Check a lively discussion on stackoverflow at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/270401/is-oslo-going-to-make-the-role-of-developer-obsolete
Once in every few years we come across vendors who make such bold predictions. In this case MS has not made any such predictions but hysteria is already being generated in the community.
My opinion is Oslo kind of technology and integrated tools are a way forward in the software engineering and would make developer job easier. These tools would help us focus on solving unsolved problems instead of solving the repetitive problems many a times.
What do you think?
In this blog we will see how to unfold multiple projects using Microsoft Blueprints. Unfolding default project or single project is quite easy. We will start with default and single project first and then see what extra needs to be done for multiple projects.
Continue reading "Unfolding Multiple Projects using Blueprints" »
Cloud computing is a new style of computing which packages computing resources such as processing power, storage, connectivity etc as a service and delivering the same to the consumer in a scale-free, cost efficient and timely manner over the web. Applications get into production much quicker than the traditional models by which applications are provisioned. This entails a shift in the way applications would be built, executed and also managed in the future.
In an attempt to understand the financial implications of the new cloud based model used for deploying and running web applications over the traditional client server web application model a little better, we shall discuss this in the context of a hypothetical scenario which would highlight differences one would observe in both the cases.
Continue reading "Remote deployment of Clickonce application on IIS 7" »
As stated on the Codeplex link, the ‘Silverlight Toolkit’ is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle.
It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. It includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input. The December 2008 release has some interesting improvements and features that should excite Designers.Continue reading "Silverlight Toolkit: Support for UX Design" »
Here are some of my thoughts on this:
1. The current version of the SDS entity design is based on a free-form schema-less model unlike the rigid schema based approach which most RDBMS such as SQL Server, Oracle work on. SDS builds on an Entity definition model wherein the data object constructs gets abstracted to a much higher level. The approach makes the process of low-level object creation such as tables, constraints, relations etc… a job of the SDS layer. As far as the End user is concerned he/she would only be concerned about the Entity definition, this will include attributes along with the data types of those attributes. Though relationships are not supported in the current version of SDS, which the SDS team intents to provide in some future version .And this should not be difficult, they can be inferred easily from the entity object associations which could translate to a low-level parent key- foreign key relationships in the RDBMS parlance
MS released Windows Azure at the PDC 2008, a code name used for the work done as a part of the Azure (MS Cloud) initiative. More details on these are available at
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx
Continue reading "Windows on the Cloud released at the PDC 2008!" »
Suppose an enterprise has a set of services that it feels can be exposed to the internet for business or for its own usage, there are two ways to address it.
1) Setup the services on a DMZ thereby exposing the services in a secure manner to the internet.
2) Open up ports on the enterprise firewall to allow inbound access from outside machines to the services running. [This is not allowed as it has the potential to allow users to exploit the enterprise network]
The first mode of setting up a DMZ is the preferred way, but its limitation would be allowing access of DMZ machines onto the enterprise network. If the DMZ needs to access internal systems like a Mainframe, then there could be deployment and security issues.
Continue reading "Enterprise systems available on the cloud as services" »
If you have been following updates on Silverlight (SL) 2, you would already be aware of SL 2 Toolkit on codeplex. Scott in his blog has shared some amazing numbers on usage of SL and also given some indicators to where SL is headed in its next version.
I had been away from SL for some time due to other focus areas. However I decided to try my hands on the support for themes, a feature added with SL Toolkit.
One of my colleague, Archana Sachin Ghag who is a key member of our software factory team has just finished writing a Blueprints Walkthrough. I am sharing this walkthrough with rest of the development community hoping it may act as a jumpstart for your Blueprints adoption.
Before you start creating your own Blueprint using Microsoft’s Blueprint Manger go through this article which introduces Blueprint Concept and Blueprint Manager. To start building your own Blueprint, Blueprint Manager comes with “Microsoft Blueprint Factory” which is nothing but a Blueprint itself.
Continue reading "Microsoft Blueprint Walkthrough – Creating My First Blueprint" »
Installing SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition RTM on one of my desktop having Windows Vista has been a nightmarish experience for me. The setup always failed at the end while running post installation scripts with an error message “Access is denied”. I tried running setup with all possible security settings that I could have but of no avail.
Continue reading "Problem Installing SQL Server 2008 on a Vista Box" »
Before we start discussing Microsoft Blueprints technology, let us try to answer this simple question: Do you have structured and systematic reuse practices in place? Please don’t rush to the answer because when one says “reuse”, the first thing that comes to mind is “code” reuse and our answer is mostly based on this perception. To bring objectivity while explaining the concept of reuse we should think in terms of reuse of intangible assets like reuse of knowledge, intelligence, domain/technical expertise etc. You might have gone through the situation when an experienced person quits the team and you find yourself struggling to meet the deadlines. Why? Because, we always tend to reuse the person itself rather than his/her knowledge or intellect. And a time comes when you become heavily dependent on that person to implement defined procedures and processes. So, the question is why do we need to re-invent the wheel when ideally we can embed all of our intellect and expertise inside a workflow based process-oriented tool and reuse that tool itself to implement a particular aspect or process during software development lifecycle or develop a particular feature of a specific type of application for example, implementing MVC pattern for your web application or implementing Single Sign-On or implementing a Data Access Layer using Entity Framework. There are a multitude of scenarios where you can use this kind of a tool tightly integrated with your development environment to provide step by step guidance to build a finished product.
Continue reading "Microsoft Blueprints - Building Process Oriented Contextual Guidance" »
Continue reading "Cloud computing made possible with Azure" »
Here's something that I accidently noticed today. Inside of a command prompt, of you type "cmd" (to launch a commonad prompt), it treats this as a new instance, though no new windows is opened. Now if you type "exit", the command window still stays since there were effectively two instances. Only when you type "exit" the second time, will the command window close.
This can go on at any level (I didn't really try too many levels). You can also easily make out the # instances by looking at the title bar. Every time you type "cmd" at a command prompt, you will see "- cmd" get added to the title. With every "exit" one of these goes away till you are back to the default title you had started up with and another "exit" will close the window.
My name is Jitendra and I am a Principal Architect on Cloud Computing work we are doing at Infosys. Microsoft announced their Cloud Computing platform “Azure” last week and with that also made lot of the technologies which we were working with them as public information. This enables me to blog on the work we were doing with Microsoft since last 8 months around their Cloud Computing platform.
I did a session at the Microsoft Professional Developer conference event last week where Microsoft announced the Azure platform. My session was a walkthrough on one of the Partner Integration solutions we developing on this Azure Platform. You may view the recording of the session on the channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB56/. Infosys Case Study on this can also we found at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/casestudies.mspx.
Enabling partner integration and extending the enterprise boundaries to external partners and customers is one of the core enabling functions of a Cloud computing platform. This gives enterprises an incredible value to expand their boundaries to public facing endpoints and make the overall business process more straight through. For instance, the AReIS solution described above helps dealers to collaborate and share information with other Dealers over cloud based infrastructure. In my next blog I would touch upon the how we used the appliance based architectures patterns to realize the solution and why such patterns would be more relevant in the world of cloud computing for large Enterprises
Continue reading "Using Triggers for Specifying WPF User Experience Elements" »
