A way of working

Today I read a very interesting article about the way architects work.

.

It sounded very familiar to me. How about you?

.

JUMP! meeting: overview of development days at Microsoft

Every now and then I find it useful to attend presentations about subjects not directly related to Infrastructure, Security or Architecture. For architects, this broadens the vision on the world. It is useful for everyone in the IT business to know what is going on in the world of Microsoft developers, and what is possible these days.

A few days back I was invited for an evening at LogicaCMG, where some presentations were held about the Microsoft DevDays 2007.

The Microsoft DevDays is an event that takes place in Amsterdam. It takes 2 days, where in 6 tracks, 54 presentations are given to Microsoft developers. Obviously, much information is presented during these days, and some LogicaCMG consultants who attended the event, presented the highlights:

Visual Studio 2008 - Orcas is the latest Visual Studio version, which now (finally) includes support for Java development, including code completion and debugging.

Silverlight is a cross platform (that is Microsoft and Mac) plug-in for browsers, that enables rich content. It is a competitor for Adobe Flash. A demonstration showed that it was pretty easy to produce rich content, including drawing, animations (using timelines) and events in a web interface.

LINQ can be compared to SQL statements that can be used in source code, where information in databases, or in classes (!) can be retrieved.

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) are new technologies that enable developers to design application User Interfaces (WPF) or communications between applications (WCF) easily. A demonstration showed the possibilities of WCF: a new version of the classic game Pong was implemented, using two systems: one server and one client. The communication between these systems was done using WCF contracts. Contracts define what needs to be communicated (for instance the names of the players of the game). How it is communicated is hidden for the application developers. This is done by the WCF layer. Very impressive.

DSL (Domain Specific Language) is a technique for automatic code generation from models. This is not new, as there are already tools for generating code from UML. DSL however, gives the developer the freedom to define their own modelling language, and use this specific language to generate code. This makes it possible to use or develop a modelling language, specific for a particular domain or business.

Popfly mashups is a new technology that makes it very easy to create mashups. Mashups are Internet sites that combine information from several other sites of web services to create new content. The live demo showed creating a mashup between Microsoft Virtual Earth and a news site. The news articles state the location where the news happened. The mashup took that information, converted it to coordinates using a web service and used the coordinates to point the news to a place on the world map, provided by Virtual Earth using "pins". When one clicks on a pin, the news is shown in a pop-up. All this was done with little or no coding, in a few minutes, just by visually dragging, dropping and combining web services together. The Popfly site is open for developers to test it, and relies heavily on the new Silverlight technology.

I found the presentations very impressive and entertaining. Microsoft has a lot of very user friendly tools, that give developers much (artistic) freedom. Nowadays, only a very small portion of developing is actually coding. Tools automatically hide the most boring part of developing from the developers.

Another thing I noticed was that much designing (specially UI's) is done nowadays in XAML, the Extensible Application Markup Language.

Archivering data - more than backup

Some documents must be stored for a long time. The (Dutch) law has no specific regulations about how long data must be stored in archives, but it requires companies to state how long their data must be kept available.

This means that every company uses different standards for archiving data, and the type of information might also be different. For instance, the Dutch tax agency forces companies to keep tax records for at least 7 years. But the retention time of sales records might be 2 years, depending on the business. There are however circumstances where data must be kept much longer, sometimes even more than a human lifetime.

Some examples are:

• (Pension)Insurance companies must keep records of their history of people and claims;
• Hospitals store medical information during the lifetime of a patient;
• The Justice department keeps records of crimes (specially if they are not solved) for a long time;
• Newspaper archives, archives of television networks and government (like image- and sound archives).

Digital format

Data must be kept in such a way that it is certain the data can be read after a long time. This means the digital format (like a Word file or a JPG file), the physical format (like a CD or a magnetic tape) and the storage environment (temperature, humidity) must be such, that data can still be retrieved after several decades.

This is not a simple task.

Let's look back a few decades. In these years mainframes were common in the IT industry. Data was stored on reel-tapes, that are not readable anymore (using 8 or 9 parallel tracks, usually in EBCDIC format instead of ASCII). Data was also kept in propriety formats, like mainframe database tables.

Can you guarantee this data can be read and interpreted today?

After mainframes, PC's became the norm, using applications like Wordstar, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, MS-Word (how many versions?), Lotus Notes, PDF, etc. Furthermore, there are now audio- and video formats, like BMP, GIF, TIFF, MP3, WAV, MPEG (several versions). The list is too long to comprehend, and all of this was developed in the last 30 years.

Here is an interesting list with file formats and their specifications (47 pages long). It ill not be easy to make sure all these file formats can be read in 30 years time. And probably more file formats will be developed in the years to come.

I recommend to use open standards for storing data as much as possible. These standards should be not too complex, like the ODF format. The ODF format is a zipped file with XML text files in ASCII, that will be readable for a long time, because it's format is well described and not too complicated.

Physical format

Many physical storage format exists. Except the previously mentioned reel-tapes, these are also tape cartridges in many formats, DLT tapes, SDLT tapes, LTO tapes, DDS tapes, CD, DVD, Floppies (3,5", 5 1/4", 8"), etc.

Many archiving technology is storing data in optical formats. While this is much better than magnetic storage on disk or (even worse) on tape, is it not obvious that media like CD's or DVD's are still readable in many years time. How long will it take for Blu-ray- or HD-DVD's to be common media? And what will follow?

Therefore, it is advisable to transfer data that is to be kept for a long time to the latest storage media standard every 10 years (from Floppy to CD's) or to at least move the data to a new copy (burn a 10 year old CD on a new CD).