"All the wonders of architecture, elegant structure, proper provision for security and scalability amount to nothing if the user cannot make use of the application to accomplish the goal." Recently Microsoft has decided to save money on telecommunications...

I went to a Silverlight training event the other day and Ihave to say this is a really cool platform. Since they just releasedSilverlight 1.0 RC I decided to try it out for an ARCast episode. You cancheck out the episode for tomorrow ARCast.TV– PlentyOfFish...

Do you ever get those nasty phising emails? Ofcourse you do. You and I know what to do with these but what about dearold grandma? How can we protect people from being tricked into givingaway usernames and passwords? How about by changing the way we ask...

Here is an interesting question from the MSDN ArchitectureGeneral forum that I decided to answer. To throw exceptions or use error codes – that is thequestion… Since God has not handed down any commandments related tothis I think this is a...

At this year's Tech-Ed I've had opportunity to sit in on a number of sessions as well as reflecting on the eval comments from mine. I've been making notes on things that work well and things that don't. I've been jotting notes on my smart phone but just...

Whew! It’s finally done. I just gave my one and only session at Tech-Ed US 2007. I have to tell you I really sweated this one. After giving the “Pattern & Anti-Patterns for SOA” talk for the last 2 years I knew I had to do something...

Today on ARCast.TV we have another episode from Kuala Lumpur on Performance and Scalability. So I thought I would jot down a few notes from my thoughts on the subject. When it comes to performance what is the role of the solution architect? The hardware...

So you are thinking about becoming an architect are you? People often ask me how to become an architect. My typical answer is that the best way to become an architect is to start acting like one. To help you with this I spend my life interviewing architects...

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.” -Mahatma Gandhi Nearly every day I think how amazed I am at the changes the internet has brought us. If you could bring someone from the near past (just 20 years ago) and show them how...

One of my favorite features in Visual Studio 2005 is the refactoring tools. Today while creating a class I was using the encapsulate field refactoring to expose fields as properties when it occurred to me how annoying it is to have Visual Studio repeatedly...

Today I agreed to do a presentation to give my thoughts on SaaS – (That’s Software as a Service) for the uninitiated. It seems to me that most of the conversations I’ve heard around SaaS deal with the provider perspective. Questions...

After watching of a few of those “Survival in the wild” type shows I thought. Why not? I bet an architect could do one of those! Check out this pilot promotional video Ron Jacobs - Host of ARCast.TV and ARCast Radio

Disney Studios is without a doubt a highly successful an influential player in Hollywood. Actually, they are in Burbank right near the NBC studios. While I was in LA checking the place out for the Architecture Training videos about Architect as Explorer...

This morning ARCast hit an important milestone, early this morning we crossed the 1 Million Hit mark for FY07. To put this into perspective for all of last year (FY06) we had approximately 330K hits. This is amazing growth for the show and it’s...

Last night I was preparing all of the ARCast content for the quarter to be sent to a team that burns them on DVDs for distribution throughout the world when I suddenly realized that I forgot to post the Security video from the very popular Architecting...

Working for one of the biggest software companies in the world I have to say is always quite interesting. We have resources on top of resources to get things done. But I can recall about 16 years ago when I was one of the little guys. I wrote a piece...

Apologies to all but I just realized that I was not receiving email sent to this address. I’m sure that some of you have sent mail to ARCast(at)Microsoft(dot)com and I didn’t reply because I didn’t receive it. Please send again, it’s...

I have finally come up with a solution about the ARCast video thing. Since I'm doing more videos now I decided to create a separate show with an RSS feed that has the WMV files. That’s right – just go to www.arcast.tv and check it out. I just completed...

Being a podcaster I just had to run out and get one of these. I'm thinking about giving a Zune away to some lucky ARCast listener - just need to work out the details on this. And yes - it is a little bigger than an iPod but light weight, works really...

What does an architect do anyway? I was given this topic last spring with the assignment to come up with a fresh way of looking at the work of an architect. It is a difficult challenge to try to boil this topic down to something simple, memorable and...

Software as a Service SaaS is the next big thing. Our team (Architecture Strategy) has been working with some SaaS providers around the world. My colleagues Fred Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro have been doing a fantastic job of thinking about and working...

While I was in Barcelona I met up with a group of ARCast listeners from bt.com. These guys are really great and have been doing great work as well. We created a video episode of ARCast about their project. What will the telco of the future look like?...

Arfa Karim Randhawa is one of the most mature 11 year old girls you are ever going to meet. And not only that, she is the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional - a title that allowed her to meet Bill Gates and President Musaraf at just 10 years old...

Over the past 2 years I've received many wonderful email messages from listeners. Of course many times I've badly mispronounced the names as people have written to me so this year I decided to try something new. When I'm out traveling around I'm going...

2 years ago I created the first version of my Patterns and Anti-Patterns for SOA presentation. Since then I have presented this content around the world in many different countries over 50 times. It has been the top-rated architecture session at many...