDC talks.

A well designed end-to-end .NET application will account for all of these functional layers in each of the technology stacks. As developers (and users), we can see the value in a software architecture that includes GUI, Client/Server side validation, Logic and Rules, Command/Navigation control, Data services, Networking, Object Relation Mapping, and Persistence.

Vertically the diagram shows a progression from End User to Application Hosting, via a set of functional requirements (Functional Layer). Horizontally, there is a set of four technology stacks, each with a unique perspective on building software.
Horizontally I have juxtaposed 4 diagrams each focusing on a different aspect of the software development process -- breadth, depth, platform, and tooling. Here are some working definitions:
•Breadth: who is the audience and how do I reach them, how do they plan to access my solution?
•Depth: what tasks do my users do and under what conditions, how do I make the application easy to use?
•Platform: what are the technologies I can use to build a deployable, maintainable, extensible solution, successfully using the skills of my development staff?
•Tooling: what are the tools available to assure that I am producing the solution efficiently and correctly?

My goal is to explore the subset of the Microsoft technologies presented at PDC in the context of building a solution that can run thinly over the web, or disconnected as a thick client reusing as much code and common technologies / tooling as possible. The result should be a road map of the essential Microsoft technologies you should be aware of in order to build a modern .NET client/server application.

No comments: