Architecture: The Harmony of Mathematical Precision...

The Story of MyChristmasCatalog.com

jbarnes — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:05:16 GMT

‘Twas the week before the holiday season…last week, I caught-up with Ron Teblum, CEO of Catalog Enterprises Inc. and Raphael Parentes, lead graphic designer, to discuss the launch of MyChristmasCatalog.com and their innovative use of Silverlight3 and Expression Blend and to deliver a truly unique one-stop, holiday shopping destination and experience.

Catalog Enterprises was one of the first registered Microsoft Bizspark Partners when the program launched almost a year ago - and now they are leading the race in e-Commerce 3.0 using Microsoft technologies. By leveraging all the rich media capabilities in Silverlight 3, they have brought together all the familiar sights and sounds of Christmas, including Christmas in New York, Silverlight games for the kids, the narrated Christmas story, Christmas for soldiers, and a truly unique shopping experience to help you find that perfect gift for those on your holiday list this season.

And don’t forget to check the Christmas Traditions section - they have digitized all the old catalogs from your childhood; Sears, Spiegel’s, Schwarz, and JC Penney’s using their proprietary print media conversion tool that converts them into digital flip-books. And using the Silverlight Deep-Zoom technology – you can once again see all the cool toys you didn’t get for Christmas…

http://blogs.msdn.com/innov8showcase/archive/2009/11/15/arcast-tv-the-story-of-mychristmascatalog-com.aspx

Check out the Channel 9 Interview:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast.TV/ARCastTV-The-Story-of-MyChristmasCatalogcom

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 3,Deep Zoom,Expression Studio 3

NBC Winter Olympics on Silverlight

jbarnes — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:48:48 GMT

NBC and Microsoft are getting the band back together for a full Silverlight experience around the 2010 Winter Olympics. You'll have DVR control of the video, including rewind, sharing, and saving clips. There will be a Facebook Connect feature to allow you to socialize the insanity (or coolness, depending on your POV) of skiing with a rifle.

Check-out the Channel9 article at: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/TWC9-Channel-9-Goes-Live-Zune-detecting-memory-leaks-Life-at-MSFT/

The site will also include Deep Zoom photo galleries so you can enjoy each flake of snow individually. More details to come as we get closer to the event.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 3,Expression Studio 3,NBC Winter Olympics

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.

jbarnes — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:43:40 GMT

Title: An Architect’s perspective on Silverlight 3

November 24, 2009 at 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

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: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432980&Culture=en-US

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Title: Cloud-computing architecture – designing multi-tenant applications on Windows Azure.

November 25, 2009, 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

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: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432981&Culture=en-US

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.

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.

Technorati Tags: Architecture,Silverlight 3,Azure

Innovation Showcase – Windows 7 Slides and Demos

jbarnes — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:01:44 GMT

A huge Thanks! to everybody who attended the Innovation Showcase event for Windows 7… There’s certainly a ton of exciting new features and capabilities in Windows 7 and it seemed like we hardly scratched the surface by covering this laundry list of topics:

The Windows 7 Taskbar
Jump Lists
Thumbnails
Libraries
Federated Search
The Ribbon
Windows Web Services
Background services & Tasks
Multi-Touch
Sensor & Location Platform
Windows Application Compatibility
XP Mode

You can download all the slides and cool demos from my SkyDrive folder at:
http://cid-e80ea9288abd4452.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Windows%207

Another great resources is the Windows 7 Training Kit For Developers (updated 10/22/2009):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1c333f06-fadb-4d93-9c80-402621c600e7&displaylang=en

Remember to keep in touch with us at: http://blogs.msdn.com/innov8showcase
Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7

ARCast.TV - How to Improve Testability with a Modular Architecture

jbarnes — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:48:39 GMT

Mario Cardinal and Aaron Kowall discuss how to easily test in an autonomous way an application conceived with modular abstractions such as the "layer". Mario and Aaron discuss how to partition the concerns of the application into layers and best practices regarding application architecture and modularity.

