Coming to PDC?  Interested in what it means to move to the cloud?  If so, you should definitely check out the PDC symposium this year.  The symposium is three sessions that wrap up the last day of the PDC - the goal of which is to "connect the dots" between everything that you'll have heard at the event, and look at ...

I wanted to share a couple of updates about the Microsoft Architecture Journal: 1.  Issue 16 has just been released to the web!  You can find it here, and can also download a PDF version of the magazine here.  The theme of issue 16 is Identity and Access, and Diego explains more about the articles in his blog post. 2.  The ...

Today, Marc Mercuri, an architect in my team, launched one of the most exciting things I've seen for sometime:  RoboChamps RoboChamps is an online, virtual robotics competition that makes use of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.  The concept of the competition is to program a series of robots ...

Like many people, I have VOIP at home - my current provider is Vonage.  One of the features of Vonage is an international virtual number.  This gives me a local number in the UK that my family can dial, which automatically redirects to my home number here in the US.  It's relatively cheap ($4.99 per month) and makes it really ...

Good news from Karsten's blog.  The source code for the hierarchical view carousel has been released.  I played around with this WPF code a couple of years ago and found it very useful for displaying navigable, hierarchical sets of data.   As Karsten mentions, the code is based on an older drop of the framework, and is ...

With 13 issues and over 60,000 subscribers, you are probably already familiar with the printed and PDF versions of the Microsoft Architecture Journal. At the Strategic Architect Forum (SAF) last week we released a new way of reading the Journal:  The Architecture Journal Reader.  Based on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and the ...

Rich Application or Web Application?  ASP.NET or Sharepoint?  Regular ASPX controls or AJAX? In sessions at conferences (most recently TechEd in Barcelona), I've been discussing the many choices that architects and developers face every day, especially when it comes to user experience.  To help get across the point, I put ...

What I love about GTD (Getting Things Done) is that everyone has their own take on what works for them.  I often find myself refactoring my own GTD system every month or so with minor tweaks that make things a little more efficient. Josh Fialkoff has a nice post on different methodologies and tools other GTDers use.  He says that my ...

I often get asked the difference between User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). Although the original intent and definition of UI started out in the right direction, too many times I've heard it used to explain just the visual aspects (or cool factor) of an interface.  To give you a non-technology related example, let me show you the ...

This week I'm in Barcelona for TechEd Developers Europe where I have a session called ''Putting the User back into Architecture''.  If you are at TechEd, be sure to stop on by - it's tomorrow (Tuesday) at 9am in ''Tent 2''.  (and before you ask, no - I've no idea what presenting in a tent will entail... :)