I'm actually using them myself and find them one of the most useful resources that I'm aware of. Check them out at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/nuggets.aspx.

this week I had the great pleasure to speak about Ajax and WPF/E in Dubai in front of students from various universities around UAE. Honestly I was very nervous presenting in a country with a culture that I did not know. Actually it turned out that the students were less shy than myself and I had great conversations with many of them as well as I had chats with some of threir professors. Yesterday I had the chance to speak to prefessional developers which was another great experience. As mentioned in my presenation (attached) here are some addintional useful links to technology I was referring.

For the attendees: Ajax.net can be found on ajax.asp.net You can find the Ajax Control Toolkit on www.codeplex.com/AjaxControlToolkit.If was also refering to the blog of Nikhil Kothari at http://www.nikhilk.net/ and WPF/E can be found at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187358.aspx 

Please watch the information and announcements being published during MIX07 - I think there will be exciting news.

Today I started my first trip to Estonia where I'll be speaking to students about Web2.0 and related SaaS engagements I'm currently doing. Additionally I'll give an overview on ASP.net AJAX We will also visit a hoster this week.

Presentations from this conference are available here.

With a first ADS (Architectural Design Session) at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Denmark we stepped into a very interesting space. In October we spent three days together with a hoster and a software vendor discussing opportunities and technologies arround Software as a Service.
I think we need to figure out what are the interesting categories arround that theme. For me there are three:

1. Business impact
2. Architecture of a SaaS solution
3. Service Delivery platform

There are lot's of interesting discussions going on in regard to SaaS and its business impact and how it will change the IT world. I hope that my observation adds to this discussion event though it is an assumption and is not verified with hard figures. Here it is:

Hosters and ISV (especially Line Of Business ISVs) potentially approach SaaS from different perspectives.

The classic hoster:

1.       seems to be keen on moving up the stack to become an aggregator and gain more quality type of service offerings through SaaS.

The LOB ISV might have the following goals:

1.       Renting services from hosters (e.g. Operations but also things like Provisioning, Federation etc.)  to actually outsource the application but keep the business relationship with the customer

2.       Sell through the hoster their solution and create a new sales channel and the hoster has the customer/business relationship

IMHO the majority of classic hosters do not refer to themselves as service companies. So in many cases I would suspect that ISV option 1 does not fit to the business model of a hoster. This is rather a services play for service companies. 

I put together this slide to visualize this a little bit. The two curves are guesses – assuming that the economy of scale is higher in Small to medium sized services whereas the closer you get to LOB the scale goes down and therefore the margin decreases as well.

It is called "Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail" and for me it is the best paper about this topic so far - and I like the the way Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro view the SaaS world with a mixture of de-mystification and what the opportunity could be. I very much like the architecture maturity model.

Last week I gave a presentation on it at a hoster seminar in Stockholm.

The paper can be found here 

Wow! Having read through those papers I might not be able to retain and not  taste it ;-) It really looks promising. It can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/ For people who are interested in ASP.net check out Scott Guthries blog about Linq. You can find a cool post here http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/14/446412.aspx 

On the site http://www.snowcovered.com/ you can buy/sell software for diverse applications like DotNetNuke. I think it's interesting to see these apps growing and becoming more and more popular.

On Webhosting Day in Brühl I showed a Windows Workflow Activity which is able to host the Microsoft Shell.
I think this could potentially be a way to build a modern Provisioning System.
There would be several advantages. You would have a lot of flexibilty while using an infrastructure that offers automatic persistence, tracking and an extensible event and activity system that someone can take advantage of.

If there was a common provisioning system you could exchange the xoml definitions and easily implement them on your site.

I wonder if someone would be interested in working on such a project.

Attached is the source code of the custom activity which is a prototype and not ment to run in any production environments.

Found this information useful because it relates to my previous post. So you can have a look on the increased capabilities of a X64 Architecture.

Please find this very useful information at our Support web site. Below you'll find an explanation how we actually figured this problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/911272/en-us

At a hoster we had 3 servers running against a NAS. The file structure of the NAS is designed to hold 2.5 million websites. If you setup IIS to look into the UNC path it will recognize these file structures and especially asp.net 2.0 will add file change notifications to each sub directory. The asp.net team designed it this way so that whenever a file is changed (e.g. web.config or any other .aspx file etc.) the app can be re-compiled without interrupting the service. In the case of UNC paths you have a) the Windows limit of file change notification and b) the limit of the NAS appliance holding only a few thousand (can be configured on NAS devices) file change notifications. File Change Notifications are low level  file system objects which consume memory from the so called non-paged pool which is limited. Another option than could be the usage of 64bit  Windows OS where non-paged pool is bigger.

The fix allows you to control the behavior of asp.net to limit the number of file change notifications.

Intergenia invited to Webhosting Day. A lot of Hosters came along and I gave an introduction on Microsoft Command Shell (Codename Monad) and Windows Worfklow Foundation.

If someone is interested you can find information about

• Monad

blogs.msdn.com/Monad

www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

• Windows Workflow Foundation

www.windowsworkflow.net

msdn.microsoft.com/winfx

msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/workflow