Enterprise Architectures - skills, perspectives and insights - Tom Graves replies

Tom Graves has given deep insights (bit philosophical, but reality ) on building up skills on enterprise architecture from a professional and personal perspective; a query I had raised him earlier.

Read more here : http://weblog.tomgraves.org/index.php/2010/11/20/creating-a-career-in-enterprise-architecture/

HoC is up on codeplex

HoC - A distributed cache implementation using .NET 4.0 is now available for download with source at http://hoc.codeplex.com/

HoC = Herd Of Cache.

Azure opens up for Private cloud - Windows Azure Platform Appliance

MS announced yesterday that Azure would soon be available for deploying on your local datacenters. Effectively, you could soon create private clouds using MS Azure. This is a great move especially if you were concerned about data security in the public cloud and subscription costs.

But still, the upfront cost could be high; this is not yet published. Check more here

This is also interesting since my last blog entry did refer to this thought!

Cloud Thoughts - 2

What if there was a mechanism to provision PaaS cloud environments (say MS Azure ) on public servers? Theoretically, if I had a free server(/cloud), I would install the "Azure runtimes" and add it to an existing cloud for others to use.

Registering a server to this free public cloud would then be a voluntary effort. This could have been a possibility if Azure allowed in-premise setup in the first place.

Can I call the end result as "Distributed Cloud Computing" ? Cloud computing that is distributed.

Cloud Thoughts - 1

A few cloud related thoughts


Cloud Cumulus

A single cloud access point that internally seamlessly talks with the subscribed cloud providers. Eg:- Subscriber A could subscribe to the services of Amazon, Google and Micrsoft (yes, Subscriber A is quite well off) cloud services. Subscriber A would deploy the same app on each of these servers and provide a single service URI. Subscriber A's customers would be serviced by one of the cloud provider seamlessly - perhaps with parts of the request being handled by more than one provider. Session states, data etc being shared across clouds is interesting.

For A's customer, there is only one cloud. The cloud of cloud providers / Cumulus Cloud accessed with a single entry point.

Perhaps, once the Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) is in place, this could be built?


Upgrade Ease

How easy is it to upgrade a cloud based app that is actively serving hundreds of users? Came across this for Azure :  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee517254.aspx

Not sure what happens to the application state. If an 'In-Place' upgrade is followed, does it mean that at a particular point in time there could be two instance of the same application running on different versions?


Chess On Cloud

Though there are numerous instances of distributed chess engines, has anyone attempted to get a chess engine on the cloud? I guess the only person who can try this out today is Bill with his Azure and his $'s.

Everyday Enterprise Architecture - The book - full download

It appears that Tom has put the full version of his new book for download for a limited period of time. Check out if it is still available here

Note: though the page might say its a preview edition, its actually the full book.

Review - Book - CLR via C# 3rd Edition by Jeffrey Richter

Having been a die hard fan of the second edition of CLR via C#, couldn't wait to get hold of the third edition. The third edition keeps up to the Jeffrey standard on covering from the basics to the internals of .NET 4.0 with C# 4.0. Starting with the rather interesting foreword by his wife, this book can be read end to end if you are already comfortable with .NET and have enough time to read through ~850 pages of pure core stuff.

There is so much of deep insight in most of the pages that it might take some time to absorb stuff. The best recommendation to attack this book is to read one chapter a day while preparing notes. Once you are done with the book, your notes together with the book can be one hell of a reference at any point. If there is only one book you read as a .NET developer, this is it. Even if you have been the best .NET developer of your league, each time you read this book there is something new learnt. This book covers a good wide area of .NET topics, sometimes delving deep too.

Sharing Richter's deep experience and know-how of .NET in plain non-geeky language has worked out well. Additionally, there are various tips and notes provided in the boxes and shaded text that are pure gems. Richter has made sure that the reader is thoroughly introduced to CLR concepts and in turn how things work out from the C# layer to the IL layer. Richter had made sure that most discussed basic stuff like hashcodes, interface v/s class, explicit v/s implicit interface definitions are discussed to a level such that no further questions arise. There are various instances where he has provided guidance on what to use and why, while sometimes providing historical background to these decisions.

There is good introduction to advanced topics like application domains in the context of hosting. With multicore and concurrency the talk of the town, new to 3rd edition are the 5 new chapters dedicated to discussion on threads and related classes in .NET. Discussion on TPL, PLINQ, spinning and locking etc are dealt quite thoroughly.

At the end of the book you would feel a better .NET developer, ready to take on your next development task in a more elegant manner - believe me.