Colleague Clint Edmunson has put together set of templates for you to begin your architectural discussions around Windows Azure . With new offerings coming every six months from the Windows Azure team, the templates provide a set of technologies that fit common scenarios. Clint writes, “In this...

Glassboard is a mobile service for sharing privately with groups. With Glassboard, you create 'boards' which are groups of people around a common interest where you can share messages, comments, photos, videos, and even your location (when appropriate). When the Glassboard team was developing Glassboard...

One of the key patterns in building scalable applications is queues. Let’s say you have a Website or Web Service (in your Web Role) that responds quickly to a user request, but there’s another process that takes longer. It might be a long data base inquiry or video encoding or extensive calculation...

A new architect certification program, Microsoft Certified Architects (MCA) for SharePoint , was announced by Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President Office Business Platform, at the SharePoint Conference. He said those who become certified architects “will have a level of depth and training and...

Many times, ISVs ask me about how Microsoft is using Windows Azure. A recent blog post shares best practices and cost saving scenarios is to help customers make decisions about how best to plan for, deploy, and manage Microsoft solutions in their own environment. The post, New Microsoft IT Showcase...

A Windows Azure AppFabric Application is any n-tier .NET application that spans the web, middle, and data tiers, composes with external services, and is inherently written to the cloud architecture for scale and availability. Build AppFabric Applications using AppFabric Developer Tools, run them in...

Practical guidance for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate , which is focused on modeling tools, is available on Codeplex. This release includes common usage scenarios, hands on labs, and lessons learned from the community discussions. You can learn about how to architecture your application by either reverse...

A white paper, Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 , contains guidance documentation, detailed examples, and a reusable class library. These resources help solution developers and architects make the right decisions and follow proven practices when designing and developing applications for Microsoft...

Windows Azure Windows Azure Platform Training Course The Windows Azure Platform Training Course includes a comprehensive set of technical content including samples, demos, hands-on labs, and presentations that are designed to expedite the learning process for the set of technologies released...

Today we released a great whitepaper that goes through common hosting environments and the architecture behind them with respect to SharePoint 2010. You can get the paper at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=326845d1-95db-4e55-b65a-218509debe24

Visual Studio 2010 launched today. You can get the new version in your MSDN subscription. Download from: MSDN Subscriber Downloads Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) Download test drive editions Visual Studio is available in four versions: Professional Premium Ultimate...

patterns & practices has released Application Architecture Guide Layer Diagrams for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition. The diagrams includes custom toolbox items for Layer Diagrams and Layer diagrams from Microsoft Application Architecture Guide 2nd Edition. This extension package contains five...

Application requirements change frequently and software is constantly evolving. As a result, such applications often become monolithic making it difficult to add new functionality. Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in .NET Framework 4.0 that addresses this problem by simplifying...

The new Architecture Journal covers modeling and processes in software development. This 23rd issue of The Architecture Journal is on Architecture Modeling andProcesses . The articles that were selected for this occasion deal with aspects such as: Change-enabled architectures. Brandon Satrom and Paul...

In a new series of videos, MSDEV introduces Master Data Services (MDS) . This is a new SQL Server 2008 R2 component that will help your organization effectively manage master data in a centralized location. You can see the videos at An Introduction to SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services . MSDEV...

Reed Copsey has written a series of blog postings on how to look at your application to make it run on multi-core processors. He approaches the issue by focusing on what you are trying to accomplish. This is an indepth series that shows code and details in how you can Here’s a list of his posts so far...

Architect Innovation Café is a set of 60-minute Software Architect-focused Webcast to educate on the latest trends/topics and how new technologies can align with your business needs.  Two sessions are offered this week that are of interest. Visual Studio Tools For Architects February 25, 2010 at...

Today, Microsoft announced as February’s monthly spotlight: the Windows Web App Gallery , available via the Web Platform Installer. The Windows Web Application Gallery provides instant access to the most popular free web applications available today. With just a few clicks you can install applications...

A new series of videos has been launched on MSDEV for developers and designers. The “Think Like A...” series is a collection of topics presenting a developer's point of view and a designer's point of view on what goes into making a WEB 2.0 website. The purpose of this series is to help developers understand...

A beta release of Windows Azure Drive is now available. It was announced as XDrive at PDC 2009. Customers have told us that they want to take their already running Windows applications and run them in the cloud using the standard Windows NTFS APIs, and make sure that the data is durable. With Windows...

Check out www.jumpman23mosaic.com . It’s a five gigapixel “social mosaic” of photos of Air Jordan shoes submitted by fans. Windows Azure currently supports the following two types of roles: Web role : A web role is a role that is customized for web application programming as supported by IIS 7 and ASP...

MySpace uses SQL Server for more than 400 databases within the company. In an article in SQL Server Magazine thing month, they explain why MySpace chose SQL Server. The article is MySpace Answers the Question: Why SQL Server? The article discusses the architecture, scaling issues when moving from one...

An interesting article in the Huntington Post by Steve Ballmer discusses the tends in technology. He writes, “trends like the proliferation of ever cheaper and lighter HD screens, the combination of smart devices and powerful PCs connected to the cloud and the changing nature of television when combined...

The Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. Application blocks are provided as source code plus documentation that can be used "as is," extended, or...

Come and join us for the inaugural meetup of the NYC Microsoft Solution Architects :-) in January at the Microsoft office in NYC http://bit.ly/73M7j9 . Click here to check out The NYC Microsoft Solution Architects! Hope to see you there…. Happy holidays! Gunther :-)