Introduction In my last post , I showed how to use Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus Queues with WCF. Service Bus Queues provide a great mechanism for asynchronous communication between between two specific applications or services. However in complex systems it’s often useful to support this...

In 2008 I posted a series of blog articles about how to use MSMQ, WCF and IIS together. I chose to use this architecture as it combined the scalability and resiliency benefits of durable asynchronous messaging, with the simplicity and power of the WCF programming model and IIS hosting model. Over the...

Many developers choose to use service oriented techniques to break large systems into smaller, loosely coupled services. Frequently, each service will be hosted on a different machine and use WS-* protocols for standards-based communication. However there can be times when different hosting and communication...

I’ve just come back from Microsoft’s Tech.Ed conferences in Australia and New Zealand, where I presented a session called The role of an architect in an agile team . Thanks to everybody who attended the session, and for the great questions and eval results. If you weren’t able to come...

Just a quick post for anyone attending TechEd Australia and/or New Zealand, in the first couple of weeks of September 2009. I’ll be doing two presentations, so please stop by and say hello (and maybe even watch the sessions!). The sessions I’m presenting are: ARC302 – Introducing Enterprise Library 5...

As you know, I’m a big fan of agile software development. But what exactly does “agile” mean? If you ask a room full of software engineers that question, you’re sure to get as many different answers as there are people. I’m not going to try to tell you what agile is, or what it should be – but a lot...

Those of you who have been paying attention may have remembered a post I did over a year ago announcing the p&p team's plans to update the excellent but now very dated Application Architecture for .NET guide. Those of you who were paying even more attention may have noticed that the promised guide...

About a year ago I put together a post called Thoughts On Product Management , containing some random musings about my role at the time. The big reason I put together this post was because so few people had any idea what this job involved or why it is important. Now that I've got "Solution Architect...

Back when we originally designed the Policy Injection Application Block for Enterprise Library 3.0, we made a conscious decision not to target the block at WCF service boundaries. This wasn't because we didn't think there was value at injecting cross-cutting concerns at service boundaries - in fact it...

Architects love abstracting things. And why wouldn't they - it allows you to hide those pesky implementation details out of the way so they don't trouble your callers, and lets you completely change the implementation at a later stage, provided the interface isn't changed. But like most of the good things...

As a product manager at patterns & practices , I got to write a lot more code than most people would expect from a product manager. However the nature of the job and the team meant that it was basically all prototypes and samples. So after over 3 years, it's very exciting to be working as a solution...

No we're not going to ask you any questions about your age, race or income. This is an application architecture census. Let me explain. As I mentioned the other day, we've started work on a new release of the Application Architecture for .NET guide . Our current idea for organizing this guide is to anchor...

One of the first major deliverables produced by the patterns & practices team is Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services . This guide is now getting close to 5 years old (it was written by Ed long before I joined the team), but unlike some of our other early deliverables...