Powers Unfiltered

I just returned from New York where Dan and I worked the 5th Annual Microsoft Financial Developers Conference at the Grand Hyatt hotel. Dan and I did a tag-team presentation entitled “Scaling SOA with Grid Computing for .NET,” which was well received. Frankly, I felt like I stumbled through the first part, but eventually warmed up. Dan’s code demo was the best part of our session — showing clearly how to go from a service designed for a single server to a service designed for a grid in just a few lines of code.

If you want to go deeper into this topic, a good place to start is the Dr. Dobb’s article by Robert Anderson and Dan Ciruli.

I ran into Tom Groenfeld who has moved on from Windows in Financial Services, dedicating more time to some direct projects with Microsoft and his excellent blog; if you’re following Microsoft and its partners in this market, it’s a must-read.

Speaking of Windows in Financial Services, they caught up with me for an interview and (no guffaws please) a photo shoot. They’re doing a special HPC edition this summer, which should be out sometime in June; watch for it.

Maybe the most controversial guy at the event was Harvard Professor David Platt, who teaches .NET classes through his firm, Rolling Thunder Computing. He’s an excellent speaker — funny, smart, polished — and his emphasis on championing a simple user experience was certainly a breath of fresh air at this event. He was plugging his book, Why Software Sucks…and what you can do about it, and I may pick up a copy for more of his humor.  Frankly, his presentation offered more problems than solutions (i.e.,  examples of why something sucks, without recommendations about how to fix it), but he’s calling attention to a really, really important issue.  While we pride ourselves on ease of use, it’s clear we can make many further improvements.

Kudos to the whole Microsoft event team, especially the folks I worked with most directly — Asli Bilgin, Laura Leedy, Kathy Ross, and Michelle Ledesma for putting together an event that went off without a hitch.

I look forward to participating in this event again!