Developer Community

IT Architect Skills Library

Devin A. Rychetnik — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 17:14:00 GMT

A new library website devoted to IT architects: http://www.iasahome.org/web/home/skillset.

Microsoft Programs for ISVs

Devin A. Rychetnik — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 05:18:00 GMT

Microsoft Empower for ISVs: https://partner.microsoft.com/40011351

Microsoft Saas On-Ramp: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/programs/saasonramp.mspx

More resources: http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/applicationhosting.mspx

Network with IT Professionals at Aggreg8

Devin A. Rychetnik — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 03:15:00 GMT

What a novell idea... a way for IT pros to connect: https://aggreg8.net/.

Learn Linux

Devin A. Rychetnik — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 06:26:00 GMT

Ubuntu Linux has made it pretty simple to try out their OS. You can simply download and burn the ISO image from the website or they'll even send you a CD in the mail for free. Either way, once you get the disc you can boot from it and try out Ubuntu without having to install a thing. It just goes through an initialization process in order to run and automatically cleans up after itself when you shut it down.

If you find yourself enjoying the Ubuntu experience you can take it a step further and download VMware Server and make yourself an image to work with. If you don't feel like creating your own image and don't mind working with a little older of a version then you can download this 6.06 one.

Here is an article that can point you to beginner books for Linux: http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2624162284.html.

Once you find yourself ready to start developing for Linux you can refer to the Linux Standard Base (LSB) Developer Network: http://www.freestandards.org/en/Developers.

How Deep Do You Want to Go?

Devin A. Rychetnik — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:39:00 GMT

I've known about Channel 9 for quite some time, but a colleague of mine just shared the Going Deep section of it with me today. Here is a short description of what it is:

“Charles Torre travels around Microsoft to meet the company’s leading Architects and Engineers to discuss the inner workings of our core technologies. Going Deep is primarily concerned with how things work, why they are designed the way they are, and how they will evolve over time.“

Check out the current line-up of videos it offers:

Arun Kishan - Process Management in Windows Vista
Programming in the Age of Concurrency: Software Transactional Memory
Programming in the Age of Concurrency: The Accelerator Project
Singularity IV: Return of the UI
Singularity III: Revenge of the SIP
Doron Holan - Kernel Mode Driver Framework
Barry Bond: Emulation, Emulation, Emulation
PhotoSynth: What. How. Why.
CCR Programming - Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos
'SQL Everywhere Edition' - What. How. Why.
ADO.NET Entity Framework: What. How. Why.
Rob Relyea - There's Something About XAML
Diving into the Vista Heap
InfoCard - Deep Architecture
Louis Lafreniere - VC++ backend compiler
Greg Schechter: Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF) Architecture
Jim Hogg: Phoenix Framework
Windows Shell Architecture
Going Deep: Richard Ward - Engineering security into Windows Vista
Oughtness, Isness and the world of systems management
WPF Imaging
Virtualization
Eugene Lin and Jason Cobb - Windows Plug and Play
Rob Short (and kernel team) - Going deep inside Windows Vista's kernel architecture
Vista Audio Stack and API
Concurrency and Coordination Runtime
Surendra Verma: Vista Transactional File System
Singularity Revisited
Landy Wang - Windows Memory Manager
Windows, NT Object Manager
Singularity: A research OS written in C#
Chris Anderson - Talking shop about Avalon
Nar Ganapathy - Windows, the IO Manager and Driver Model, Part II
Nar Ganapathy - Windows, the IO Manager and Driver Model , Part I
Windows, NT Cache Manager - Molly Brown - Part II
Windows, NT Cache Manager - Molly Brown
Windows, Part IV - Dave Probert
Windows, Part III - Dave Probert
Windows, Part II - Dave Probert
Windows, Part I - Dave Probert
Neal Christiansen - Inside File System Filter, part II
Neal Christiansen - Inside File System Filter, part I

I've got a whole lot of viewing time ahead of me.

New Places to Store Open-Source Projects

Devin Rychetnik — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 02:28:00 GMT

Just recently, Microsoft opened up a new community development Web site named CodePlex to start and share development projects with others. It includes projects such as IronPython, which is the implementation of the Python programming language on .Net and the “Atlas“ Control Toolkit, which is a collection of web-client components built upon the ASP.NET “Atlas” Framework.

Now Google is offering a site of their own named Google Code. I briefly looked through the CSharp section and saw the Pandora Player, which looks interesting. For those who don't know what it is, Pandora.com is a music project that helps you discover other music similar to those that you already like. The Pandora Player simply displays the Flash-based player in an application window that can be minimized to the system tray.

All these new places to host open-source projects are great, but don't forget about SourceForge.net, which is home to many great applications as well. I just went there the other day to get log4net, which is a logging framework for .NET. Perhaps that wasn't the best example since they have officially moved now to http://logging.apache.org/log4net. Oh well, you'll find lots of other nice stuff there still anyways.

SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006 Launch

Devin Rychetnik — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 02:35:00 GMT

The long-awaited launch happened yesterday and I enjoyed what I was able to see. Unfortunately, I only stayed through the morning session since our team was scheduled to release that day (imagine that). In any case, the organizers were understanding and forgiving enough to give me the free copies of VS.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 before I left anyway. Let me give a quick synopsis of some of the things I noted during the talks.

