Principles

On the tube on the way home, I read this article in which the author suggests rewriting the Highway Code as a set of principles rather than as a rule book.  He goes on to argue that working from principles would lead to more consistent judgements.  This article resonated with me because establishing architectural principles and communicating them is so important to the success of establishing an architecture within the enterprise.  It is much more valuable to communicate and agree the principles rather than try to enforce the decisions based on them.  There’s a couple of good overviews of architectural principles here and here.

Silverlight Tools

Scott Guthrie has announced the release of the Silverlight Tools Add-In for the recently released VS 2008.  More info here.  It’s the bit at the end of Scott’s post that’s intriguing:

“The next public preview of Silverlight will include a ton of new runtime features, as well as a significantly enhanced VS 2008 tooling support. I’ll be blogging more details about this shortly.”  

Eyes will be peeled.

Orcas Arrives

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and version 3.5 of the .NET framework yesterday.  I’ve been using the beta 2 of Orcas for a while now – and it’s very good.  Read more details about the release here on Soma’s blog.  I’d also recommend reading  Scott Guthrie’s post about the release, which includes detail of the new features.

Architect Training

The IASA have been developing a training programme for architects.  You can find the details here.  This programme is worth keeping an eye on – it looks like the broad syllabus will cover the range of skills that you require as an architect.