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Architecture Cafe – An Architects Perspective on Silverlight 3

ArchitectCafe

Title:  An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3

November 24, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

Presenter: Tim Heuer

Abstract:  Many .NET developers are becoming more and more interested in the Rich Internet Application development space, and in particular Silverlight.  In this session we will step back from a detailed implementation technology and take a higher level look at Silverlight from the architect’s perspective.  We will discuss the types of applications where Silverlight makes sense and some scenarios where Silverlight may not be the appropriate technology.  We will also delve into some of the architectural decisions that the architect must consider when writing applications for this platform and where some of the tradeoffs may lie.

Event ID:  1032432980

Link to Register:  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432980&Culture=en-US

SPEAKER BIO

Tim Heuer

I currently work for Microsoft as a program manager for Microsoft Silverlight, a web technology aimed at delivering rich internet experiences to users.  Before this current role, I was a developer evangelist for Microsoft serving the Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana and Utah areas aiming to strengthen and support communities and software developers in these geographies. 

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Architect Cafe - Designing multi-tenant applications on Windows Azure

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Title: Cloud-computing architecture – designing multi-tenant applications on Windows Azure.

November 25, 2009, 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

Speaker:  Joseph Hofstader

Abstract: Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in information technology today.  With all the confusion surrounding acronyms ending in ‘aas’ like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) it can be intimidating for even seasoned IT professionals.  This presentation will briefly discuss the different types of cloud platforms and then address one of the key business scenarios for the cloud: Software as a Service.

Software as a Service is a business model for making applications available over the Internet.  One of the key tenets of SaaS is multi-tenancy, or software designed to be used by multiple parties.  Designing SaaS applications touches on many of the technologies that comprise the Azure platform: Processing, Storage, Workflow, Database and most importantly security.   This presentation will discuss how each of technologies can be utilized to define a flexible architecture for multi-tenant solutions.

Event ID:  1032432981

Link to Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432981&Culture=en-US

SPEAKER BIO

Josepher Hofstader

Joseph Hofstader is an architect/evangelist in Microsoft Communications Sector.  Joe has spent his career architecting, designing and developing solutions in the telecommunications industry.  Over the last 5 years, he has been involved in architecting solutions that provide telecommunications services in the cloud.  Joe presents regularly at industry events sponsored by organizations like the TMForum  and the National Association of Broadcasters.  In his spare time Joe is an adjunct professor in the department of Information Technology and Electronic Commerce at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.

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The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity

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Roger Sessions, author of Software Fortresses and Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises,  has released a new whitepaper entitled ‘The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity’.

The world economy is losing over six trillion USD per year to IT failures and the problem is getting worse. This 22 page white paper analyzes the scope of the problem, diagnoses the cause of the problem, and describes a cure to the problem. And while the cost of ignoring this problem is frighteningly high, the opportunities that can be realized by addressing this problem are extremely compelling.

The benefits to understanding the causes and cures for out-of-control complexity can have a transformative impact on every sector of our society, from government to private to not-for-profit.

[Click] for a PDF of the white paper.

[Click] for a spreadsheet that can be used for analyzing architectural complexity based on the ideas presented in the white paper.

Note: read the white paper before trying the spreadsheet.

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ARCast.TV - The Story of MyChristmasCatalog.com

ARCast.TV - The Story of MyChristmasCatalog.com

ARCast.TV

‘Twas the week before the holiday season… in this interview, with Jeff Barnes from Microsoft, Ron Teblum, CEO of Catalog Enterprises Inc. and Raphael Parentes, lead graphic designer, discuss the launch of MyChristmasCatalog.com and their innovative use of Silverlight3 and Expression Blend and to deliver a truly unique one-stop, holiday shopping destination and experience.

Catalog Enterprises was one of the first registered Microsoft Bizspark Partners when the program launched almost a year ago - and now they are leading the race in e-Commerce 3.0 using Microsoft technologies. By leveraging all the rich media capabilities in Silverlight 3, they have brought together all the familiar sights and sounds of Christmas, including Christmas in New York, Silverlight games for the kids, the narrated Christmas story, Christmas for soldiers, and a truly unique shopping experience to help you find that perfect gift for those on your holiday list this season.