ARCast.TV - How to Improve Testability with a Modular Architecture

Technorati Tags: Architecture,ARCast,Channel 9

Visual Studio 2010 + .NET 4.0 = Parallelism for the Masses

jbarnes — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:32:57 GMT

Got Multiple Processors? With the hardware advances today, you would really have to search hard to find a good laptop, desktop, or server that doesn’t come with multi-core processor technologies in the box...

As software developers, we have been spoiled by Moore’s Law (http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw) which states that: “The number of transistors on a chip will double about every 2 years” …

If you look at the chart above, you can certainly see that this has been true over the last 25+ years. Typically, this has been manifested as clock-speed increases..

Well, my friends, I’m sorry to say it – but the free Lunch is over…and the reason is HEAT! We have now reached a major inflection point in the industry as far as taking advantage of further improvements in processor clock speed improvements – and the reasons for this are:

Increased clock speed == increases power usage
Increased power usage == increased heat output
Harder to keep the chips cool…

To drive this point home, here is a picture of what I am going to call an “Egg McMotherboard” – and yes, someone has actually documented exactly how you too can fry an egg on your motherboard using a few pennies as a heat-sink…notice also from the picture below - that this is a water-cooled CPU!

So, what’s the answer? –> Scale-Out by taking advantage of the now largely available Multi / Many Core processors along with the new Parallel Programming capabilities coming in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET 4.0 Framework.

As you can see in the diagram above, Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET 4.0 framework will provide (2) new programming libraries to help you take advantage of Parallel programming to dramatically speed-up your applications.

The Task Parallel Library – allows for (2) types of parallelism:

Task Parallelism - “fine grained”
Simultaneously perform multiple independent operations. Divide-and-conquer, tasks, threads, fork/join, futures, etc.

Imperative Data Parallelism
Apply the same operation to common collections/sets in parallel. Looping, data partitioning, reductions, scans, etc.

The Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) Library:

Declarative Data Parallelism
Define what computation needs to be done, without the how. Selections, filters, joins, aggregations, groupings, etc.

Why You Should Care:

What does all this mean to you? Consider the following code snippet - that represents a traditional (sequential) approach to processing a common task such as creating thumbnails for a series of images; We will demonstrate how this simple loop can be expressed using each of the (3) new Parallel processing metaphors:

Traditional Sequential Approach:

Parallel Tasks:

Below is the same processing loop – but slightly modified to take advantage of the new Tasks API in the .NET 4.0 framework:

Imperative Data Parallelism:

The code below illustrates how you can “Parallelize” your FOR / FOREACH loops to express common imperative data-oriented operations. Note how this is as easy as adding Parallel. in front of your ForEach statements:

PLINQ:

PLINQ is an implementation of LINQ-to-Objects that executes queries in parallel. The concept is that you express what you want to accomplish, rather than how you want to accomplish it. Note that this has Minimal impact to existing LINQ queries…the only difference is adding an AsParallel() statement in front of the Select statement…How cool is that?

And the results:

I ran each of these on my dual-core Dell 820 laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate – here are the results:

Note that each one of the (3) parallel methods reduced the processing time to LESS THAN HALF of the time it took to process sequentially – WITH MINIMAL CHANGES TO THE CODE!

QUAD Core Anyone?

I happen to have a Quad-Core workstation at home and wanted to take my parallel processing tests one step farther – to see how the relative performance gains stacked-up across dual and quad-core machines…

For this test, I chose a different problem example – measuring how much time it takes to calculate all the Prime numbers for sets of 5,10, and 15 million – across each type of processor.

Here is the sequential FOR loop that was the baseline:

And here is the modified code to take advantage of Declarative Parallel processing – note how the loop also requires special processing to make sure that each iteration protected - the interlocked functions provide a simple mechanism for synchronizing access to a variable that is shared by multiple threads. This function is atomic with respect to calls to other interlocked functions.

Here are the results:

And a chart that shows just how dramatic an effect Parallel processing in the .NET 4.0 framework really is:

Note how the scalability is almost linear – using parallel processing techniques across Dual-Core machines takes roughly 1/2 the processing time of traditional programming methods. And running the same code on a Quad-processor takes roughly 1/4 of the time!

