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Each month through June 2010, we’ll bring you a 90-minute Architect focused Webcast to educate on the latest trends/topics and how new technologies can align with your business needs.
November 24, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST
Title: An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3
Presenter: Tim Heuer
Abstract: Many .NET developers are becoming more and more interested in the Rich Internet Application development space, and in particular Silverlight. In this session we will step back from a detailed implementation technology and take a higher level look at Silverlight from the architect’s perspective. We will discuss the types of applications where Silverlight makes sense and some scenarios where Silverlight may not be the appropriate technology. We will also delve into some of the architectural decisions that the architect must consider when writing applications for this platform and where some of the tradeoffs may lie.
Event ID: 1032432980
Link to Register: here
November 25, 2009, 11:00am – 12:30pm PST
Title: Cloud-computing architecture – designing multi-tenant applications on Windows Azure.
Speaker: Joseph Hofstader
Abstract: Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in information technology today. With all the confusion surrounding acronyms ending in ‘aas’ like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) it can be intimidating for even seasoned IT professionals. This presentation will briefly discuss the different types of cloud platforms and then address one of the key business scenarios for the cloud: Software as a Service.
Software as a Service is a business model for making applications available over the Internet. One of the key tenets of SaaS is multi-tenancy, or software designed to be used by multiple parties. Designing SaaS applications touches on many of the technologies that comprise the Azure platform: Processing, Storage, Workflow, Database and most importantly security. This presentation will discuss how each of technologies can be utilized to define a flexible architecture for multi-tenant solutions.
Event ID: 1032432981
Link to Register: here
SPEAKER BIOS
Tim Heuer
Tim Heuer is a program manager for Microsoft Silverlight, a web technology aimed at delivering rich internet experiences to users. Before this current role, Tim was a developer evangelist for Microsoft serving the Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana and Utah areas aiming to strengthen and support communities and software developers in these geographies.
Josepher Hofstader
Joseph Hofstader is an architect/evangelist in Microsoft Communications Sector. Joe has spent his career architecting, designing and developing solutions in the telecommunications industry. Over the last 5 years, he has been involved in architecting solutions that provide telecommunications services in the cloud. Joe presents regularly at industry events sponsored by organizations like the TMForum and the National Association of Broadcasters. In his spare time Joe is an adjunct professor in the department of Information Technology and Electronic Commerce at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
Each month through June 2010, we’ll bring you a 90-minute Architect focused Webcast to educate on the latest trends/topics and how new technologies can align with your business needs.
October 27, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST
Title: An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3
Presenter: Tim Heuer
Abstract: Many .NET developers are becoming more and more interested in the Rich Internet Application development space, and in particular Silverlight. In this session we will step back from a detailed implementation technology and take a higher level look at Silverlight from the architect’s perspective. We will discuss the types of applications where Silverlight makes sense and some scenarios where Silverlight may not be the appropriate technology. We will also delve into some of the architectural decisions that the architect must consider when writing applications for this platform and where some of the tradeoffs may lie.
Event ID: 1032427862
Link to Register: An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3
October 28, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST
Title: Deploying Windows 7 from an Infrastructure Architect’s Perspective
Presenter: Doug Klokow
Abstract:
We’ll discuss 5 key areas centered on deploying Windows 7: Developing business justification – Evaluate the capabilities provided by Windows 7 and develop a plan for how to realize business value from these solutions; Where are you today – Explore the differences of preparing for Windows 7 based on your current desktop operating system; Application readiness – Explore the tools and resources available to gain insight into your readiness to deploy Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8, and/or Office 2007/2010; Deployment readiness – Explore the tools and resources available to create a design and deployment solution for your enterprise; Training your employees – Discuss available resources for training your IT Staff and End Users.
Event ID: 1032427863
Link to Register: Deploying Windows 7 from an Infrastructure Architect’s Perspective
SPEAKER BIOS
Tim Heuer
I currently work for Microsoft as a program manager for Microsoft Silverlight, a web technology aimed at delivering rich internet experiences to users. Before this current role, I was a developer evangelist for Microsoft serving the Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana and Utah areas aiming to strengthen and support communities and software developers in these geographies.
