First off, I owe my good friend David Risko a belated "WELCOME".  David is now up and blogging after a little push and threats that I would start blogging about all his ideas.  He’s one of my main idea guys at REJIS and even gave me another good one today…

Clint and I had lunch today to discuss some things as I am gearing up for my role on the new project I am working on.  As usual he had a lot of good things to say and I’ll plug two of them for him:

Denny had a hit with his "Autopsy" on SOA post.  It grabbed enough attention that his article was mentioned in a two page article on Beta News.

I have begun some initial testing with the Entity Framework.  I am a big fan of LINQ to SQL and the entity framework looks to be even bigger than that (yes, I've seen all the discussion about the "death" of LINQ to SQL).  After completing my simple database design in SQL 2008 I generated an entity model and unit-tested a simple data access class to perform basic CRUD operations.  After viewing a 10 minute tutorial I spent about 5 minutes enabling a REST based service which connected to my entity model and generated ATOM feeds of data from my data store.  I could literally use the RSS reader of my choice to subscribe to my entity service's data feed.  I was impressed to say the least.

Which leads me to my final topic of this madness.  Standards.

One of the things that you must consider when developing any new system is what standards you will need to adhere to, especially if you system will have any type of services exposed (and in today's world there are few that won't).  I have seen a variety of things done in the services space that are very non-standard by a variety of vendor tools and creative developers.  Going forward I think it will be critical to look to standards such as SOAP, WSDL, WS-*, ATOM, etc. to create a baseline that your systems should adhere to.  I would argue that systems should be designed around those standards and then the implementation technology should be able to adhere to those standards.

In terms of long-term sustainability, maintainability, and interoperability you will gain a lot by adhering to the standards and implementing in the technology of choice.  There will be cases where standard adherence may be impractical or even not necessary.  Those should be the exception.  Not the rule.