The keynote speech cited a few statistics that showed the market adoption of .NET in comparison to J2EE and SQL Server in comparison to Oracle and DB2 over the past few years. Some of these numbers were quite impressive although I wasn't able to catch the source quickly enough so I'm not sure how reliable/accurate they were. Nonetheless, a couple things sure hit home; the fact that .NET has been adopted by a lot of large companies and it is here to stay for a while. Two of the companies that the presentation specifically talked about were HMV and Barnes & Noble. The presentations focused on how HMV is utilizing VS.NET 2005 to develop its online media center and how Barnes & Noble is using SQL Server 2005 to integrate, analyze and support billions of data records. The argument that SQL Server cannot scale has to be seriously reconsidered after seeing what they are doing with it.

Ok, so moving on to the session about Visual Studio Team System. The Team System is targeted at integrating several different software team roles: the infrastructure architect, the solution architect, the developer, the tester, and the project manager. The Team System comes in three editions (software architect, developer, or tester) or you can get the whole team suite. The idea is to let everyone on the team work smoothly together via a common toolset. In this case, the infrastructure architect can create a logical model of the available web servers, database servers, firewalls etc. and the solution architect can apply the functional model with the web service packages, web interfaces, smart clients etc. on top of that. Then the deployment can be validated and checked in for the developer who will work on the specific projects and solutions and so forth. Later on the tester comes in and start writing stress tests, unit test and other things and the project manager can check-up and run reports seeing all the progress that has been made because everything relates back to the same repository. What makes all this possible is that Team System uses the concept of work items. So you can, for example, only allow a developer to check-in code that has been related to a specific work item, which could be a feature or a bug fix or whatever. The Team System has version control so history of all changes is kept. It also has automated build, unit test integration, and code performance and analysis checking capabilities with things such as NUnit and FxCop. Another plus is that the software comes with the documentation for two MSF methodologies including the agile one. It has templates, samples, and learning material to teach you the formalized approach as well as help you complete each deliverable. So as you can probably tell I was pretty impressed with the tool and would love to start using it myself. [I just realized that there is a 180 free trial version of it available at MS.com: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/trial/. Now all you have to do is find a company that is willing to pay for it and employ you to use it.]

I missed the afternoon sessions on 1) Design and Development Tools for Building Mission Critical Applications, 2) Web Application Development, and 3) Smart Client Application Development and Deployment, but I would love to hear from anyone else who was able to attend them.

Seattle Code Camp v1.0

Devin Rychetnik — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 03:07:00 GMT

I attended the Seattle Code Camp this weekend (where I could) and had quite a bit of fun. In addition to learning a few things, I got to preview a bunch of upcoming technologies and meet a lot of distinguished developers in the area. For those of you who weren't able to attend or didn't see the same presentations I did, I'll just share some of my notes:

Refactor! is a great tool that I already blogged about before, but they deserve a special plug since Mark Miller largely contributed to the event and frankly the tool is sweet for a measly $90. Also, the VB version for VS 2005 Beta 2 is available for free.

Windows Mobile and .NET Compact Framework was made clear to me by Ed Kaim and you can get the Mobile 5.0 Developer Evaluation Kit that has everything you need to get started today. It also includes a free copy of VS 2005 Beta 2, which should hold you off till the November 7th release. Also, for those of you who plan on doing some serious mobile development you can get unlocked and unrestricted phones from www.expansys.com and find lots of amazing open software resources at www.opennetcf.org.

Next up I saw a new and potentially revolutionary way of developing software in VS 2005 using software factories from Martin Danner. The definitive book on the subject is Software Factories published by Wiley and the specific way this is done in VS 2005 is by utilizing the guidance automation toolkit (GAT).

Brad Abrams shared his wisdom on framework design guidelines and gave us these four key points to remember and ponder: 1) the power of sameness, 2) framework design matters, 3) tools for communication, 4) the pit of sucess. He described the pit of success as designing your framework so simply that the user can do what he/she is intending to do as easily as it is to fall into a pit. He also shared a great motto to follow when designing your framework, “make the simple things simple and the hard things possible.” He also gave away a free copy of the book he co-authored on the subject.

The next day I saw some of the amazing things you can do with LINQ from Tim Shakarian. If you haven't looked at this stuff in depth yet I highly recommend it. Although it is almost scary to see how easy it could be abused or misused, it is certainly going to save a lot of development time and improve the way we do data related operations in the future. I also got a preview of C# 3.0, which adds some extremely powerful new features like type inference and anonymous types.

The last session I went to was with Peter Provost who gave a screaming run through of how to build a smart client application using the Composite UI Application Block (CAB). In just one hour, bystanders witnessed him tear through the code necessary to build the basic structure of a tabbed web browser with a bookmarks list. He also mentioned that this application block will have some sort of integration with the next version of the User Interface Process (UIP) block in the future.

Also, one thing that came up over and over throughout the weekend was FXCop, a free code analysis tool for checking .NET managed code assemblies and their conformance with the Microsoft .NET Framework Design Guidelines.