Udi Dahan’s SOA Course

I had the pleasure of attending Udi Dahan’s Advanced SOA course this winter. He is an experienced software architect, frequent blogger, the co-creator of the CQRS pattern, and the originator of NServiceBus. For years he has blogged on topics ranging from DDD to SOA to the benefits of message based architectures over traditional RPC.

The SOA course is 5 jam pact days during which he works tirelessly for his students, plowing the entire 8 hours each day on his feet. Roughly half of the the course is spent massaging existing assumptions so that students can approach SOA with a new perspective. The other half is spent explaining techniques born out of years of consulting and answering a bevy of questions along the way.

When I returned to work on Monday my coworkers asked me what I had learned. I realized I had no idea where to start. This is a common problem experienced by course attendees graduates. It’s tough to share when back with the tribe. Part of this is because the course has his own specific definitions for widely used terms like “service” and “domain model”. More though, the course is lasts for five days because it takes that time and his experience to bake in these concepts. While he lets students have access to his voluminous slide deck, out of context of the talk they generate confusion.

It’s been four months and I can feel the knowledge decay starting so I have decided to blog about what I have gleaned from it. I hope this series of posts makes you interested in service oriented architecture and in Udi’s work. Every serious architect in the .NET space should take his course not even if – but especially if you have been building systems for decades. These posts will only be my interpretation. Go to his course or purchase his videos for the real deal.