Doug Klokow
Part of Microsoft Consulting Services for 9 years focused on client desktop deployment solutions. He is part of the Virtual Deployment Practice that is focused on driving early customer deployment on Microsoft client technologies and is also supporting Microsoft’s Desktop Virtualization capabilities and service offerings.
Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, and the re-release by Warner Brothers of an HD version of the movie, Netflix has launched a website to stream the movie for FREE to anyone in America on October 3rd.
Netflix also hosted a free, live concert and outdoor movie screening on Tuesday, September 29th, in New York City’s Central Park at Rumsey Playfield. The concert featured songs from “The Wizard of Oz” performed by Jennifer Hudson, Julianne Hough and ?uestlove. 
New renditions of “Wizard of Oz” songs from the concert are also posted on the site here.
The site has been implemented with Smooth Streaming, an IIS Media Services extension, that enables adaptive streaming of media to Silverlight clients over HTTP. Smooth Streaming provides a high-quality viewing experience that scales massively on content distribution networks, making true HD media experiences (720p+) a reality.
Enjoy!!!
In the world of rich internet applications (RIA), Flash is very well known and often compared to Silverlight. Many web developers and designers are discovering the latest cool features and benefits of Silverlight version 3, and now building RIA in Silverlight. Many are making the switch or planning to.
Jason Campbell is a User Experience Evangelist for Microsoft, and a former Flash Designer. He has a terrific blog, Silverlight | Switch, that features many topics that Flash programmers and designers are interested in as it relates to Silverlight. He also includes events, tips & tricks, and video tutorials, like this one on SketchFlow.
Check it out!
![clip_image001[6]](http://jcstame.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/clip_image00161.jpg?w=121&h=70 "clip_image001[6]")
I interviewed Ward Bell recently and we discussed using Silverlight for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) for UFC Gyms and New Evolution Fitness.
You can view the interview on Channel 9’s ARCast.TV here.
Exciting day – Silverlight 3 was launched today, as well as Expression Studio 3!
With Silverlight version 3, the feature list delivers innovation and benefits to key areas of rich internet applications, including:
- Support for true high definition video
- Out-of-browser functionality
- Smooth Streaming
- Improved line of business support, including data validation and element-to-element databinding
- Pixel shaders for deeper rendering control
- More than 90 controls and themes, with source code and unit tests for many of them in the Silverlight Toolkit
To learn more about Silverlight 3 you can go here or get more insight from some of my colleagues blogs:
In addition to the availability of Silverlight 3, the release candidate of Expression Blend 3 and SketchFlow were announced today. In addition, the full family of Expression Studio 3 products will be available within thirty days!
SketchFlow is a very innovative prototyping tool that comes with Expression Blend. This dynamic prototyping feature in Microsoft Expression® Blend™ 3, demonstrates the flow, layout, and transitions of an application through interactive “sketches” to convey initial concepts. And concurrent workflows between design, user experience, and development ensure that the visuals, interaction model, and the underlying architecture of an application can be simultaneously evolved and delivered as a completed project.
“Soma” Somasegar, Sr. VP at Microsoft has a real good post on SketchFlow here. Also, visit Microsoft Expression for more information or click here to download a copy of Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Release Candidate.
If you missed the “Pragmatic Patterns for Architects” webcasts last week, you can go to the Strategy and Architecture Council (Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelism U.S. West Region) site and view the slides or view the recordings.
You will find all 3 days there:
Day 1 – Patterns for Moving to the Cloud
Day 2 – Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism
Day 3 – Patterns for Parallel Computing
I have blogged a bit about Internet Explorer 8 (previous posts are here) and some of the really cool features that it comes, making your web discovery and usability experience really great. Specifically, accelerators and web slices bring a whole new set of IE tools to some great web services. You can find some accelerator and web slices from popular web services like Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and many more here.
One of my favorite accelerators is from Digg. Digg is an online destination that enables people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.
You can download the accelerator here.
This new Digg Accelerator enables you to quickly Digg, Submit, and find related content from anywhere on the Web. A great tool!
Also, coming soon, is a Silverlight version of the accelerator providing a really rich experience for Digg stories.