I had the chance to present this topic recently at the Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 event in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I am convinced that this will be a real game-changer for .NET Architects and Developers who are looking to Do More With Less in the new economy…You can download my slides and demos for this talk from my SkyDrive folder at:

http://cid-e80ea9288abd4452.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Parallelism

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010,.NET 4.0,Parallel Processing

Silverlight 3 + Windows 7 = Browser-based Multi-Touch Game

jbarnes — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:14:25 GMT

Here is the first-ever on-line game that combines the power of Silverlight 3 with Windows 7 Multi-Touch to give you a browser experience like never before!

If you have a Windows 7 Multi-Touch device – point your browser to http://www.playcrazycoins.com and get ready for some fun!

Be sure to read Kevin D. Wolf’s blog posts on what he used to create the game and how to incorporate Windows 7 Multi-Touch into the application:

Introducing Crazy Coins – a Silverlight 3.0 Multi-Touch Application
http://new.efficientcoder.net/2009/08/introducing-crazy-coins-silverlight-30.html

Silverlight 3.0 and MultiTouch
http://new.efficientcoder.net/2009/07/silverlight-30-and-multitouch.html

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 3,Windows 7 Mult-Touch

Internet Explorer 8 / Silverlight 3 Presentation and Demos

jbarnes — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:55:29 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended the Innovation Showcase event yesterday in Ft. Lauderdale. We certainly covered a wealth of information and went through some great demonstrations of the capabilities for each technology.

To quickly recap the IE8 session, we took a look at some of the compelling new features in IE8 that can help drive more web traffic to your site – Web Slices, Accelerators, Visual Search - especially if you host your add-ins on the IE Gallery at http://www.ieaddons.com/en.

The best part is that the development effort for these IE8 add-ins is trivial – and the cost to host them in the gallery is *zero*. Remember that in order to upload your branded add-ins, you will need to click the “Join” link in the upper right portion of the home page.

You can download all the Internet Explorer 8 slides and demos at:

http://cid-e80ea9288abd4452.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/IE8

In the Silverlight 3 session, we did a comprehensive review of all the exciting new features baked into this release – including a cool video demo of a Silverlight 3 game that integrates with Windows 7 Multi-Touch at http://www.playcrazycoins.com.

You can download all the Silverlight 3 slides and demos from my Skydrive folder at:

http://cid-e80ea9288abd4452.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Silverlight3

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Internet Explorer 8,Silverlight 3,Expression Studio 3

Are you Ready for some FOOTBALL- Powered by Silverlight?

jbarnes — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:28:10 GMT

Here's a new online viewing experience for all you folks trying to watch Sunday Night Football while working on your computer...The NFL and NBC will be delivering the entire Sunday Night Football season utilizing Silverlight 3.0 and IIS7 Smooth Streaming.

The Sunday Night Football online experience will be groundbreaking, and set a new bar for what can be done with live online video. Better yet – it cannot be achieved today with anything but Silverlight 3 and IIS7 Smooth Streaming.

Check it out: http://snfextra.nbcsports.com/

Some particular highlights of what it delivers:

A full screen video player that is capable of delivering 720p HD video. TV quality on the web.
A main HD video feed, plus 4 user selectable alternate synchronized camera feeds that allows users to switch camera angles themselves. Your TV can’t do that.
Adaptive smooth streaming of live HD video, which enables the video player to automatically switch bitrates on the fly depending on networking/CPU conditions. No buffering/stuttering experience.
DVR support of the live video, including Pause, Instant Replay, Slow Motion, Skip Forward/Back. You can pause and rewind on live video.
Play-by-play data (touchdowns, fumbles, etc) inserted as tooltip chapter markers on the scrubber at the bottom allowing you to quickly seek to key moments. A smarter, contextual DVR.
Highlights of major plays created within minutes of the play. NBC is cutting on demand highlights and publishing them on the fly with Smooth Streaming.
Sideline interviews with the players. No more channel surfing, you are one click away from additional content.
Game statistics. These are live stats coming directly in real-time from the NFL.
Game commentary and Q&A with the SNF hosts. Chat with the live TV broadcasters.
And for the first time ever, dynamic ad insertion of smooth streaming adverts on the client. This is a big benefit for NBC to help drive additional ad revenue.

