Microsoft's Unified communications

"Unified communications will drive the next major advancement in individual, team and organizational productivity in today’s 24x7, always-connected and increasingly mobile work environment," Microsoft Business Division president Jeff Raikes said. "We believe that through software, we can transform business communications (bringing down both its cost and complexity) by now integrating voice communications with the familiar and powerful communications and collaboration experiences provided by Microsoft."

Presenting at PDC 2006

I will be presenting at PDC 2006 in Karachi. I will doing three sessions. One on Smart Clients and two on Architecture. For more details about the event and agende please check out PDC Web Site.

If you read my blog and will be visiting PDC then do meet me I would like hear your comments and suggestions.

Excellent read on enterprise agility

I was skimming through CIO.com and came across this excellent article.
The Struggle to Define Agility
Let me know how do you find it.

Breaking News--Bill Gates Bowing Out

Breaking News--Bill Gates Bowing Out:

"Bill Gates has begun the process of leaving Microsoft, the company he co-founded 31 years ago, to spend more time on his charitable work, it was announced yesterday. The plan calls for a two-year transition out of day-to-day activities. The evolution will begin immediately for Gates, who is giving up the chief software architect title, and it will continue through July 2008, at which point he will work only part time. The move comes amid a period of re-organization at the world's largest software company, and signals more changes to come. "

Download WCF documentation June 2 update

Download here

.net 3.0

Another name change :(!
Just when people started getting used to WinFX and its underlying technologies... they have changed the name again :-/

According to S.Somasegar

When speaking to developers about WinFX one question that repeatedly comes up is, “WinFX sounds great, but what happens to .NET?” .NET Framework has becomes the most successful developer platform in the world. Developers know and love .NET.

The .NET Framework has always been at the core of WinFX, but the WinFX brand didn’t convey this. The WinFX brand helped us introduce the incredible innovations in terms of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and the newly christened Windows CardSpace (WCS) formerly known under the codename “InfoCard.” The brand also created an unnatural discontinuity between previous versions of our framework and the current version.

With this in mind we have decided to rename WinFX to the .NET Framework 3.0. .NET Framework 3.0 aptly identifies the technology for exactly what it is – the next version of our developer framework.

The change is in name only and will not affect the technologies being delivered as part of the product. The .NET Framework 3.0 is still comprised of the existing .NET Framework 2.0 components, including ASP.NET, WinForms, ADO.NET, additional base class libraries and the CLR, as well as new developer-focused innovative technologies in WPF, WCF, WF and WCS:

So lets embrace .net 3.0 and keep .net rocking!

Developer Highway Code

Excellent gift from MSDN UK site.

To build software that meets your security objectives, you must integrate security activities into your software development lifecycle. This handbook captures and summarises the key security engineering activities that should be an integral part of your software development processes.

These security engineering activities have been developed by Microsoft patterns & practices to build on, refine and extend core lifecycle activities with a set of security-specific activities. These include identifying security objectives, applying design guidelines for security, threat modelling, security architecture and design reviews, security code reviews and security deployment reviews.


Download it here

Some interesting and useful stuff for Smart Clients

MSDN biweekly newsletter is always a useful source of updates and relevant information. Through MSDN newsletter i got to browse GDN (www.gotdotnet.com) which again is an excellan and very useful resource specially for patterns practices guidelines. Following are a few useful links that got me to read and explore some really useful stuff.

1- Smart Client Project Software Factory:
The factory is believe to provide an effective way for architects, dev leads and developers to create high-quality baselines for their smart client applications, addressing non-trivial design and development challenges. The factory will provide reusable assets, guidance and examples for solving those challenges in the most common scenarios. The guidance will be open, so you will be able to customize it to fit your specific needs.

Mobile Client Software Factory:
It includes a port of the Composite UI Application Block to the .NET Compact Framework. Mobile Client Software Factory – Community Technical Preview This new patterns & practices software factory extends Visual Studio 2005 with additional guidance that helps to automate designing and developing occasionally-connected mobile client applications (such as hand held field data collection). The resulting application architecture is both extensible and fully customizable. NOTE - This software factory is leveraging the patterns and design from the Smart Client Composite UI Application Block implemented on the .NET Compact Framework.