Rob Grigg's Blog

OK, OK, I’ll start again…

2008-10-27T23:24:57Z

‘nuff said about my lack of blogging over the last, well, few years.

If the truth be told, I am so jealous of Mick Horne's blog that I have been ashamed to put fingers to keyboard, But, I have moaned at so many people to get them to blog, I really have to step up myself.

Luckily, I am at PDC in LA this week and this is a great opportunity to start again as I might actually have something mildly interesting to say?

I am here with a few Conchango bods; the great Simon Evans, the inimitable HvR and the masculine Matt Mould. As you can see from the picture below, we are not in competition with The Chippendales.

Enough of the sex…This picture was taken just before Ray Ozzie announced the new windows platform in the sky, sorry Cloud, Windows Azure. Previously known as Reddog, this is a significant initiative and a big bet that there is a mayor market for utility and scale computing is a world outside of the enterprise.

I will not repeat the blurb here as i am sure it will already be well blogged about, but the key objectives are;

Scalable Hosting. Federated data centers and on demand horizontal scale.

Automated Services. Automatic management of release and upgrade. Managed by a magical thing called the Fabric Controller.

High availability. DR, Global deployment, replicated storage, partitioning…all baked into the platform and from an application perspective, for free!

and as you would expect, all deliverable with the rich developer experience you have come to expect with Visual studio, VS tools, Local testing (read Cloud Cassini ) .

Oh did I mention federated security and a secure service bus in the sky allowing for firewall sympathetic connectivity to your enterprise LOB applications.

There is a lot to digest here and time will tell if this really is the 5th generation of computing, but be very clear; this is a significant investment and although not betting the farm on this, Microsoft are stepping up once again and taking a pretty big punt.

Next episode. Hanging with ScottG, well almost.

VSTS Blogs

2006-05-04T09:15:00Z

I am doing some work automating various aspects of Team System right now and especially focusing on Version control…more to follow on this.

In my trawling I have come across a few (only a few) blogs which are indispensable if you plan get mean with TFS and I though I’d list a few…

Firstly a big shout out has to go to Scott Stansfield’s team at Vertigo Software

http://blogs.vertigosoftware.com/teamsystem

Of course we need to mention the MS team, which is best captured on this page…

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/community/blogs

Particular mention here (from my perspective) goes to Rob Caron and Buck Hodges

Martin Woodward’s blog is worth a look

http://www.woodwardweb.com/vsts

…and I suppose I should also mention Colin Bird and Howard van (Diesel) Rooijen

http://blogs.conchango.com/colinbird

http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen

Lots of good information out there, but we are still lacking some comprehensive API documentation from Microsoft ;)

Rob.

Microsoft Architect Insight Conference

2006-03-27T12:24:00Z

As you may know, I was lucky enough to speak at the Architects Insight Conference last week. All went well with the presentation and it seemed to be well recieved...I'll let youknow the feedback scores.

The conference was a great event with a good mix of speakers and architects from different backgrounds. I believe the intention is to hold this event annually and i will certainly be looking to attend the next one.

I witnessed a number of interesting debates, from our CTO, Colin Bird, slugging it out with Ivar Jacobson on Scrum (and Real agile) vs EssUP and Martin fowler’s “what is an architect anyway” um…speech J

I myself had cause to take issue with David Sprott from the CBDI about his appreciation and understanding of agile delivery techniques and his comparison to RAD (blood boiling just repeating it). Please keep an eye on this blog as I will be attempting to educate Mr Sprott and discuss why Agile is not RAD and why RAD was BAD.

Service oriented Business Intelligence.

2006-03-20T14:37:00Z

Service oriented Business Intelligence.

For quite some time now, a small group of undesirables have been studiously working away of some cool thinking and approaches to a common architectural challenge; “How do the world of Service Orientation and Business Intelligence (including ETL, Data warehousing and reporting for our purposes) sit together and can we learn from each other?

Sean Gordon (Microsoft), Michael Horne (Conchango), Simon Thurman (Microsoft) and I were lucky enough to come across a real life problem which needed solving and if you are so disposed you can read about it in the current version of the Microsoft Architect Journal (http://www.architecturejournal.net/2006/issue6/).

Sean and I are also presenting about this at the forthcoming UK Architects Insight Conference (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=260640&SiteID=1)

Thanks go out to Mick, Sean and Simon.