What’s covered in this first part of the Windows Azure Architecture Guide? Here’s a picture inspired in our previous guide style:   And remember, this is the first guide on a series that we have planned. In the next couple of weeks we will start...

Things will eventually fail in your application and you need to be prepared. So most components should be designed for something going wrong and recover gracefully (or as gracefully as possible) and leaving the system in a consistent state (eventually...

Scott has published the results of his “Continuation Token” spike, which is a critical aspect of dealing with queries against Windows Azure tables storage. His findings will make it to the guide, but you can read the essentials here . The unusual thing...

It seems some people were somewhat confused with the guide downloads . A picture is worth 1000 words:

We are almost content complete for our first Windows Azure Architecture Guide (the most probable name for our book). Available for download today: New updated samples, including all file processing and background tasks (lot’s of small nuggets in there...

Last week Scott walked me through his current design for the “Integration Service” in our sample. Here’s some preview of this early thinking. As a reminder, our fictitious scenario has a process that runs every once in a while and generates flat files...

Question for you: if your application has 2 “background” task to perform, do you implement this as 2 distinct workers? or as 1 worker with 2 responsibilities? Option 1 is straight forward. Option 2 requires more work, but … does it make sense? It turns...

As described before , a-Expense static content (mainly the scanned images uploaded by users) is stored in blobs. As with many other things in life there are quite a few options when it comes to how those images are made available to users. A key design...

If you recall from my original article on a-Expense , there were 2 background processes:   Scans Service : a-Expense allows its users to upload scanned documents (e.g. receipts) that are associated with a particular expense. The images are stored...

We want to know about your success! Share your story with us and get a signed book and a few little surprises from patterns & practices.   Just send me a short e-mail ( eugeniop AT microsoft.com ) with the following information: e-mail subject...

I got a few questions from people on how the “ Federation with Multiple Partners ” sample of the guide works, so I figured I would just write it down in one place for eternity. The guide explains all sequence in quite some detail (see pages 88 to 97)...

Customers frequently ask me about interoperability with their non-Microsoft products, and identity is not an exception. There’s roughly 2 set of scenarios that come up often: A relying party (an application) built on the Microsoft stack trusting a non...

One frequent question we get is around “process guidance”. Also known by the more modern and fancy acronym “ALM”: A pplication L ifecycle M anagement, which replaced the old SDLC term, which in turn (and only if you are old enough like me) meant something...