Brian H. Prince

The Patterns & Practices group at Microsoft has released version 2.0 of the PRISM framework. PRISM is a framework you can use you easily build loosely coupled composed applications. This new version supports both WPF and Silverlight! That is totally awesome. I believe that we should focus on only writing the code that only we can write, and to leverage frameworks and components to provide the infrastructure and cross cutting concerns for our systems. This is a key way to provide more value to your business, and to reduce costs and time. There are plenty of other ways, like TDD, agile, pairing, etc. But this post is about PRISM, and there are far more smarter people than I to learn about those other practices from. PRISM helps you create modules in your application. For example, a screen might have a list of upcoming appointments, and a section highlighting some tasks the user has to accomplish before the selected appointment. Each of these pieces would be a component. But they ...

Looking for something to do this weekend? How about a series of small, low calorie, bite sized videos on how to work with Azure? Check these out. These are great training videos. Everyone is interested in Azure, and cloud computing, and everyone is looking for resources to get up to speed quickly. This is the next best thing to downloading the SDK and hacking out some code. Overall Page Visit here for the full summary of videos   Get Started Developing on Windows Azure? If you’re a developer and you’re new to Windows Azure, start here! You’ll see what you need to download and install, and how to create a simple “Hello World” Windows Azure application.   Deploy a Windows Azure Application You’ll see what it takes to move your application into the cloud – you’ll see how to request and re...

Dave was hanging around the awesome CodeMash event this January, when he asked to interview me for his blogged. So we snuck out to the entryway of the Kalahari, and chatted about my experience at being a new employee of Microsoft. He had good timing in publishing the video, since this past Wednesday was my one year anniversary as a blue badge. Go check it out. http://www.davidgiard.com/2009/02/23/BrianPrinceOnWorkingForMicrosoft.aspx

Some of my colleagues have worked with IT Pros in the community to start a new user group focused on Exchange and Windows. If you need to manage these systems, and want to learn how to really leverage them, this is the group for you. CEWUG Registration Link What: http://cewug.spaces.live.com/blog/ · Please join us for the first meeting of the Columbus Exchange & Windows User Group (CEWUG).  The goal of CEWUG is to help businesses, public sector and home users to optimize their knowledge of Windows, Exchange, Office Collaboration Server, System Center, Dynamics and Virtualization. · The goal of the CEWUG is to build relationships with peers, share expertise and involvement with the central Ohio IT community. · We will meet the 4 th   Wednesday of the month at the MS Columbus Office: 8800 Lyra Dr , Suite 400, Columbus, OH  43240 Agenda: § 5:30 to 6:05: Welcome time; meet the MS steering committee, pizza and beverages § 6:05 to 7:05: Windows 7 Overview...

During the upcoming ArcReady tour, I will be sitting in on a KNOThead meeting. The meeting is at EdFinancial, and is from 5:30-8:00pm on 3/10/2008. We will talk about cloud computing, and how this shift is affecting our organizations, especially during this time of grapefruit. So come out for ArcReady, and hang around for the KNOThead meeting.   Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN

No matter how you slice it, the economy is definitely in a state of concern. Some call it a recession, some a depression, others it is a crash. Since all of those words are overloaded, I will choose to use the word Grapefruit to represent the current situation. How concerned you are with grapefruit depends on who you are, and your personal situation. It is these times of grapefruit when there is the most opportunity. Crazy, I know. But now is the time to start that crazy idea, to outmaneuver an opponent, or get desperate enough to take risks you normally wouldn’t take (personally, or as a company) during up times. All boats float in the high tide. Only great captains can navigate the low tide. There is no such thing as job security. Surprise. There just isn’t, it is a complete myth. ‘Job Security’ might have made sense two generations ago, but it just doesn’t work now. You make your own security, during good times, and during grapefruits. Through keeping your skills sharp, thro...

The third aspect of Azure storage is the table structure. BLOBs answer how to manage unstructured data in your cloud application, and tables answer how to manage your structured date. Tables, like the rest of Azure, are designed to be super scalable. You can easily store billions of rows, and terabytes of data, and still get great performance. Because the tables are part of Azure, the table data is always available, and triple replicated for reliability. Accessing tables is easy using ADO.NET Data Services, which should be familiar to most .NET developers. ADO.NET DS uses normal .NET classes and LINQ to access your data. If you don’t want to access sit with ADO.NET, you can easily use REST, so any platform can make queries and calls into the data. Each account can have many tables of data. Each table contains entities, which are like rows in a traditional database. Each entity is indentified with a composite key. The first half is the partition key , which identities which partit...

