SSIS - Never expected it to be so good ...

For past 6 months I am looking into SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) as a ETL technology. Frankly, I never expected that it would be so mature a platform. With SSIS Microsoft directly competes with Informatica (which has ben around for years) in ETL space. At first glance it looked as a battle between a mouse and a dinosaur. However, Microsoft's Business Intelligence Suite is gradually gaining pace and recognition. It is now a very mature platform. The suite consists of Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services. It has a development environment in form of BIDS (Business Intelligence Studio) which is ok. The provision for C# based custom scripts is quite good. The framework options are also reasonable. The SQL Data validation options are pretty ok. However, debugging the C# custom scripts is still a pain. Overall it is a decent bet given the fact that it ships free with SQL Server as compared to the costs associated with Informatica.

WF 4.0 State machine workflow

Recently, I have been working on WF 4.0. On the look of it Workflow Foundation looks pretty impressive. The XAML based designer for developing the workflow is pretty responsive. I got a chance to evaluate State Machine workflow and did manage a quick Proof of Concept within just a day or two. The persistence and tracking capabilities with SQL Server are good and robust. However, not support for Oracle persistence which means develop you own custom instance store to persist long running workflows. Hmmm.. something not very impressive ... It is light and performance of WF 4.0 is 10 times faster than that of WF 3.0. However, there are few concerns around testability of XAML based workflow and also maintainability. One needs to carefully devise a strategy to migrate the existing workflow instances when a workflow undergoes a version change. It has decent support for transactions, exception handling and bookmarking. Overall I am pleased with what is on the plate!

WPF 4.0

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft's user interface technology ... aa much much advanced version of so called "Windows development". It has great graphic capabilities, very responsive and with a great control toolkit. With Expression Studio as far as creativity and rich user experience goes sky is the limit. It has a strong MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern .. pretty much on the lines of Model-View -Provider. A strong Prism (advanced Composite Application Block) library with unity container for IoC makes enterprise development pretty elegant. Overall the roadmap for WPF looks very promising. With Silverlight which is a subset of WPF for web, Microsoft has captured the attention of developers towards rich user experience on web too. Definitely WPF and Silverlight are excellent technologies to watch out for in future!