Last week I attended Etch in San Diego. The theme was “the attention economy” and whilst there wasn’t a huge amount about the attention economy there wasn’t much about Web 2.0 which was good. In fact it was pretty much dismissed by all as hype and most...

Following from my last blog I wanted to write down what the motivation was behind the Edge Architecture and in the end it became more of a manifesto about what I believe and how I think the IT world is changing. It has the following 5 core values: ...

A while back my boss, John devados , gave a keynote at VS live on some of the architectural work we are doing pulling togther the Web and the Enterprise that we are calling Edge Architecture. James Fawcette has an interesting article about the same thing...

In researching the architectures used in Web 2,0 applications I wanted to make a list of application categories and good examples of Web 2.0 systems for each category. I was able to gather a lot of great information from http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005...

Here are some Web 2.0 Archiectural resources that I use a lot: Newsfeeds worth following are: http://www.techcrunch.com/ and http://tech.memeorandum.com/ . blogs worth reading are: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition...

Well it has been an age since I have blogged, mainly because of all the changes that have been going on. Firstly of course I have moved across to Microsoft Corporation in Redmond from the UK to work as part of the architecture strategy team. Initially...

Following on from the comments on my previous Blog I updated the architetcre types; · What are the types of architect? Whilst architects need all of the above skills the technical depth skills and experience level that they have make them fall into...

What is architecture? IT architecture is the use of models, levels of abstraction and relationships in IT systems and processes to manage complexity and simplify communication. http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/std_public/description/se...

Following on from my definitions of what the different types of architect do here is an excellent description of the infrastructure and software architects roles: http://www.certmag.com/articles/templates/CM_gen_Article_template.asp?articleid=1406&zoneid...

Just been to another meeting where there was confusion over what an infrastructure architect does in comparison to an application architect. I cant understand this, its so obvious to me: An infrastructure architect provides models and technology...

I have had a go at defining infrastructure architecture and the feedback seems to have been: Ok, so what about infrastructure architects and the business value of infrastructure rather more than the details of what categories exist within infrastructure...

Of interest to anyone who is working on Infrastructure Architecture based around SOA is the Managing Connected Systems set of whitepapers just released on the Microsoft Architecture Series website. This set of whitepapers uses a typical enterprise...

I read a fair amount of the analysts reports, probably not as many as I should, but I like some of Zapthinks stuff, especially the wackier ones so it was no big surprise that I read their latest one on " The seven things that your SOA teams shouldn't...

Back in January I went to some internal Microsoft training (called Envision) in Seattle and had the privilege to go to a session by Tom Bittman, a VP and distinguished analyst with Gartner. Now in general I am not overkeen on Gartner having looked at...

My manager asked me a question late last night (he's very sad [:)] ) about infrastructure architects which I came up with my answer for but would like to get feedback on so I thought I would blog about it. He asked: My takeaway from interacting...

I have just got my printed copy of the Architects journal number 5. I know it has been on the web for a while, its just that I don’t like reading articles on the monitor so I haven't got around to looking through it. The other advantage of print is that...

Someone asked me a really good question via my blog yesterday: What is the difference between the terms interoperability and integration when it comes to software? This is something I haven't really got a good definition for and that I tend...

Some time back I was fortunate to sit on one of the Microsoft Architect Certification Boards with Chip Wilson from Geniant. One of the nice things about sitting on the board is that you meet some really smart architects, both in front of and on the board...

So I have a ton of feedback from a number of people about my SOI blog . There are a couple of key points that I think I have not been clear about: This blog is not the answer to life, the universe and everything in Infrastructure... yet :). Its...

I've been asked to present to a major financial institution which has bought into Service Oriented Architecture in a big way. They have a number of projects underway based around web services, Service Orientation and Orchestration. They clearly have a...

Jon Arce emailed me that in my earlier blog I should have included the IEEE standard definition of Architecture: IEEE Std 1471-2000 IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems Which defines: A system...

As I mentioned in my last blog my new job makes me responsible for Microsoft’s strategy and guidance on Infrastructure Architecture. The first question I have to answer is what is Infrastructure Architecture, that is what is a formal definition for the...

So I haven’t blogged in ages because I have taken on a new job and moved to the US which has involved a huge amount of visa / house renting / car selling and buying / moving / phone and PC reconfiguring etc activity, none of which has much place on a...

There seems to be quite a lot going on in the whole area of Organizational mapping / Idm / Federated services with the recent announcement between Sun and Microsoft re federated security systems (ADFS and Liberty ). A couple of really interesting whitepapers...

So I am working on a virtualisation whitepaper and presentation. There is an interesting definition on wikipedia which I am not sure I agree with and also a useful overview at http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/virtualization . So my definition...