• Dealing with the Seven Year Itch, Working at Microsoft and a few thoughts on the Google Hiring Process
• Building Scalable Databases: Pros and Cons of Various Database Sharding Schemes
• Can RDF really save us from data format proliferation? – The closest thing to a deployable web technology that might improve describing these kind of data mashups without parsing at any cost or patching is RDF. I’ve always found this particular argument by RDF proponents to be suspect.

Al Tenhundfeld – Rails Style Database Migrations in .NET

Ayende Rahien – Examines Persistent & Distributed Storage

Brad Abrams – Framework Design Guidelines: On the usage of Sealed Classes

Eric Lippert – Future-Proofing A Design

High Scalability Blog

• Intro to Caching,Caching algorithms and caching frameworks part 1
• Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth (IMVU case study)
• Database Sharding for startups
• Reducing Your Website’s Bandwidth Usage – how to

Ramesh Loganathan – The definition of Cloud Computing… It Depends on Who You Ask

Simon Guest – “Micro Architectures” – Jim Wilt and I had an interesting discussion today, around the role of software architecture in the current economy.  I shared some thoughts around something I’ve been thinking that I call “micro architectures”

Todd Hoff

• Papers: Readings in Distributed Systems
• Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores
• Product: Project Voldemort – A Distributed Database

Videos, Podcasts and Links

Channel 9 – Maestro: A Managed Domain Specific Language For Concurrent Programming

Deepfriedbytes with Keith Elder & Chris Woodruff – Episode 24: Chatting about F# with Chris Smith and Dustin Campbell

Scott Hanselman – Hanselminutes Podcast 146 – Test Driven Development is Design – The Last Word on TDD

Bob McIlree – Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #14 – January 18, 2009

Alvin Ashcraft – Design/Development Methodologies

• Dew Drop – January 20, 2009
• Dew Drop – January 17, 2009
• Dew Drop – January 14, 2009
• Dew Drop – January 13, 2009

• Will the Online Identity War turn out like the XML Syndication War?
• My Holiday Project: A Twitter Search Engine Built on Windows Azure

Nabble – Nabble – OpenID – General – SAML vs OpenID = SOA vs REST

Zap Think

• Seven Strategies for SOA Success Learned in 2008
• Enterprise Mashups – Good or Bad?

Dominick Baier – Federating with Live ID (using the Access Control Service)

AWS Editor – Solve for Efficiency With Amazon Mechanical Turk

Dave Linthicum - SOA Versus Integration? Really?

David Millman – The Rise of Events and Eventing

Jim Webber – Origins of Cloud Computing and *aaS

Joe McKendrick – Ten examples of SOA at work, circa 2008

J Vaughan – Microformats for fast REST APIs?

Loraine Lawson

• Strategic Integration: Business Building Tips from 2008, Part I
• Strategic Integration: Business Building Tips from 2008, Part II

Nicholas Allen – Forwarding Service, Part 1

Phillipe Destoop – WCF with regards to Cloud Computing and Azure

Sami – PHP Web Services: Article Introducing PHP Data Services

Steve Jones - In a recession its even more about the services

Trevor Eddolls – Mainframe Update: Enterprise WOA

Udi Dahan – Building Super-Scalable Web Systems with REST

AWS Editor – 100% on Amazon Web Services: Soocial.com

Ayende Rahien – Discussion: OO 101 Solutions and the Open Close Principle at the architecture level

David Chappell – The Sixth Platform Mainframes, minicomputers, desktops, servers, mobile phones: That’s five,
Yet one is being born right now: The cloud is the sixth platform

High Scalability Blog

• Scalability Perspectives #5: Werner Vogels – The Amazon Technology Platform
• Messaging is not just for investment banks
• Alternative Memcache Usage: A Highly Scalable, Highly Available, In-Memory Shard Index
• How to Organize a Database Table’s Keys for Scalability
• Platform virtualization – top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined)

J.D. Meier – Grady Booch on the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide 2.0

Mike Moore – Podcast on Ruby on Rails

Patrick Smacchia – Ship It Often vs. TDD

Phillipe Destoop – Birth of a brand-new architect paradigm shift: cloud computing

Steve Vinoski – More SHA in Erlang

Ted Neward – 2009 Predictions, 2008 Predictions Revisited

Todd Hoff – Strategy: Understanding Your Data Leads to the Best Scalability Solutions

