This past week, I had the privilege to be involved with the Phizzpop Design Challenge in Austin. I was called in by Chris Bernard as a technical mentor to the contestants who needed help and to help him run things on the night of the presentations. What is the Phizzpop Design Challenge? Let me back up here and explain what the Phizzpop Design Challenge is. Phizzpop, the new Microsoft center » read more.
Archives - 2007
“My dream is that the next evolutionary leap in software development, on the magnitude of continuous integration, comes from the .NET world.” John Kordyback – Alt.NET Leadership Summit 2007. This is a huge challenge that he laid out at the summit meeting this past weekend. I’m actually sitting on the plane on the way home from this same Alt.NET Leadership Summit and collecting my thoughts. I’ll be honest and say » read more.
One of the reoccurring topics recently has been green computing and how the architecture decisions that we make impact the environment. From laptops to data centers, we are trying to reduce power consumption. On laptops it’s obvious because the more power you consume the worse your battery life is going to be and people see that dramatically. When I’m talking about battery life, I will usually say I’ve got X » read more.
In the 13th edition of the Architecture Journal, Larry Clarkin and I wrote an article on Enterprise Mashups. You can find a PDF of the journal here. The two of us actually presented the paper at the Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF) in Redmond which is a gathering of about 100 enterprise architects, CIOs, CTOs and the like. Our basic thesis is that Mashups, while most famous in the consumer space, » read more.
Bill Gates I had the privilege of attending the SAF in Redmond. Actually, I’m presenting on a paper the Larry Clarkin and I wrote for the Architecture Journal. Bill Gates did a great Q&A session on the first morning with Eric Rudder. It was interesting listening to him talking about the future of architecture in all companies but especially at Microsoft. This was extremely relevant after a conversation that I » read more.
I just saw an interesting article from the BBC. It’s evidently big news that the populous of England is sending 1 Billion text messages each week. Now, that is 25% higher than last year which represents fairly explosive growth. What it tells me is that they obviously haven’t discovered Twitter yet because it’d be a ton higher if they had. I’ll be honest, when I heard about Twitter – I » read more.
Jeff Blankenburg has a new video series that he’s starting to do called JUXtapose which stands for Jeff on User Experience. That’s a clever twist on words there. What Jeff doesn’t mention is that he “grew up” in the technical end of a marketing firm implementing the whims and ideas of the designers. Through that experience, Jeff learned a lot about user experience and design. He was the designer of » read more.
This quarter’s ArcReady is coming quickly. This quarter we are talking about Software + Services (S+S). This is Ray Ozzie’s vision of the future of the industry. It’s a vision that encapsulates SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 and really takes it to the next level. SOA can be how you compose, govern and control your services but it doesn’t talk enough about delivery of the software to the user. SaaS » read more.
I blogged last about Platforms verses Applications and put the statement out there that platforms beat applications every time. At least one of my readers (Alan Stevens) agrees with me. My other reader hasn’t commented yet. Alan pointed out, however, that I missed some rather important platforms that Microsoft ships. One that all of the developers in the audience (on the Microsoft technology stack so that doesn’t include you Joe) » read more.
Soma Segar did a Red vs. Blue show with Church and the gang. It was funny hearing Soma, who is always seems to be serious, chatting with the guys that aren’t. One of the things that he talked about was the Balmer Developers, Developers, Developers speech in terms that I actually agree with. He said that Microsoft is a platform company at heart and that we have been since the » read more.
