[This is the 2nd article in a series of diary entries covering my experiences with Project MEBA]

As every developer knows, starting a new project requires a little bit of ramp-up time. Tasks such as getting your machine prepped with all of the necessary tools and favorite trinkets to make you a productive programmer, reviewing the requirements, brainstorming ideas to solve the problem statement, etc. As a developer coming onto an existing project, you also need to spend some time getting comfortable with the existing code base. Typically you have a lot of questions like: why is the project structured the way it is? what is the current testing/source control/build/etc process? who is the subject matter experts for parts X, Y or Z? You also have questions like “What the hell were you thinking?”, but we keep those to ourselves. I hope. :)

With existing code bases, your first task is to get the solution to build and run on your machine (depending on your solution). This tends to be a chore in itself most of the time. For Project MEBA, I fall into the category of working with an existing code base. This is Phase 2 after all. :)

In my “Ramp Up” time, I’ve spent the last couple of days getting my machine “dev ready”. This included installing all of the required bits to build Project MEBA. These include the following:

• Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite
• Team Foundation Server 2008
• Windows Azure Software Development Kit (January 2009 CTP)
• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio January 2009 CTP
• Microsoft .NET Services SDK (Dec 2008 CTP)
• Microsoft SQL Data Services SDK
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Silverlight Toolkit

What I have done was create a VPC Dev environment will all of my required tools installed. I’m not sure I’m going to stick with it. I may switch over to a dedicated machine for all of my dev work as the VPC is performing as optimally as I’d like. It’s currently running on the same hard drive as the host OS which may be one of the underlying reasons why it isn’t performing optimally. I’d be interested in hearing from others on their dev machine setup of choice. What tools do you use? What are the first things you install? Do you run in a virtual environment?

Once I had all the tools up and running, I fired up Visual Studio, connected to our TFS instance and pulled down all of the source code. Unfortunately, this project is a little more complicated than hitting F5 and we’re off and running. I spent a good majority of my time last week digging into the project structure trying to understand all of the moving parts including what was an executable, what was a website, what was a library, etc.

Now Phase 1 dealt with a particular “reference implementation” of a B2B messaging solution running on Azure. If we continue to focus on this particular reference implementation, the first order of business will be to fire up Team System for Architects and model out these moving parts. I can’t wait until we can start using Visual Studio 2010 as the the Architecture modeling tools in VSTS 2010 have greatly improved. I will have to admit, it took me a good deal of time to get to know the project. It’s very important that we use the tools at our disposal and the capability they provide in communicating and collaborating across the team. VSTS as it has progressed into VSTS 2010 should provide increased capabilities in this communication process, and therefore cut down on those ramp up times.

The next order of business is meeting with the project stakeholders to discuss Phase 2 planning.

Until then…

For the next few months I will be working on a special project with the Platform Architecture team in our Developer & Platform Evangelism group. We will be working on a project that will provide proof-points and guidance packages for Multi-Enterprise Business Applications “in the cloud” (or Project MEBA).

With the announcements and work being done around Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform, we believe there will be a resurgence in business-to-business (B2B) computing in a way that hasn’t been possible before. With this project we’ll work to define the capabilities and patterns businesses can gain by moving their business partner integration to Windows Azure.

You can see some of this work as its already been highlighted in the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) keynote (skip to 59:00), as well as a break-out session by Wade Wegner and Jack Greenfield on how they built the MEBA demo. Jack is the Project Lead and brainchild behind this project. Wade served as DevLead for Phase 1 of the project. He worked alongside David Chou, Program Manager, and a development team in India to produce the initial results. My role is to serve as DevLead for Phase 2 of the project and continue exploring the possibilities with the Azure platform.

I will have the fortunate opportunity to work alongside the Windows Azure and Azure Services Platform product groups, as well as our Senior Platform Architects in DPE. In addition, my duties will be to manage a team of developers in India that will assist in the some of the coding efforts. This is where technologies like Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server are going to come in handy.

With this opportunity, I plan to bring you along. The idea is to start a developer diary and to capture all of progress (good and bad) as we play with these new bits to determine some best practices for utilizing the Azure platform for B2B communications, workflows and functionality.

My project participation started this past Monday with Jack Greenfield and myself serving as booth babes at the National Retail Foundation Big Show to showcase the work the team has done in partnership with Red Prairie (a supply chain solutions provider) in Phase 1 of the project. This particular scenario focused on the business problem of product recall. The difficulty in this particular scenario is having the capability to communicate with business partners to pull product out of the supply chain when a quality issue has been discovered. Currently, Red Prairie works with its customers to set up numerous private data lines between business partners and maintaining those lines for communication needs. A very costly piece of the solution offering. With Azure, we can use the Internet Services Bus to facilitate the necessary communication between business partners and have the opportunity to host workflow processes “in the cloud”.

We met with a number of retail customers that were interested in the prospects, as well as a number of ISV’s who were interested in moving their business solutions to the Azure platform. However, we’re in the infancy of Azure. There is still quite a bit to work out on the technical front. The team I will be working with over the course of the next few months will be working alongside the Azure product group teams to put a business solution in place as they fine tune the technology bits.

It’s a great opportunity for me and a great opportunity for you to participate in this adventure along with us. Stay tuned!