And don’t forget to check the Christmas Traditions section - they have digitized all the old catalogs from your childhood; Sears, Spiegel’s, Schwarz, and JC Penney’s using their proprietary print media conversion tool that converts them into digital flip-books. And using the Silverlight Deep-Zoom technology – you can once again see all the cool toys you didn’t get for Christmas…

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Bing Adds Wolfram | Alpha Capabilities

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Bing has unveiled some work they have been doing with Wolfram|Alpha.

Started in May 2009 by noted scientist Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious (and very cool) project to, as the company’s website says, “make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

This notion of creating and presenting computational knowledge in search results is one of the more exciting things going on in search (and beyond) today, and the team at Bing is incredibly fired up to bring some of this amazing work to our customers. You will begin to see the benefits of this unique partnership over the next several days as we roll it out in the US.

Here are a couple screen shots of how these new capabilities can be used. Here Bing is relying on Wolfram|Alpha's ability to solve complex math functions (and some easy ones too) and to provide you with knowledge about unique math concepts.

bingSample1

Displaying details of

bingSample2

I wish I had this when I was in graduate school!

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Test and package .NET apps for Linux with Visual Studio add-in from Novell

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ArsTechinca has an article that details a new commercial product from Novell that is an add-in for Visual Studio that will allow Windows developers to test and deploy their .NET applications on Linux. Novell has launched a new add-in for Visual Studio that will allow Windows developers to test and deploy their .NET applications on Linux. This could help boost the availability of third-party software for the open source operating system.

Read more…

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Posting your WebSlice, Accelerator or Visual Search to the IE8 Gallery

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Jim Cirone details how to get your IE8 WebSlice, Accelerator or Visual Seach add-on listed in the IE8 Gallery.

Read more…

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Innovation Showcase Headlines – 11/09/2009

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Lots of terrific articles posted this week on the Innovation Showcase news site. Read about new features in Visual Studio 2010, check out David Chappells’ whitepaper on the SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform and see video interviews with Don Box and Dave Thompson.

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Visit the Innovation Showcase Site

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Subscribe to the Innovation Showcase Feed

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Follow Innovation Showcase on Twitter

ARCast.TV - Improving Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio Team System


ARCast.TV - Improving Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio Team System

ARCast.TV

In this interview with Zhiming Xue at Microsoft, Mike Snell, VP Solution Services at CEI, Microsoft Regional Director and co-author of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed book, discusses five key issues that typically exist in the application lifecycle management (ALM) process – requirements tracking, code review, unit testing, automated testing (aka black box testing), and continuous integration.

 

Mike speaks each of these five issues from his extensive customer experience and offers his domain expert views and recommended practices, including use of Microsoft tools and systems such as VS 2008 Team System, Team Foundation Server, MSBuild and some non-Microsoft tools such as Ravenflow and RequisitePro for advanced requirements management.

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Azure Blob Caching – Life on the Edge

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Microsoft has just announced the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

This is a new network edge caching service built upon Windows Azure that provides improved high-bandwidth blob retrieval performance by locating blobs near the point that they are requested.  Blobs can be retrieved either from a Windows Azure storage account directly or from a local point of presence node based on the request URL and whether the data is currently available at one of 18 delivery nodes located across the world.  This is one more excellent example of the continuing evolution of the Windows Azure Platform.  There will be many more to come.

You can read more about it here…

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Architect Innovation Cafe WebCasts – November 2009

ArchitectCafe

silverlightlogowh8

Title:  An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3

November 24, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

Presenter: Tim Heuer

Abstract:  Many .NET developers are becoming more and more interested in the Rich Internet Application development space, and in particular Silverlight.  In this session we will step back from a detailed implementation technology and take a higher level look at Silverlight from the architect’s perspective.  We will discuss the types of applications where Silverlight makes sense and some scenarios where Silverlight may not be the appropriate technology.  We will also delve into some of the architectural decisions that the architect must consider when writing applications for this platform and where some of the tradeoffs may lie.

