Top 10 Windows tools for IT pros

Infoworld’s 2009 Top Ten Emerging Technologies

Distributed System Designers are an integrated set of graphical designers that help application architects, developers, and infrastructure architects achieve the following high-level goals:

• Document, visualize, and communicate application design and datacenter run-time environments.
  
• Design distributed application systems for deployment.
• Evaluate deployment of application systems in the target datacenter.
• Maintain and synchronize application design diagrams with source code.

Distributed System Designers help achieve these goals by supporting the following software development processes:

• Design, configure, and implement reusable applications for composing application systems.
  
• Compose application systems to use in distributed system scenarios.
• Represent run-time environments as logical datacenters.
• Define and validate deployment for applications and application systems against logical datacenters.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181240.aspx

Great! Looks exactly like what we are looking for! Now, how do you make it do that?

Unfortunately the documentation is clear as mud. It seems kind of cobbled together, with a lot of nebulous terminology. This shouldn’t be surprising considering the documentation seems to be a hodgepodge of articles Microsoft partners, including Avanade. I also discovered, like so much other Microsoft documentation, it matters where you start. Don’t start here. Start here.

But of course, you say: the first is VS 2005, the latter 2008. But you wouldn’t know that by some navigational paths through searching the help unless you are paying close attention.

Speaking of versions, a colleague of mine who attended a conference on Visual Studio noted that Visual Studio 2010 takes a radically different approach to system architecture design, improving on the well known weaknesses of previous versions. But perusing the Visual Studio 2010 documentation I found nothing to do with Distributed System Designers. So I Googled (oops, Binged) and found this:

I can’t say much about our past support of UML, but I can say we are committed to UML going forward.  Microsoft has joined the Object Management Group (OMG) and is working to influence the future of the specification to make it valuable to .Net developers.  Any feedback you have on our Beta 1 product would be great, we are still working on visual improvements, if you have ideas, we would love it.

We have decided to not ship the Distributed System Designers in 2010, several of the scenarios that we did find customers utilizing with those designers are covered by the UML designers we are shipping.  There are other scenarios we may not be able to cover in this release, but hope to fill the gap based on customer feedback. 

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Top-down-design-with-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/

What? The very thing I needed? Say it ain’t so, Joe. So I installed the beta. Sure enough, no Logical Datacenter or anything like that. The closest project type I could find was a modeling project. UML. No DSL.

So do I go back to VS 2008 and build a solution that will soon be obsolete? I have wasted a day chasing this down. And everyone wonders why everything takes sooo looonnnngggggg…

I started my search simply: “Building software environments”. The results could have been one of those Bing commercials where search terms lead to all kinds of irrelevant results. And yes, I used Bing. Early results were, in baseball parlance, a no decision. Google performed no better. To rid myself of the hits relating to software environments for building buildings, I add to the search terms: “building software development qa production environments”.

Now it really looks like a Bing commercial. I’m not looking for a QA Engineer position with LegalZoom.

Of course building software environments falls under the purview of Software Configuration Management, and the Wikipedia article on SCM references “Environment management – Managing the software and hardware that host our system.” Unfortunately, unlike Build management or Process management, there is no article specifically on the topic of Environment management.

Binging (and isn’t that why they really called it Bing, to co-opt Googling) “Environment management software” shows me where I can buy green software. And profile and user management. And, naturally, the Wikipedia page for Environmental Management.

Bing!

Linus Torvalds, the “father of Linux”, is such a technician. He noted recently, to Linux Magazine, nonetheless, that “Microsoft hatred is a disease”. This would be significant in and of itself, but for added kicks the article is shrilly anti Microsoft:

You may have already heard, but the unthinkable has happened. That’s right, Microsoft, the self-proclaimed enemy of Linux and free software, has announced that they will be submitting some 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel. Come again? Yes, Microsoft wants to get its code into the Linux kernel. You read that right!

It is important to note that this code has not yet been included into the official Linux kernel. The code has also not yet been thoroughly scrutinized by the wider community to see what the code actually consists of. Is it all code, or does it rely on binary blobs? Will the quality of the code make the grade, or will the community be expected to clean it up and maintain it?

Microsoft Patches Linux; Linus Responds | Linux Magazine

I don’t really expect fanboys to be logical, but can’t they at least be consistent in one paragraph?

