Architect Insight Conference 2008

I’ve been at the Architect Insight Conference yesterday and today.  Yesterday, I spoke about Oslo, for which I was joined by Greg Leake who spoke about the Stocktrader application – there’s some fascinating work going on here solving the real problems we have all faced in building out our SOAs.

It’s a break before the final session and then the closing keynote.  The conference has been a great opportunity to hear about some of the trends and issues facing us as architects.  What I have also found valuable is the conversations that the sessions have sparked.  And bumping into a few familiar faces was a pleasant surprise.

There has been a lot of focus on building for internet scale, which presents some interesting challenges and it seems to me that the industry is maturing as we find solutions to these challenges – accepting that your hardware will fail and starting from this point is one of the signs of this maturity.  Brewer’s principle (which states that of three properties of shared-data systems; data consistency, system availability and tolerance to network partition one can only achieve two at any given time) and its ramifications for application design is another interesting area to explore.  Lots of food for thought.  Need some time to digest now…

Django on IronPython

At PyCon 2008 in Chicago earlier this month, the latest release of Django (0.96) was shown running on IronPython.  There’s an interesting post about it here, and there’s some background info here from Dino Viehland.

It’s great to see IronPython supporting Django.   It demonstrates the power and ambition of IronPython, but, more to the point, the combination of Django and the .NET platform is exciting.

Mix ‘08

Want to keep up with what’s going on at Mix ‘08 but you’re not attending?

Here’s some help:

Read Tim Sneath’s blog
Follow Scott Hanselman on Twitter
Visit the official site

Architect Insight Conference

April 28th and 29th will see this year’s Architect Insight Conference roll into town - the town in question being Windsor on this occasion.

To whet your appetite, take a look at the agenda here. It’s divided up into four themes this year: Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure Architecture, Solution Architecture and Software plus Services. And in the Software + Services track, I’ll be speaking with Marc Holmes about the upcoming Oslo set of technologies. Hope to see you there.

Full time round-up

The second and final day of Mix ‘07 UK has come to an end.  I started today with a double helping of Visual Studio 2008 and ASP .NET 3.5.  These Scott Guthrie sessions were right on the mark: well-paced and full of content.  The highlights for me are the ability in Visual Studio 2008 to target different versions of the .NET framework and LINQ.

After such a good start, the next session was likely to be a disappointment and it was.  After lunch, however, things looked up again.  The session on IronPython and Silverlight was interesting, although I felt it could have been improved by focussing more on IronPython and the DLR and less on Silverlight - which received adequate coverage elsewhere.

The day was rounded off with Swaggily Fortunes - in which a lot of lucky punters won Microsoft branded socks - and Sneak Peeks - a look at some of the stuff that’s heading our way accompanied by the sound of a large audience playing bamboo recorders.  These sessions were a good way to end the conference.

All in all, two days well spent.  For those of you who couldn’t attend or who would appreciate a helpful prod to the memory banks, the slides and some videos should be up on the Mix website over the next week or so.

Half Time Report

The first day of Mix ‘07 UK has come to a close.  The opening keynote was a mixed affair (if you’ll pardon the pun) with a good story about the evolution of the .NET platform for application building punctuated by lacklustre demos - demos that showed some interesting functionality in most cases but failed to explain how or why the technology was used.  The last demo, by a representative from Sage, however, really hit the spot:  a little context and then some insight into how the technologies were used (in this case WPF and Silverlight with a little IronPython) and why.

Later in the day, I attended both of the sessions on Silverlight that Scott Guthrie did.  The more I see of Silverlight 1.1 the more impressed I am.  A cross platform CLR, plus the support for dynamic languages makes this technology really compelling.  It’s frustrating that we’ll have to wait a while for it to get to a 1.0 release.  It’s also frustrating that you need Visua Studio 2008 Standard or Professional edition to use Silverlight 1.1 - which means back to the drawing board for me and Orcas.

The day was rounded off with a couple of panel discussions, which varied in their interest for me.  There was some interesting stuff, such as mention of a .NET MVC framework to be released later this year.

I came to learn more about Silverlight, LINQ and the DLR.  On the first of those scores I have come home happy.  Tomorrow, I am hoping to find out more about LINQ and IronPython.

All mixed up

I’m going to attending Mix ‘07 UK in a couple of weeks.  (My favourite session title so far is "Swaggily Fortunes.")  This year, Microsoft have added social networking functionality via backnetwork - click here to see it.  There’s also a facebook event for those of you so inclined.

The Architect’s Tale

I’ll be speaking at a ProNetworking Event at the British Computer Society on 30th August called Career Canterbury Tales.  You can find all the details here.