Yesterday I gave a talk on SOA pattern on the European Virtual Alt.Net user group. You can find the recording of that talk here as well as download a pdf of the slides.

Before I’ll talk a little about the substance I want to say a few words about office-live meeting (the platform used for the presentation). To sum this in one word the experience was horrid. It took me more than 35 minutes just to upload my presentation. Then I had to switch to windows XP (VM in parallels) to speak since it has problem with Windows 7 (low sound volume). However, the worst thing is that throughout the presentation I constantly lost control of the slides progress (i.e. couldn’t move the slides forward), which was very distracting. 

Anyway, if ignoring all that, I think overall the presentation is still beneficial and  addresses a  few interesting issues that are challenging like flexibility, reporting and management of SOA. If I am to sum the presentation I’d say that  when you build a system on SOA you get a system built of (relatively) a lot of components of questionable reliability. You can reap a lot of benefits in the flexibility department, but you have to address several challenges in the performance, availability, management (etc.) departments. Additionally you  need to look at the overall solution from an holistic viewpoint since different parts of the solution can push in different direction or  only cover part of the picture.

Lastly thanks to Jan and Colin for organizing the event and for all the attendees for giving me an hour and half of their time