Alvin Ashcraft – Design/Methodology links

• Dew Drop – January 6, 2009
• Dew Drop – January 5, 2009
• Dew Drop – January 5, 2009
• Dew Drop – January 1, 2009
• Dew Drop – December 30, 2008
• Dew Drop – December 29, 2008
• Dew Drop – Weekend Edition – December 27-28, 2008

• Cloud Maturity Models Don’t Make Sense … criticism of SOA Maturity Models can be directly applied to Cloud Maturity Models, especially if your focus is on software as a service or even capacity as an automated, self-administered service, which is what many organizations seems to be looking for in their current cloud experiments.
• Could Modeling Language Jump Start SOA Adoption?
• Podcast: Empowering Business Users with Composite Application Platforms

AWS Editor

• Amazon SimpleDB – Now With Select – In addition to SimpleDB’s existing query language, you can now use select statements which look very similar to standard SQL (Structured Query Language).
• Bizo SDB Tool a B2B advertising network running entirely on top of AWS.

Dave Linthicum

• 2009 SOA Predictions
• SOA flying in 09?

David Bressler – Business Transactions, Exciting Stuff! From a business perspective processes always involve information, and there’s no way to get value out of information without doing something with it, and when the business does something, that activity constitutes a business process.

Joe McKendrick

• Five fearless predictions for SOA 2009
• Can we really, really, trust the cloud?

John Wilmes – One data model, many approaches to integration

J Vaughan -

• How Green was my SOA?
• SoaML targets top-down, bottom up or meet-in-the-middle modeling
• Bruce Silver on BPMN

Kyle Gabhart – Last minute stocking stuffer

Loraine Lawson

• The Case Against Using SOA for Integration
• Lessons Learned in Two Years of SOA

Todd Biske – More on review boards… All too often, these boards are created without sufficient direction to be effective. If I were on one of these boards, even though it might be boring, I’d really want to just be able to rubber stamp as many of the projects as possible. That can only happen if the board effectively sets expectations in advance so the project teams know what they’re in for.

High scalability blog -Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

Harry Pierson -IPy RTW FTW!

Todd Hoff – Strategy: Facebook Tweaks to Handle 6 Time as Many Memcached Requests

Werner Schuster – Presentation: Ruby.rewrite(Ruby)

Channel 9 – Learning to build on Azure: One ISV’s Experience

Microsoft -  Download the New Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Threat Modeling v3

Alvin Ashcraft – Design/Development/Methodology links

• Dew Drop – December 15, 2008
• Dew Drop – December 13, 2008
• Dew Drop – December 12, 2008

Simon Brown – The role of the Software Architect in successful projects

Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz -Architect Soft Skills – PDF version

Billy McCafferty – Refactoring Service Dependencies to Separated Interface – I find that fragile tests are often those that depend on data within a database, which can become out of synch with the assertions in the unit test, and those that depend on external services.  I use the term “services” loosely to define anything that represents an external resource; examples include web services (including RESTful services), file repositories, databases, and remote procedure calls.

Brad Abrams – Framework Design Guidelines Video from PDC2008 Talk Posted

Charlie Calvert – New Features in C# 4.0 Paper, plus Feedback and Samples

FransBouma – Designing a language is hard, and M won’t change that on Microsoft’s M modeling language

J.D. Meier

• Patterns & practices Performance Engineering Cheat Sheet
• Agile Architecture Method

NickMalik -The business value of elegant design

Philipe destoop -

• The Application Architecture Guidance 2.0 Project
• Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices

The Progress Guys -Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise ArchitectureTim Barcz -Test First or Test Driven, Who Cares?

Todd Biske - Architecture Self Assessments – In my post on a CIO and CTO for the USA, at the very end I called out Jim Kobielus’ idea for an online presidential scorecard. As it turns out, I think this has merits in the world of EA and SOA, as well.