Join us for Week 3, Sunday, Sept. 27 -- TV: Game begins on NBC at 8 p.m. ET / WEB: Show begins at 8 p.m. ET!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 3,IIS7,Smooth Streaming,NFL Football

Moving your SQL Server Database to the Clouds? Try the SQL Azure Migration Wizard

jbarnes — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:40:14 GMT

Thinking about kicking the tires on SQL Azure? Wondering what tools are out there to help automate the process and save some time?

Check out the SQL Azure Migration Wizard at http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com.

The SQL Azure Migration Wizard helps you migrate your local SQL Server 2005 / 2008 databases into SQL Azure. The wizard walks you through the selection of your SQL objects, creates SQL scripts suitable for SQL Azure, and allows you to edit / deploy to SQL Azure.

Since there are some minor DDL changes required to port a SQL Server database to SQL Azure, one of the really nice features of this tool is that when the SQL script is generated, an analysis window will be displayed telling you what areas need to be fixed prior to running the script against SQL Azure.

Click the link below for more information or to sign-up for the SQL Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dataservices/default.aspx

Technorati Tags: SQL Azure

Windows 7 For Architects & Developers - Updates

jbarnes — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:22:12 GMT

Many thanks to everybody who came out to see my presentation at the South Florida Architecture Group meeting! I have updated my slide deck to represent the features in the RTM release of Windows 7 and have included a few more code downloads for your review.

Here's the short list of the topics we covered:

Programming the Windows 7 Task bar
Jump Lists
Thumbnails
Libraries
Federated Search
The Ribbon
Windows Web Services
Background Services & Tasks
Multi-Touch
Sensor & Location Platform
Windows XP Mode

You can download a copy of my Windows 7 presentation and all the cool demos at:

http://cid-e80ea9288abd4452.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Windows%207

And remember – More Happy is coming! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU&feature=player_embedded

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Visual Studio 2008

Innovation/Showcase on Windows 7

jbarnes — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:27:48 GMT

“Windows 7 is what a modern managed desktop should be. It helps us increase productivity, reduce costs, and provide enhanced desktop security”

- Doug Miller, Practice Architect, CDW

Join us at Microsoft’s Windows 7 Innovation Showcase where you can explore how Windows 7 delivers ‘the new efficiency” by growing your business through cost savings, productivity and innovation! Register today to see what Innovation can do for you!

Areas covered include:

· Address top seven business values of Windows 7 that enterprise customers care about

· Take advantage of the advancements in the Windows 7 user experience to make your application more compelling to users

and your users more productive in the tasks they care about

· Dive into the business scenarios and technical details of Multi-Touch and the Sensor and Location API on Windows 7

· Ease of Migrating to Windows 7

City/State	Date	Microsoft Location	Registration Link
Farmington, CT	October 15, 2009	Farmington Directions	Farmington Registration Link
Waltham, MA	October 20, 2009	Waltham Directions	Waltham Registration Link
Reston, VA	October 20, 2009	Reston Directions	Reston Registration Link
New York, NY	October 21, 2009	New York Directions	NY Registration Link
Rochester, NY	October 22, 2009	Rochester Directions	Rochester Registration Link
Alpharetta, GA	October 22, 2009	Alpharetta Directions	Alpharetta Registration Link
Ft Lauderdale, FL	October 26, 2009	Ft Lauderdale Directions	Ft Lauderdale Registration Link
Malvern, PA	October 29, 2009	Malvern Directions	Malvern Registration Link

Technorati Tags: Windows 7

Make it Super Easy for people to Follow You, Your Business, Your Cause – with an IE8 Web Slice

jbarnes — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:27:49 GMT

Still looking for that “killer app” that let’s your loyal minions always stay connected and allows them to follow you or your Company’s every blog post, twitter tweet, or RSS news feed?…Anybody remember PointCast from the early 1990’s?

