Zachman Diagrams

My summer OOA/OOD course at UC Irvine Extension is winding down, and we've discussed Zachman diagrams several times in the context of enterprise-scale architecture problems. In my opinion the UML story for deployment modeling would be great comedy if it didn't lead to such epic disasters:

"So we have a couple of boxes, and inside each of the boxes a few components. The line between the boxes means that there's a 100 MB connection..." What mental giant thought this model was sufficient for any sort of enterprise deployment more complex than a "Hello World" web site? It captures absolutely nothing, except that software runs on a box in your enterprise. Well, duh.

Anyway -- just in case you can't wait for next week's meeting, here's a link to the Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement, and a shortcut to information about The Diagram. BTW, the course is offered in the Winter also, so if you'd like to hear me rant about OOA/OOD once a week, you have time to sign up.

More on XML Schema Wildcards

I recently wrote an article on using open XML elements and attributes and versioning, which is available in at least two places inside the developer.com plantation.

Don Box recently posted a pointer to a W3 posting by Noah Mendelsohn -- he discusses more issues with XML schema versioning and UPA. I recommend it if you're into this kind of thing.

Still catching up on topics in my notes...

I'll Give Up WinFS...

When they pry it from my cold, dead fingers...

I've been using WinFS (as well as Avalon) a lot lately, and there's no way I'm giving it up. I need to face reality of course -- I'm going to build some adaptation code to accommodate the fact that the application will need to run without WinFS when initially released. When I started to use WinFS, there was a bit of a learning curve. The API is huge, there's little documentation, and without Reflector, there's little chance of accomplishing much with the current bits (4074). But once you use WinFS and get over the learning hurdles, it changes the way you think about data relationships. I'm hoping that WinFS is included in the builds moving forward, and isn't actually pulled -- that would be a bit much in my opinion.