Another week started with a lots of goals to achieve. Our first iteration of the new implementation of our Admin 1 system will conclude at the end of this week. My part hasn't done yet. I'm behind my own schedule.

Last week, our external consultant brought in a specialist who was from Taiwan to help us on improving our system. The specialist was introduced as Microsoft Product expert. However, the first impression we had for him was totally opposite. He introduced COM+ to us, a technology which Microsoft is replacing with .NET. The whole week, we spent our time in those COM+ meetings. The really good thing he tried to implement for us a COM+ server to try instead of telling us to implement what we didn't want to do.

We tried the COM+ servers over the weekend. Coincidently, the last weekend all the major leagues were off for the EURO 2008 qualification rounds. The load of the system won't be so high. My supervisor took one of our largest sites to test how the COM+ performed. The site was slower than one without COM+. It was obvious that things's slow down because now a request from a web server had to go through COM+ server to get the objects and after than came back to the COM+ server to execute the request. COM+ server introduced an intermediate step to connect to the database. Personally, I think this is one of the reasons for Microsoft to drop the COM and COM+ technology by .NET. ADO.NET layers provides the same thing what the COM+ does in term of reducing the number of connections from the web servers to the database servers with a pool of SQL connections. I also think our specialist knows this, and I hope that too.

Advanced Betting System from London came to our company in the middle of the week to introduce their betting software for bookies. First time, we got to attend these demo like this. It was a really well-organized system, and using service oriented software platform. They didn't use XML as the data transportation, but another Servlet thin layer instead to reduce the amount of data to transfer over the network. This is exactly what we want our software to be like in the future. My colleague was talking about this couple months ago and we are trying to design our Admin 1 system in the way that later on we could switch our system into services oriented software platform in the easiest way. My colleague is really good at visioning and look for the future development of our software. His Master degree in Computing Science shows its true values.

Saturday night was really peaceful for us. The load to the database wasn't high. There were no major problems except some little bugs on the interface of our .NET member sites. We had launched 3 more small sites and the .NET system is increasing its portion in our system.

... Sunday, our off day ...