Remember how cool it was that information could be “pushed” to a users screen saver? Wondering how you can bottle-up all that cool “push” capability and have it only 1-click away in your user’s browser?…

Well, wait no more my friends – the answer is right here and it’s called an IE8 Web Slice…

What is it? A Web Slice enables users to subscribe to content directly within a Web page; a separate feed file is not required. Users can monitor content changes and view the updated portion of the Web page directly from the Favorites bar of Internet Explorer 8.

Here’s how my utterly shameless, self-promoting, IE8 Web Slice looks in action:

And since a Web Slice is really just a mini-HTML page – I can get pretty creative with what and how I choose to render the content. In my shameless example above, the default view shows my recent blog posts – which are easily fed from an RSS feed from my blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/jbarnes/rss.xml …and here’s what the other tabs contain:

Tab #2 - Local technical events for Florida - an RSS feed from http://www.communitymegaphone.com – with a filter applied for Florida events:

Tab #3 – My latest “Tweets” from Twitter…which is really just an RSS feed from: http://www.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/Jeff_Barnes_1.atom

And finally Tab#4 – the latest ARCast.tv episodes from Channel 9, again it’s just an RSS Feed from http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast.TV/RSS

How can you create one for your own use? The concept and code base demonstrated here is based upon the wildly popular H1N1 Swine Flu Web Slice - originally developed by Giorgio Sardo:

What’s the installation process? If you want to host a slice on your own web site, it’s as easy as coding an HTML button event to “Add” the Web Slice to your IE8 Favorites bar:

<

button onclick="window.external.AddToFavoritesBar(

'http://www.DotNetTikiHut.com/FollowMe/SliceUpdate.aspx#FollowMe',

'FollowMe Updates',

'slice')">

Add to Internet Explorer

button>

And here’s what your user will see:

If you own a business, another great option you might want to consider is posting your Web Slice or Accelerator on the IE8 Gallery at http://www.ieaddons.com – this is a great way to reach new customers, keep them updated of your firm’s activities and updates around your products & services, and increase web traffic to your site. Check it out!

This is cool – how can I see this in action? You can “Follow Me” by installing my IE 8 Web Slice at http://www.dotnettikihut.com/FollowMe/install.html

The code for this sample solution can be downloaded from my SkyDrive folder at:
http://cid-e80ea9288abd4452.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/DPE%7C_Web%7C_Slice

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Internet Explorer 8,Web Slices

Innovation/Showcase on Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 3

jbarnes — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:48:29 GMT

Join us at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 3 Innovation Showcase where you can learn how IE8 & SL3

features deliver the best web experience for your users. Register today to see what Innovation can do for you!

During this showcase we will discuss how you can Expand your Business Reach with Internet Explorer 8 and

Build a Line-of-Business Applications with Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3.

Who Should Attend:

Solution Architects, CIO’s, CTO’s, Development Managers, Lead Developers, Business Decision Makers

City/State	Date	Microsoft Location	Registration Link
Charlotte, NC	September 15, 2009	Charlotte Directions	Charlotte Registration Link
New York, NY	September 16, 2009	New York Directions	NY Registration Link
Farmington, CT	September 17, 2009	Farmington Directions	Farmington Registration Link
Reston, VA	September 17, 2009	Reston Directions	Reston Registration Link
Waltham, MA	September 22, 2009	Waltham Directions	Waltham Registration Link
Ft Lauderdale, FL	September 22, 2009	Ft Lauderdale Directions	Ft Lauderdale Registration Link

Technorati Tags: Internet Explorer 8,Silverlight 3

ARCast.TV - Simon Guest on Patterns for Moving to the Cloud

jbarnes — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:54:51 GMT

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 you be moving? 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 talk, learn architectural patterns and factors for moving to the cloud.

Based on real-world projects, the talk explores building block services, patterns for exposing applications, and challenges involving identity, data federation, and management. Denny Boynton talks to Simon Guest about the tools and knowledge required to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.

ARCast.TV - Simon Guest on Patterns for Moving to the Cloud

Technorati Tags: ARCast,Architects,Architecture,Software+Services,Cloud Architecture,Cloud Computing,Cloud Patterns,Cloud Services,Simon Guest,Denny Boynton