Todd Hoff -

• Is Eucalyptus ready to be your private cloud?
• Plenty of Fish Says Scaling for Free Doesn’t Pay

Matthew.Podwysocki - KaizenConf’08 Functional Programming Presentation VideoUdi Dahan – Webcast on Reliability, Availability, and Scalability

Videos from Microsoft PDCs

• “Oslo”: The Language
• IronRuby: The Right Language for the Right Job

Dare Obasanjo

• REST API Design: Invent Media Types, Not Protocols and Understand the Importance of Hyperlinks
• Microsoft Announces Windows Azure
• Windows Live is now an OpenID Provider

Mike Kavis

• SOA skillsets: Part 1 – SOA Evangelist
• SOA skillsets: Part 2 – The Architects
• SOA Skillsets: Part 3 – The Developers

Udi Dahan -Additional Logic Required For Service Autonomy

Brenda Michelson

• CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest – Special Recognition Winner Snapshot: Penn National
• CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest – Special Recognition Winner Snapshot: Con-Way

Dave Linthicum

• My SOA predictions for 2009 — early
• Anne Thomas Manes and I Talk about SOA Failures
• Interesting SOA data from Forrester

Joe McKendrick

• Analyst: ‘SOA is working’
• Why ‘Event Driven Architecture’ is more than ‘Complex Event Processing’
• Situational awareness, thanks to SOA-driven dashboard
• Information technology prospects in a volatile economy
• Service Oriented Architecture on $10 a day

Microsoft Releases WCF REST Starter Kit

• Ron Jacobs – WCF REST Starter Kit
• Sam Gentile – Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) REST Starter Kit is Live!
• steve maine – Announcing the WCF REST Starter Kit
• Aaron Skonnard – Microsoft takes REST to the next level: the WCF REST Starter Kit

Mike Taulty – Astoria Online/Offline

Sam Gentile – New and Notable 274

Identity

Vittorio Bertocci – Identity@PDC08: Roadmap session with Kim Cameron himself & yours truly

Dominick Baier – Geneva is the new Zermatt (and much more)

Governance

Bob McIlree - Book Review: SOA Governance by Todd Biske

Loraine Lawson – Is There a Right Time for SOA Governance?

Miko Matsumura – Getting fit for SOA with Governance Tools

Todd Biske – Important Questions for Successful Governance

Surekha Durvasula – Comparing Current Financial Crisis to SOA – Continued

Clould computing

Phillipe Destoop – Windows Azure Cloud Computing Platform: white papers

Rich Seeley – Forrester sees two compute clouds

Channel 9 – A Lap Around Windows Azure

Aaron Skonnard -Windows Azure: a new era for Microsoft developers

Mary Jo Foley – Amazon battens down the hatches before Microsoft’s cloud launch next week

Charlie Calvert – LINQ Farm: Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0

Justin Etheredge – C# 4.0 New Features Part 1.1 – dynamic keyword second look

Nicholas Allen -

• PDC 2008: Deep Dive Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET
• PDC 2008: The Future of C#

Eric Lippert – The Future of C#, Part Two

Azure/Cloud news

Clemens Vasters – Azure: Microsoft .NET Service Bus (nice explanation on Azure)

Mark Relph – Live From PDC – Windows Azure – Cloud Computing Announcement

Mary Jo Foley – Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed
Philippe Destoop -

• Big Day for Amazon EC2
• Windows in the cloud in there!

OSLO NewsChris Sells – The Oslo Developer Center: Letter from the Editors

Ron Jacobs -

• endpoint.tv – WCF and WF 4.0 First Look with Zoiner Tejada
• WF 4.0: A First Look at Microsoft PDC 2008

Sam Gentile -

• What is Oslo and Oslo Announcements at the PDC
• PDC Day 2 Coverage
• Oslo’s Coming Out Party at the PDC

ScottGu -October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight

News/Videos/Links

David Hayden – Enterprise Library 4.1 Released (seems like this one sneaked in along with the other big releases)

DotNetInterop – Microsoft joins AMQP

Channel 9 PDC Videos -

• Don Box, Paul Vick and Chris Anderson: Introducing M
• Expert to Expert: Natural Language and Computational Linguistics
• Steve Marx: Windows Azure for Developers
• John Shewchuk and Dennis Pilarinos: Inside .NET Services
• David Treadwell: Inside Live Services
• Lucian Wischik and Lisa Feigenbaum: What’s new in Visual Basic 10
• Astoria Design Walkthrough: Introducing $count as an URI query option
• Astoria Design Walkthrough: Thinking of a future with sync & offline
• A Lap Around the Azure Services Platform
• Developing and Deploying Your First Windows Azure Service
• Windows Azure: Essential Cloud Storage Services
• Identity Roadmap for Software + Services
• Identity: “Geneva” Server and Framework Overview
• Under the Hood: Advances in the .NET Type System
• A Lap Around Windows Azure

Aaron Skonnard

• Screencast: Workflow (WF) Screencast Series
• Screencast: Creating your first WCF client
• Screencast: Configuring WCF service references

