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  • The Book of Architecture Axioms

    "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" - a new community driven wiki that aims to provide bite-sized chunks of good advice.

  • Improving Web Service Security: Guidance for WCF

    Microsoft patterns and practices group has released a WCF Security Guide. The 689 pages compendium offers a general introduction to Web Service security fundamentals as well as in-depth knowledge about several security threads and appropriate counter-measures.

  • Windows Communication Foundation: Application Deployment Scenarios

    Microsoft has just published an excellent overview of WCF capabilities and deployment strategies for 5 most common SOA scenarios including Enterprise Web services, Web 2.0 services, intranet applications, queued messaging and Workflow services.

  • Mocking Web Services

    Service simulation (mocking) – the ability to mimic service behavior even before they are implemented - enables service consumer developers and testers to parallelize their efforts without having to wait for service implementation to complete. Service simulation also provides a light-weight alternative to building expensive reference environments.

  • The State of Enterprise Architecture

    As organizations continue to grow their IT investments (bought, borrowed, or built) and concepts like Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture become more common, the role of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become more common. Recently, several people in the EA community have spoken about its current state.

  • Article: Software Development Lessons Learned from Poker

    There is no silver bullet. We know it, but don't act like it. Your language, tool or process is better, right? In this article, Jay Fields says: "It depends". The right choices varies with context, people, and more. This article touches upon how a lot of things must impact a choice; learning culture, skill levels, teamwork, incomplete information, metrics - and context.

  • The Semantic Web and Ontological Technologies Continue to Expand

    Ontologies and Ontological management have become more popular as enterprise architecture has gained ground in organizations. As tool support has become available and the semantic and ontological concepts are being understood, more players, like the UMBEL project, the AKSW group, and consultant Dan McCreary have come to the table with contributions.

  • Agile Version Control for Multi-Team Development

    Many agree that the minimum set of Agile practices includes disciplined version control. In particular, when several development teams work in the same codebase, to ensure there's a clean, releasable version at the end of every iteration, they need a plan. Henrik Kniberg's proven scheme is a useful guide for teams. This detailed paper includes the entire method and even a cheatsheet.

  • Presentation: Steve Jones on "Driving IT from the Business"

    In a presentation recorded at QCon London, Cap Gemini's Steve Jones explains his concept of a business service architecture. Topics covered include how to apply SOA to existing systems, the problems one runs into when SOA is driven by technology, and the structural and organizational impact of business-driven SOA.

  • First (Forgotten?) Rule Of The Retrospective: Follow Through

    Even the very greenest of agile teams clearly recognize the word 'Retrospective'. But, alas, it is often overlooked that a retrospective may be a wasted effort if not used to initiate an actual improvement that the team follows through on. Jim Shore gives advice on how to make the most of your retrospective and reminds us of the activity's ultimate place in the agile heartbeat.

  • Is the ScrumMaster-as-Blocker a Pattern to Follow or a Smell to Avoid?

    So, you are on a development team that is adopting Agile or thinking of going in that direction. If you are adopting Agile by starting small, you probably are working against-the-grain in your organization. You may have heard that there should be a role that protects the team from the rest of the non-Agile world that might be useful

  • Can Architects Stop Financial Ruin and Market Meltdowns?

    The purported fraud by Jerome Kerviel at Société Générale may bring down a major financial institution and may have caused markets to tumble worldwide. Attention has turned to systems intended to prevent fraud and other illegal activities. What role can software architects play in detecting and avoiding fraud and other suspicious behavior?

  • Handling Large File Uploads in ASP.NET

    Anyone who has experience with ASP.NET knows, the FileUpload control is often a savior and can also be an enemy other times. One of the biggest problems with the FileUpload control is getting it to handle large files which are bigger than the default 4MB.

  • Creating Better Metrics

    A recent article in The Economist pays tribute to three of the finest graphics from the last two centuries. What can be learned from these graphics to improve the display and the quality of agile development metrics?

  • The Power of Checklists

    In a recent New Yorker article, Atul Gawande describes how Dr. Peter Pronovost is dramatically decreasing infection rates in hospital intensive care units with "stupid little checklists". If simple checklists can save lives, can they improve your agile development team?

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