the philosophical architect

At a recent Microsoft event, a solution for the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of colon cancer was demonstrated on Windows 7, using a hi-resolution multi-touch display. This demonstration makes it possible to navigate 3D, electronically cleansed images...

Maybe no one will be astonished if I claim that computer hardware and software are becoming first class citizens in the arsenal of medical research, disease control or patient care. This proposition becomes a little more interesting if I point out that...

Michael Stiefel has done a brilliant, thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work in his talk about art and architecture which I enjoyed very much for a number of reasons. I highly recommend it. At one point, for example, Michael highlights the false...

Don Box once said that developers hate security because nobody wants to stay up all night trying to get things NOT to work. That’s why, when I’m talking to developers, I prefer to talk about identity instead of security. But either way, if you are interested...

Sure I’m employed at the moment but I’ve been around long enough to know what it feels like to be out of work in a down economy—and it’s no fun—I remember that very well. When you haven’t put together a resume in awhile it can be tough sledding. Even...

W7 gets raves for a great user experience features and improvements. Many of the consumers I’ve spoken to love the W7 Task Bar and some of the new desktop arrangement features like Snap and Shake, but some of the really important enterprise capabilities...

Here’s a Zen question: When does data become information? Is it when data is collected in some normalized form? Is it when some data can be related or correlated to other data in a well defined way? Or, is it only when it finally gets consumed by an application...

One of the obvious attractions of the Software-plus-Services approach is that it can provide a best-of-both-worlds way to deliver great software value. On the client-side, you can offer a rich user experience, the right balance between ease-of-deployment...

If you are interested in security, identity management, and web standards; you won't want to miss the next meeting of the local chapter of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) in Hartford tomorrow night. The local chapter holds bi-monthly...

Hey! CardSpace is not just a consumer technology. If you think it is, you're missing the point. It is a bit frustrating to hear even some of my Microsoft colleagues refer to CardSpace as though it belongs on the shelf somewhere between Zune and Halo3...

The potential benefits of SOA in the enterprise can be great, including reduced cost, better business efficiency and agility, and perhaps most importantly-a much better customer experience. Unum, one of the companies I have recently become acquainted...

I spend quite a bit of time thinking about authorization-especially as it pertains to highly distributed computing environments. Authorization gets tricky fast in this environment. Federated scenarios are an excellent case in point. For example, Mary...

Recently, I had an opportunity to meet several of the enterprise architects from Microsoft IT. After I published my article on Enterprise Authorization Strategy , I got to talking with Aaron Hanks about some of the challenges of enterprise authorization...

Good grief! Not another pesky TLA? Well, not really. SOC stands for service-oriented culture—an awkward term I use to describe a phenomenon that is an essential element of developing an SOA and sometimes conspicuously absent in the enterprise. Once I...