Hope is not an Architecture

There's quite a few Canberra based organisations and folks really using Team System in anger to support their software development lifecycle. Many are at different stages of the journey but there is certainly a great opportunity to share some of the experiences...

Like so many people, I find using whiteboards a really good way to exchange and communicate ideas. It's interesting that even with all the supporting software and collaboration technologies available today, that so often we end up using the whiteboard...

He is me! I thought it was worthwhile doing a very quick introduction to give some context to this blog and what I do at Microsoft. I've been at Microsoft for over 3 years now and work with the community of architects involved in enterprise and application...

You might have seen some talk of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) CommSee project. Its a highly successful SOA implementation with many interesting aspects (incremental delivery approach, Service design, .NET Smart client, large scale project...

One of the many traits of a good architect is composure, the ability to stay calm and in control when projects come in to land. But under extreme pressure event the best can't stay in control. Ever had one of these days? If I ever get the opportunity...

Last week we were fortunate to have Dr. Don Ferguson in Australia. Don is a Microsoft Technical fellow and fairly new to Microsoft after many years at big blue. During this time he visited Canberra and presented at the Canberra Architect Council and shared...

Ron Jacobs of ARCast fame just sent me an email to let me know that the ARCast he recorded at TechEd 2007 Australia is now available. Checkout his ARCast from downunder (2.5 mins into the video) which has an interesting interview with an organisation...

We were fortunate enough to have Glenn Smyth, Chief Architect of Adelaide Bank present at the Canberra Architect Council last week. Many folks that have been around the traps in Canberra for a number of years will know Glenn from his days at ATO and...

I've always been a fan of the high quality articles available in the Architect Journal. Of course you've always been able to subscribe or view articles online but now there is a better way to read, search and share articles. Simon Guest and co. have just...

Greg Willis (aka Gravity man ) recently joined our team and it's great to see that he has got his blog up and running so quickly. Greg, if you are seeking advice on blogging habits such as frequency of posts, you should know to look elsewhere :-)

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) had some great ways to consume services, aggregate information and compose applications from a variety of sources. The article Resources for interoperability with SharePoint Server 2007 sets it out nicely.

Today I had the opportunity to present to a large group of folks from some of the government agencies based here in Canberra on one of my favourite topics -CardSpace and the Identity Metasystem! Of course, CardSpace addresses the problem of storing...

The two go hand in hand don't they? How many different forms do people need to fill out for the requirements of different government departments? It seems that every department has a process and a bunch of forms that require automation. It'd be fair to...

Well not exactly votes for him, but there is an interesting post on Kim's identity blog about Joe Hockeys approach to the Ozzie access card. To quote Kim: "The cabinet minister responsible for all of this has been Joe Hockey, who seems to have a no-nonsense...

Yesterday my colleague, Nigel came to Canberra to present at the Canberra Architect Council. The topic was "Software as a Service – Catching the Long Tail". I have seen the presentation before but the interesting thing about this delivery was that it...

Just returned from annual leave and in catching up, I see that the CommSee case study has been published on MSDN! This is a meaty, 63 page technical case study that examines the solution architecture, technical project details, and best practices employed...

The inaugural meeting is on Wednesday 24 th January at 8:00am to 9:30am WHERE: Microsoft Canberra Level 2, 44 Sydney Ave Barton ACT The topics for the first meeting are · Migrating from VSS to TFS ( Andrew Lynes based on experiences at DEWR...

Last Thursday, my colleague Anna Liu came down to Canberra. It was a beautiful spring day. We spent some time in a workshop with some Federal sector customers discussing Cardspace and potential scenarios of how this might work across different government...

Last Wednesday, 30th August we ran a Technical Architecure briefing at the Canberra Microsoft office. Ron Jacobs from the Architecture Strategy Team based in Redmond did an excellent presentation on Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Service-Oriented Architectures...

Their are many purported benefits of taking a service oriented approach to building systems and integrating with existing systems. Some of these include: Abstracted - services abstract us away from the underlying implementation Relevant - functionality...

It could take some time to load ;-)

I remember the first time I saw a virtual machine running. It was many years ago on a early version of VMware. My reaction was WOW! I immediately recognised the problems it could solve and the opportunities virtualisation could provide. Think about virtualisation...

The week before last I had the opportunity to travel to Auckland to present at Tech Ed NZ on the Microsoft interoperability story. I know it seems like ages ago, but some folks have asked for a copy of the presentation. You can find the slides “Heterogeneity...

Following my presentation at Tech Ed, I was contacted by Liz Tay of Computerworld We discussed Microsoft’s investments and ongoing strategy for working across different platforms and systems. Liz wrote an article called .NET 3.0 designed for interoperability...

In my last post , I highlighted a pretty cool video of a guy "driving a whiteboard" that looks something like a SMART board . Chris Cavanagh saw my last post and pointed me to a demo he created in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Chris is obviously...