Event ID:  1032432980

Link to Register:  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432980&Culture=en-US

 azure_logo

Title: Cloud-computing architecture – designing multi-tenant applications on Windows Azure.

November 25, 2009, 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

Speaker:  Joseph Hofstader

Abstract: Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in information technology today.  With all the confusion surrounding acronyms ending in ‘aas’ like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) it can be intimidating for even seasoned IT professionals.  This presentation will briefly discuss the different types of cloud platforms and then address one of the key business scenarios for the cloud: Software as a Service.

Software as a Service is a business model for making applications available over the Internet.  One of the key tenets of SaaS is multi-tenancy, or software designed to be used by multiple parties.  Designing SaaS applications touches on many of the technologies that comprise the Azure platform: Processing, Storage, Workflow, Database and most importantly security.   This presentation will discuss how each of technologies can be utilized to define a flexible architecture for multi-tenant solutions.

Event ID:  1032432981

Link to Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432981&Culture=en-US

 

SPEAKER BIOS

Tim Heuer

I currently work for Microsoft as a program manager for Microsoft Silverlight, a web technology aimed at delivering rich internet experiences to users.  Before this current role, I was a developer evangelist for Microsoft serving the Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana and Utah areas aiming to strengthen and support communities and software developers in these geographies. 

Josepher Hofstader

Joseph Hofstader is an architect/evangelist in Microsoft Communications Sector.  Joe has spent his career architecting, designing and developing solutions in the telecommunications industry.  Over the last 5 years, he has been involved in architecting solutions that provide telecommunications services in the cloud.  Joe presents regularly at industry events sponsored by organizations like the TMForum  and the National Association of Broadcasters.  In his spare time Joe is an adjunct professor in the department of Information Technology and Electronic Commerce at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.

Innovation Showcase Headlines – 11/2/2009

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The Innovation Showcase is a fantastic collection of the most compelling content that is of interest to the Architect Community.

Subscribe, follow and stay connected.

Here are this weeks headlines:

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Visit and Innovation Showcase Site

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Subscribe to the Innovation Showcase RSS Feed

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Follow the Innovation Showcase on Twitter

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ARCast.TV - Mark Pollack on Architecture Refactoring


ARCast.TV - Mark Pollack on Architecture Refactoring

ARCast.TV

 

 

While there are many qualities by which to judge an architecture, two technologies, dependency injection (DI) and aspect-oriented programming (AOP), provide guidance on some of the most foundational.

 

Not only do they influence how a system's components are designed and organized, they also determine how easily the system may evolve.

 

In this episode, Mark Dunn and Mark Pollack discusses DI and AOP from an architectural point of view, showing how the principles promoted by DI and AOP translate to tangible architectural benefits such as loose coupling and a separation of business and technical concerns.



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Mike Taulty Video Series on PRISM for Silverlight 3

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Mike Taulty has published an excellent series of screencasts illustrating some of the ideas found in "Prism" or the "Composite Application Guidance" from the Patterns and Practices team that can be used to build Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity.

In talking to customers building business applications with Silverlight I find that Prism (and it's friend Unity) is frequently mentioned but not everyone has seen it and so I thought I would explore it myself and capture some of the results of that exploration here. – Mike Taulty

Mike starts off with some fairly basic code and starts making use of dependency injection and modularity:

Next Mike moves that code into the Silverlight world and illustrates some specific areas of Prism: Finally Mike brings some of these concepts together in a longer, more realistic example of a simple Email application built using the Prism framework - warning, this is a much longer session but I wanted something that draws things together:

Mike recommends that you watch the 10 screencasts in order but if that feels like too long a process or if you're already very familiar with concepts like dependency injection and containers like Unity then perhaps watch the last screencast first and then refer back to the previous screencasts if certain areas need more illumination.

Mike has made the source code for Video 10 here for download as it's a bigger set of source and something you might want to explore after the video - this does not necessarily represent "best practice" but is, instead, just meant to illustrate some of the Prism ideas.

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