Microsoft and (Open?) Standards

Yesterday I met Chris Levanes, Platform Strategy Lead, Microsoft Asia-Pacific Region. The first one I have met from Microsoft with whom I had a sensible dialogue about Open Standards. Interestingly, before joining Microsoft he has worked for Red Hat.

NITC 2009

I got the opportunity to present some of the national IT infrastructure work we do at ICTA as a keynote speaker in the 27th National Information Technology Conference (NITC 2009).

I had the honour of sitting in the head table with Prof. K. K. Aggarwal (2nd from the right).

KDE 4.3.0 Caizen

KDE has announced their release of version 4.3.0 of the free desktop. I just upgrade and it looks really good. Ability to have different wallpapers in each of the desktop is back with many other really user friendly improvements.
http://kde.org/announcements/4.3/

I think the KDE team has demonstrated how a community project can take a FOSS product to a level where it can out perform a proprietary product. This should iron out any perceptions on usability features of a FOSS OS/Desktops.

ESB vs Biztalk

Today I was in a seminar organized by Microsoft on interoperability. I was listening to Lorenzo Madrid and found it interesting to know his view point on open standards and interoperability. He is of the opinion, interoperability can be achieved even without open standards. Based on my questions he may have realized that I share a different opinion on the topic.

However, later on one of the example projects they have done using Biztalk lead me to read bit more about Biztalk and I found this interesting post. Of course this is an old post;

http://oreilly.com/pub/wlg/8484

But has Microsoft change their view point later on?

http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/2007/01/23/microsoft-s-enterprise-services-bus-esb-strategy-part-4-4.aspx
http://www.infosysblogs.com/microsoft/2006/09/biztalk_as_an_esb_2.html

Now what they have is a set of guidelines as to how to use Biztalk as an ESB.
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/esb-guidance.aspx

Hence, the fundamental issue still remains. Of course when you look at most of the J2EE based ESB implementations, I don't see a different with them and Biztalk.

One example of a real ESB, in my opinion, is here....
http://synapse.apache.org/

Windows 7 in 2009?

Microsoft is planning to release another OS in 2009.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/152638/windows_7_release_date_october_2009.html
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx

At the same time they are still struggling to get their users migrated to Windows Vista.
[1]http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/130/1050130/xp-gets-another-stay-of-excecution

Even the Windows XP website is trying hard...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/future.aspx

The carefully engineered support policy is some thing users should be well aware of since vendor can sell them Windows XP till May 30th 2009.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

However, after nearly two years of existent Windows Vista hasn't been able to push Windows XP out and now its successor is also coming out :-).

Overwhelmed with all these? I am not. Because I use Kubuntu :-).
http://www.kubuntu.org/

IIT Conference 2008, Colombo, Sri Lanka

This year IITC 2008 was held on the 28th and the 29th of October at Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall (B.M.I.C.H.) - Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was followed by series of workshops on the 30th and the 31st of October.

http://www.iitc.lk/

On the 28th I present a paper based on my MSc research "Mahatittha: An Open Source Distributed Transaction Manager for Spring Framework by Leveraging Reliable Group Communication".

On the 30th I did a workshop "Introduction to SOA and Web Services". I make use of WSO2 WSAS, WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Registry, and WSO2 Mashup Server to demonstrate the participants how SOA can be implemented using Advanced Web Services / SOA middleware technologies like WSO2 product stack.

It was a small crowd, but very knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

Light Weight Enterprise Applications

Last Saturday and the Saturday before I did a class at University of Colombo (Sri Lanka) on Light Weight Enterprise Applications. My intention was to create more awareness among the students on how to pick the right framework for their development requirement, without getting crazy about those buzz words.

Since most of them have requested for the sample code I have used in the class I am sharing them at the below URL.
http://light-weight-ea.4shared.com/