Chris Alcock – PDC Link Roundup (The Morning Brew #210)

Stefan Tilkov -  Ioke is a strongly typed, extremely dynamic, prototype based object oriented language

Bob McIlree – Carnival of Enterprise Architecture #12 – October 1, 2008

Camp Sean – Interview with Joseph Hill – Mono

High Scalability Blog

• Second Life Architecture – The Grid
• Paper: Scaling Genome Sequencing – Complete Genomics Technology Overview
• Paper: Scalability Design Patterns
• The Pattern Bible for Distributed Computing
• Scalability Worst Practices
• Is MapReduce going mainstream?
• Scalability for Startups: How to Grow Up without Blowing Up

J.D. Meier -

• Cheat Sheet: patterns & practices Catalog at a Glance Posted to CodePlex
• App Arch How Tos Posted to CodePlex

JonUdell – Scott Prevost explains Powerset’s hybrid approach to semantic search

Mark Hendrickson – A Fresh Look At Google Gear, a look at MySpace’s implementation of Gears, which has little to do with offline functionality, is a perfect example. 

NickMalik

• Alignment – the missing Viewpoint
• Extending Professional Software Architecture

Yogish Pai – Organization Skills assessment and Reference Architecture

Nuno Teixeira@nospam.com -Extreme Transaction Processing, Low Latency and Performance

Matthew Podwysocki – Object Oriented F# – Creating Classes

Steve Jones – We’re all going on an architecture hunt

Steve McConnell – New White Papers

SE-Radio –   Episode 113: Building Platforms with Jeff McAffer

Udi Dahan – Unit Testing for Developers and Managers

Alvin Ashcraft (Design and methodology links)

• Dew Drop – September 30, 2008 (Evening Edition)
• Dew Drop – October 6, 2008
• Dew Drop – October 1, 2008

• SOA skillsets: Part 1 – SOA Evangelist
• SOA skillsets: Part 2 – The Architects

Stefan Tilkov – JAOO 2008: REST Patterns and Antipatterns

Zap Think - Panel: How to sell SOA governance to a skeptical audience

AWS Editor – Coming Soon: Amazon EC2 With Windows

Brenda Michelson – Synovus Financial’s SOA Success bigger than winning SVP initiative

Dan Foody – When do you need SOA governance?

Dave Laribee – .NET: Coming to a Cloud Near You

Dave Linthicum -

• Economic turmoil is changing businesses
• SOA Governance Technology Needs to Learn How to Share
• Doing SOA? Pay Attention to the Data
• What will we remember about SOA?
• Advocating the common data model — yet again

Ganesh Prasad – How SOFEA fits into a SOA Ecosystem

Jack van Hoof – EDA versus CEP (and SOA)

Jim Webber -

• When the facts change, I change my opinion
• How to GET a cup of coffee

Joe McKendrick -

• SOA, designed for turbulent times
• Analyst: SOA governance stymied by lack of standards
• Silver lining 1: lousy economy would spur demand for IT architecture professionals
• Silver lining 2: now may be the best time of all for SOA startups
• SOA soon part of the ‘cloud’? Hold that thought
• Panel: How to sell SOA governance to a skeptical audience

JVaughan

• Look back at Oracle Open World 2008
• Microsoft’s muddled modeling: Getting the ducks in line

Kyle Gabhart -    Service Design – Intermediaries

Loraine Lawson -

• Writer Identifies Eight Characteristics for SOA Success
• How the Best-in-Class Manage SOA Governance
• Integration Plays Key Role in Winning SOA Deployment … Again
• Sifting Through the Myriad Integration Players
• SOA Gone Wrong

Nick Malik – Understanding Governance as Decision Rights

Yogish Pai – SOA Consortium announces SOA Case Study Winners

Rich Seeley – CEP opportunity in Wall Street bust?

Sam Gentile

• New and Notable 273
• Dublin Announced – Next Gen Windows Server and WCF/WF 4.0

Steve Jones

• DOA – antipattern
• My way or the highway – anti-pattern
• Boiling the SOAcean – anti-pattern
• Compromising for failure – anti-pattern
• Pink Floyd meets Frank Sinatra – anti-pattern

Todd Biske

• More on Decision Rights
• SOA Governance and Decision Rights
• Governance is not Optional

Todd Hoff – Joyent – Cloud Computing Built on Accelerators