Randy Miller gave a ridiculously short (under 45 minutes) presentation on Composite Architecture. I went in thinking he would be talking about how one hooks up different technologies into one system, which is a problem we face at McKesson Automation - our product lines are based on various technologies, and our customers like them to work together.

I completely forgot my brainwashing back in my Microsoft Merit Badge days - Composite Applications used to Microsoft-speak for cobbling together an application from various Office applications and enough VB and VBA to make them stick. Randy works for Microsoft. So, it should come as no surprise that Composite Architecture is the updated version of that vision, where instead of hooking together Office products, we're hooking together server products such as SharePoint, BizTalk, Excel Server, etc. Certainly a good solution in a lot of cases, but he didn't really dive into the details very much, or at all for that matter.

The only useful thing he mentioned was adding a "Productivity Tier" between your business logic and presentation logic, to allow for non-human systems to interface with your application easily. Definitely a good idea, if you have the need to take order via a web service, or reservations via a message queue, etc. The Productivity Tier essentially reformats your data into a form that your business tier can use, and that external applications can make use of going the other direction. Of course, its kind of a logical, common sense thing to do, but it is good to mention, I suppose. I just would have rather gone to a different presentation (Rob Daigneau had a presentation, Messaging-Oriented Design Patterns for SOAP Services, that might have been better at the same time).