Microsoft has long claimed that Linux infringes on software patents in their portfolio. The company’s CEO Steve Ballmer went so far as to say that everyone who uses Linux has an unbalanced liability sheet and that Microsoft should be compensated for their intellectual property. Of course, when asked what these patent infringements were, Microsoft would never say – it’s part of their strategy to foster fear, uncertainty and doubt in the market. They have taken this a step further however, by suing GPS manufacturer TomTom claiming the VFAT implementation in the Linux kernel violated such patents.

To point out the obvious, isn’t the suit cited an concrete example of “what these patent infringements were”? FUD is as FUD does, methinks.

I am no Microsoft fanboy. I worked on OS/2 before Windows 95 killed it, back when Linux was a puppy. I was actually an early adopter of Linux. But I grew up and realized how the world really worked. Microsoft is a business, software is a business, something the Linux fanboys far too often forget. Not happy to simply get a concession from Microsoft, they have to malign its motivations:

You can’t help but notice the very first line, “a break from the ordinary.” That’s right. Normally Microsoft is trying to destroy Linux and free software. They hate the GPL license which they call a virus, a cancer, the destroyer of intellectual property, and even anti-American. It’s also just that – a break. Nothing has changed in Redmond, the company still hates Linux and they still want to destroy it.

So why the patch? Well, it contains three drivers which will enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized as a guest under Microsoft’s virtualization product, Hyper-V. Ahh, now the truth starts to emerge. The purpose of the code has nothing to do with being generous, but rather it is to ensure that Linux will run well under their own virtualization technology. Microsoft has well realized that the world is moving towards free software and that users are implementing Linux in their infrastructure.

They should listen to Papa:

“I agree that it’s driven by selfish reasons, but that’s how all open source code gets written! We all “scratch our own itches”. It’s why I started Linux, it’s why I started git, and it’s why I am still involved. It’s the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree.

So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That’s the point of open source – the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the ‘your’ in question happens to be.

– Linus Torvalds

Of course zealots tend not to listen to the peaceful pronouncements of their leaders. Even this piece cannot resist exhortation:

Who would have thought even one year ago that they would ever contribute code to Linux, even if it was for their own benefit? So on that level it is amazing indeed. What this patch does show is that Linux and free software is gaining in power and popularity, so much so that Microsoft can no longer ignore it.

Can I hear an Hallelujah!

Of course the comments are even more outrageous. Torvald himself is coming under attack.

I feel like I’m stuck watching "Being There", where everyone is all gaga over idiotic pronouncements from a borderline retarded man. Linus didn’t say anything particularly sensible

– Some idiot

As another commenter noted:

Torvald is just too open for open source these days

Amen to that, brother.

Here’s why we came to that conclusion:  Amazon’s platform is based on the concept of renting a virtual machine image (either Linux or Windows Server). That makes it the smallest distance from any current application architecture. Google App Engine is optimized for scripting web applications. It’s simple to create web apps there. Windows Azure is setup a bit differently, and enables you to think of an app running ‘in the cloud’ as opposed to running ‘on N servers in the cloud’.

Reflections on Executive Briefing Event: Cloud & RIA – Bill Blogs in C#

Microsoft’s vision is much more ambitious and sophisticated.  Both the Amazon and Google clouds simply kick the ball down the road a little ways.  The Cloud will either be a major paradigm shift, or it will be an alternative of the same old, same old.  Microsoft gets it and is taking risks even with their greatest asset, the .NET developers, to move forward:

"Application development managers should view Azure as a brand-new platform rather than an evolution of today’s platforms — and they shouldn’t view the Azure Services Platform as an alternative for re-hosting existing .NET applications," Rymer [John Rymer, an analyst with Forrester Research] wrote in a research note. He goes on to say, "Azure is early in its development (and available only in pre-beta form) and so is appropriate only for skills development and experimentation during the next year. Teams with immediate needs for ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) offerings will find more pragmatic options for Windows applications from Amazon Web Services and other hosting providers, as well as from non-Windows providers, such as Salesforce.com."

Unlike Amazon, Salesforce and Google, Microsoft is betting that developers don’t want a place to simply host their apps. Redmond is counting on being able to offer programmers the building blocks, too, that they’ll be willing and able to incorporate into their wares. It’s the whole buy-into-our-stack play upon which the company has relied successfully in the past. The stack, in the cloud space, is the Live Services layer in Azure.

Will Azure Evolve Into Microsoft’s Fifth Major Platform? — Redmondmag.com

Microsoft is betting the farm on Azure.  It is surprising they are encountering so much resistance, even from .NET developers.  Inertia, perhaps?