You may have already discovered Arc magazine (it’s a series of 4) which aims to describe Software + Services for Architects, but if not, you should know that apart from the physical copies, you can get the digital versions from our Architect Portal

From J.D. Meier’s blog , the Patterns & Practices team have released a bunch of pocket guides – smaller and more focussed – based on the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Here’s the initial list: Agile Architecture Method Pocket Guide Web Application Architecture Pocket Guide Mobile Application...

Today, myself and Blooders presented on Software + Services on the Architecture track at OreDev (as previously mentioned). Our intention was to provoke some thought on the pressures on architects, and the drivers for Software + Services, and help architects think about modelling and translating these...

Spotted on Jon Fanders ’ blog, a look at the very first model driven architectures through to the present day . More at Models Remixed .osl

Well, I expect it is to many people. I’m one of those people who, so long as the ADSL is running, treats all of the cables, routers and stuff as one would an ancient monument: “Look, don’t touch. It’s very special” But, I’ve become more concerned recently with the state of digital media that I’d like...

Mark B has also just finished some prototyping work recently but is also able to give some details on what he’s been up to here . I saw the applicaton just after it was finished and it was a smart, practical use of both Virtual Earth and Silverlight . The mobile application is super-useful too and is...

Given I work in the media space, I should probably be among the first to blog about such things, but of course I never am. This is some of the big news for IBC . This is a pretty big deal though and represents choice for anyone utilising Silverlight, and its media ecosystem. My friend Tim Heuer – whose...

In this exciting instalment of MicroQuest activity, we're finally going to do something useful and make the Unit move around on the map, using the pathfinding code from a while ago. We need to get our coding fingers on a little this time. The interaction we're trying to achieve is as follows: User clicks...

As I was upgrading my blog I was looking at the release notes around support for APML ( you can see my APML here ). I feel the need to subscribe to many blogs to keep myself abreast of developments across the varying industries and technologies I look at. Adding one or two too many news aggregators can...

In the last post, I cobbled together something that was serviceable as a pathfinding routine, and was left with the beginnings of some structures - such as Location and Unit - that would be needed in MicroQuest. In this post, we'll look at building the beginning of the WPF application that will represent...

The new BBC iPlayer Beta has impressed me. Not so much because it changes the general iPlayer experience in terms of play out, but simply because of the approach to releasing the software. The new additions of recommendations, last played and the consolidation of radio and TV are helpful, but it’s more...

The first thing I want to be able to do in MicroQuest is move my "unit" around the "game world". So I need to establish a mechanism for the movement of the unit. Given this is a tile based game then it seems obvious that my unit can move a certain number of tiles per turn. Taking...

In a previous post I talked about inspiration and decided that I'd spend more time 'just coding' . This series of posts on 'MicroQuest' will be about my adventures doing just that. It’s sort of a vague attempt to copy from the master ( Andrew Braybrook of course!) and keep a diary on the creation of...

This is probably more of a rant than an 'interesting architectural piece' but anyway... I typically use JetBrains Omea Reader for my blog reading as it has a whole bunch of features for categorisation, annotation, and workspace separation that are appealing. Reading feeds is an important part of my ...

So Facebook has undoubtedly raised the bar in terms of social networking capability and expectation, and I imagine that LinkedIn and MySpace are now considering how to respond to the (perceived) explosion in growth in Facebook users (and therefore the probable loss of their own). Having a development...

Fabulous report from MS Research on high-level communication activities on the Messenger network . Check out the dataset: "The compressed dataset occupies 4.5 terabytes, composed from 1 billion conversations per day (150 gigabytes) over one month of logging. The dataset contains more than 30 billion...

I also had a look at the BT SDK in the last week. Wow! This is a shining example of a) some great functionality to exploit and b) a really well produced SDK, samples and service package. What does it do? Take a look at the site, but essentially it allows you to programmatically invoke SMS, Voice...

Just some thoughts for a Friday. I should probably call this Research 2.0 or something to be inthe here and now, but I'm old skool when it comes to new concepts. A question in the office the other day was raised around how someone 'does research'. I didn't think too hard about it, but really I probably...

January came and went fairly quickly and I've spent most of the month in the lab working on some stuff for the University of Manchester. This was an HPC effort using CCS to run parallelised computations on Functional MRI scans. Again, the general architecture we used was to make use of WF as a controlling...

I spend a lot of time scribing thoughts and discussions from Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) in words and pictures. Diagrams that 'just work' are really important. So link of the year so far has to be this Periodic Table of Visualization Methods which has some great diagrams and ideas for their use...

One of the useful things about horrendous flights across America and the infernal realms of chaos that are Washington, Chicago and Denver airports is that it’s easy to catch up on reading. So I read a couple of useful books (and one useless one: Michael Crichton's Congo. I mention this because it...

After a bit of CCS and a bit of WF , my latest project is on WPF giving me a chance to use the tools and start to understand how to architect real solutions around the libraries. I don't think the flexibility of WPF can be underestimated - with all of the increasing possibility of templating, styles...

You can probably tell that I'm a big fan of Ruby (and Ruby On Rails) along with my love of all things Microsoft. Working variously with Ruby and C# is interesting because of the differing natures of the languages. I like C# - it all makes sense, and of course you've got the whole of the .NET framework...

I've been pretty busy over the past couple of weeks working with some HPC (High Performance Computing) bits and pieces. Windows Compute Cluster Server ( http://www.microsoft.com/hpc ) is approaching, and it's been interesting to see the capability and types of environments in which CCS can be used...

I've always been a fan of Redgate and their tools were very useful in my last job - in particular we used SQL Compare a lot. I also used SQL Compare in Chapter 8 of the book to automate the database integration tasks in NAnt as part of the continuous integration cycle - a whole lot simpler than trying...