“Cloud computing will supersede traditional IT”, “SOA will enable business agility”, “my way or the highway”, etc. We’ve all heard this type of proclamations before, as many look to the “next big things” in technology to exact sweeping changes and solve many issues; truth is, technologies and tools aren’t as instrumental in influencing progress, as the design and discipline in applying them to specific issues. When used appropriately, technologies and tools can be powerful enablers that bring about change.
To address this, and trying to be a bit more green, our team is hosting a series of live webcasts at noon PST on June 9th – 11th, 2009, which will focus on guidance and patterns for some of today’s hottest topics. Just another excuse to have lunch at your desk (if your time zone is nearby)! 
Patterns for Moving to the Cloud – June 9
Larry Clarkin & Wade Wegner
Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should be moving to the cloud? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, learn architectural patterns and factors for moving to the cloud. Based on real-world projects, the session explores building block services, patterns for exposing applications, and challenges involving identity, data federation, and management. This session provides the tools and knowledge to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.
Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism – June 10
David Hill
Prism provides guidance, via design patterns, to help you build robust, flexible and modular Silverlight and WPF applications. These patterns support unit testing, separation of concerns, loose coupling and the ability to share application logic between Silverlight and WPF applications. Prism includes source code for the library itself, extensive documentation, and a sample application that shows how the patterns work together in a real-world application. It also includes a Visual Studio add-in to help you easily share code between WPF and Silverlight. This session provides an overview of Prism, and shows how you can use Prism to design and build composite Silverlight applications.
Patterns for Parallel Computing – June 11
David Chou
With recent advances in cloud computing, service-oriented architectures, distributed computing, server virtualization, multi-core processors, etc., we are now seeing parallel computing techniques being implemented across the spectrum, and towards mainstream applications such as internet-scale web applications, massive data processing, graphics rendering, etc. But the myriad of choices also present a number of questions on when and how to utilize parallel computing. This session explores the architectural patterns and trade-offs between different forms of parallel computing, approaches for utilizing them to improve application performance and optimize use of existing infrastructure, and how concurrency can be applied towards day-to-day enterprise information processing needs.
For more details and registration, please visit http://blogs.msdn.com/sac/pages/council-2009q2.aspx
This week, at least for Microsoft, what happens in Vegas does will not hopefully stay in Vegas. Yesterday at Mix09, the following were announced:
Silverlight 3 Beta (Developer release – no go live license yet). This is a very exciting release. Some of the interesting new features that the platform provides include:
- Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio. With support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline, Silverlight 3 brings rich, full-screen, stutter-free media experiences to the desktop.
- Silverlight 3 contains new 3D graphics, animation features, hardware accelerated effects and text improvements that enable designers and developers to create next generation Web visuals.
- Improved RIA Productivity. New features include:
- Silverlight 3 is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls
- Deep Linking. Silverlight 3 includes support for deep linking, which enables bookmarking a page within a RIA.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- Enhanced Data Support: Element to Element binding, Data Forms, New features for data validation, Support for business objects
- Improved performance through Application library caching, Enhanced Deep Zoom, Binary XML, Local Connection.
- Out of Browser Capabilities. The new out of browser experience in Silverlight 3 enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto their PC and Mac, with links on the desktop and start menu—all without the need to download an additional runtime or browser plug-in. Also, the new offline features enables Silverlight applications to work whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not.
Announcing the Microsoft Web Platform: Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta and Windows Web Application Gallery!
The Microsoft Web Platform has a goal to deliver the best platform to developers for building their Web applications. Microsoft is delivering the platform, tools, and applications that development organizations, communities, and developers need. The Microsoft Web Platform offers a complete ecosystem for building and hosting web sites, services, and applications. It is designed to interoperate with both ASP.NET and PHP, and integrate easily with community applications and products in the market today.
Some highlights:
The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.
Windows Web App Gallery is a community hub of free and popular .NET and PHP applications for you to use as building blocks for creating dynamic web solutions.
And more exciting things to come on Day 2 includes the release of Internet Explorer 8. In addition to the IE8 site, you can see some of my previous posts on IE8 here.
