Gianpaolo's blog

Wow… I have not blogged for a while, but I need to get out my blog silence to share my experience about the IE8 $10K prize competition, which by now, half of the Internet and 80% of Twitter community has commented on. (well OK, maybe not :) Let’s start...

Still not fully back on blogging quite yet (soon I promise). In the meantime, (if you want) you can follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/gcarraro . See you soon in the 140 char / tinyurl world! #gpstillnotblogging

In a few weeks, I will be packing all my goods in Redmond and board a big Qantas Airbus A380 to Sydney Australia !! My 4 and 1/2 years in Redmond have been a blast, I'm looking forward to more of those down under. (for those interested) here is more info...

What a week at the PDC ! With the CTP release Azure Services Platform I don't think that anyone is doubting anymore about Microsoft ability to understand and execute on "the cloud". But PDC was not only about the cloud, there was tons of stuff...

My brother in arms Eugenio and I wrote an article a few weeks back discussing the opportunity that "the cloud" offers in terms of IT optimization. Of course this is not the only opportunity that "the cloud" will offer, but it is likely...

As indicated in various press articles and blog entries in the recent weeks, PDC will be Microsoft's 'coming out' party for its cloud services platform. These additional platform assets will create a vast array of new possibilities, but at the same...

Over the week end, my good buddy Vittorio a.k.a. the man who knows more about identity than it is mentally safe, started a new game and tagged me . Now, time to fire up a meme. There are super smart guys out there, and I'd be really curious to know what...

Being a non native English speaker I regularly make pronunciation or grammar mistakes and I usually don't mind. There is one thing I learned today though that I found amusing mostly because it is a small mistake that is commonly made by pretty much everybody...

Although cloud storage fabrics are very cool, a lot of multi-tenant applications will be build against a database. Based on some work we did on our super famous sample application LitwareHR :) , we just released a blueprint providing guidance on writing...

A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a webcast (~1hour) going through some of the architectural challenges faced by ISV architects in building S+S solutions, as well as the ones faced by architects in large enterprises consuming S+S solutions. Below a couple...

A couple of months ago I wrote an article providing a high level explanation of the basic concepts of S+S, now my friends in Asia Pacific need your help visualizing this article through a great video. Anyone can participate – whether you’re...

I was reading Why multi-tenancy matters and Many degrees of multi-tenancy today and honestly, I am still surprised that there is still a debate around whether multi-tenancy is a prerequisite for SaaS. Multi-tenancy is a provider view of things, if you...

As I mentioned previously , the study of clouds (cloud computing of course) is becoming a very popular topic in the software industry. In the last couple of weeks alone, I read tens of articles on the subject. I found many of them proposing various type...

Nephology (from the Greek word nephos for 'cloud') is the study of clouds and cloud formation. It seems to me that everybody in the IT industry wants to be an expert in cloud these days; cloud computing that is. Jokes apart, one thing I learned from the...

More seriously... Eugenio just announced and released on Codeplex the latest drop of LitwareHR. Although the application UI was treated with a welcomed 'facelift' (we were told that LitwareHR UI was "too 1990s"), the main effort for this release...

Over the last 2 years or so ( here and here for example), I have been discussing how consumer grade IT services might/will be used as part of enterprise IT, Gartner even says that Consumerization Will Be Most Significant Trend Affecting IT During Next...

Yesterday, we released ( here ) on the MSDN Architecture center a section dedicated to Software + Services (S+S). We realized that depending on whether you are a large enterprise, an ISV, a hosting company or trying to establish yourself as a trusted...

Phil believes that I did drink too much Kool-Aid . But after reading his post, it seems to me that we agree on most of the points, or maybe it is the Kool-Aid again :) He says: The answer, my friend, is ‘yes’. Here’s Gianpaolo’s...

Readers of this blog must have seen that recently I have been spending quite some time discussing 'software + services'. I know that Phil thinks S+S is bunkum but I have to disagree on that one. Of course, an S+S world would disproportionately benefit...

Yesterday I recorded a 25min. walk through of litwareHR v2 (recording available here ) Even though the primary goal of LitwareHR is to elevate architectural best practices in a Software + Services world, this particular webcast does not dive very deep...

Below is an diagram I have been using for a while in my presentations on software + services (more about s+s here ); so due to popular demand :) here is an explanation of it in my blog. The image is meant to represent the new (or evolving) relationships...

Many of the readers of this blog also follow Fred's blog and Eugenio's blog . It is now time to add another feed to your favorite RSS reader. It is my pleasure to introduce a new fearless architect in my team: Masashi Narumoto . Below Masashi finding...

Over the week end, I was looking at AMZN DevPay announcement and I started thinking in more general terms about the architectural impact of different monetization schemes. At a high level, software / service monetization can be put into 4 main categories...

In the next couple of days I might have fun again and offer my 10 or so 2008 predictions as I did in 2007 . (many of which I think are still very valid) but in case I don't, I wanted to make sure that at least this one gets out. - 2008 will be the...

In the last couple of weeks, I finally decided to create an account on Facebook and LinkedIn. (I know, many of you must think that I am almost a Luddite for doing so only now) Anyway, as one would expect, I went through (and still going through actually...