[TechNetUnleashed has two siblings, ArcReady , and MSDN Unleashed . For some reason we haven’t unleashed ArcReady yet.] Windows Server 2008 In this session we will look at Windows Server 2008 and the improvements that have been made to Microsoft’s premier server operating system.  Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is the most advanced Windows Server operating system yet, designed to power the next generation of networks, applications, and Web services. With Windows Server 2008 you can develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences and applications, provide a highly secure network infrastructure, and increase technological efficiency and value within your organization. Windows Server 2008 introduces several new capabilities including 64bit virtualization, a robust web and development platform, improvements in networking, security, high availability and disaster recovery.  In addition, there is a new “Core” installation option that...

[MSDN Unleashed has two siblings, ArcReady , and TechNet Unleashed . For some reason we haven’t unleashed ArcReady yet.] Enhance your coding capabilities with new tools, tips, and inside secrets from MSDN Events. You’ll see how developing for a Windows Mobile phone leverages your current coding skills and can make it simple to build, deploy and debug cool new devices. Additionally, we’ll be showing you how to take full advantage of the Visual Studio debugger. We’ll offer some great tips and tricks to help you debug faster and more efficiently, while applying fresh techniques to ramp up your problem solving abilities.   Session 1: Tips & Tricks for the Visual Studio 2008 Debugger The Visual Studio debugger is a highly underutilized tool for many developers. In this session, you’ll learn how to use it like a pro, while picking up new techniques to fast-forward your problem solving and debugging a...

[ArcReady has two siblings, MSDN Unleashed , and TechNet Unleashed . For some reason we haven’t unleashed ArcReady yet.] For our next ArcReady, we will explore a topic on everyone’s mind: Cloud computing. Several industry companies have announced cloud computing services. In October 2008 at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the next phase of our Software + Services vision: the Azure Services Platform. The Azure Services Platform provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on premises environments or the internet. Session 1 : Cloud Services In our first session we will explore the current state of cloud services. We will then look at how applications should be architected for the cloud and explore a reference application deployed on Windows Azure. We will also look at the services that can be built for on premises application, using .NET Services. We will also address some of the concerns that enterprises have about cloud servi...

I have always wanted to be able to just speak into my phone to store simple reminders. There is the voice note application built in, but it just doesn’t work smoothly for me. And you end up with all of these .wav files all over the place. There is 'jott' , where you call a number to save your reminder. They turn it into text, and send it to your inbox. I tried it a few years ago, but I never really fell in love it. While these two mechanisms work ok, they both make retrieval difficult once you have built up a fair amount of recordings. Microsoft Research has released a CTP of some technology they have been developing. Recite is a Windows Mobile application. You simply click “Remember” to record all of your reminders. Click “Search” to ask your notes a question. Recite figures out what you are asking, and finds the related recorded note. Watch the video below, and get all of the latest information at http://recite.microsoft.com . Just thinking about how they have to sear...

I have always been interested in the internals of operating systems, and the science behind the engineering. One of those aspects is reading and writing to storage, and how that can be done in an efficient and performant manner. The Engineering Windows 7 blog has posted how they work with hard disks, and how disk defragmentation has changed over the versions of Windows. It is a very interesting read. I wouldn’t dig into the comments, like usual, they are filled with trolls and flame wars. Oh well. If you haven’t been reading this blog, and you have any interest in OSs or in Windows 7, I highly recommend it. It is an open and honest discussion on the building of Windows 7 by the people actually building it. The posts are detailed, and explain some of the decisions that the Windows team has to make, and how they make them. Balancing all of the different interests and different use models and different users is quite challenging. Here is my short summary, but you really should just g...

This is how you can score an easy $5,000. Think up, design, and build an awesome game in Silverlight. Just submit it to the Server Quest II contest site. Then get all of your friends and family to vote for it. The game with the most votes wins some awesome cash. The deadline is 78 days from now, so go get cracking. The website has a cool trailer, done in the 16bit graphics style of yore. Really funny stuff. But your game can be on anything, it doesn’t have to sync up with the Server Quest plot. Video: Server Quest Trailer How about a package delivery and retrieval simulator, that is multiplayer, and allows you to collect equipment, cash, and friends? Call it FedCraft. Or a real time strategy game that is centered around giant configurable robots doign battle with a background story about different clans competing for a diminishing pool of critical resources. Call it WreckWarrior. Perhaps a puzzle game that tracks progress in a community leader board way mixed with a bureauc...

The other day I discussed using Queues in Azure , and why you would want to. Today, we will talk about using BLOBs. First a bit about BLOBs. BLOB stands for B inary L arge OB ject, and is a way to store binary data. Up until now, whenever I used BLOBs it was as a column type in SQL Server and Oracle Server. This was always challenging for me because the APIs to store and read BLOBs were a pain, and hard to use. At least for me. The other problem was related to maintenance on the database server. Your database will get very big, very quickly by storing images and videos in the database. There may be some very good reasons for you to do this, but for me, in the past, the tax was too high. The approach I generally took was to store the image in a folder somewhere, and store the path and filename in the database. This did create a maintenance issue, in that we have to backup the file folder, and make sure it was transactionally in sync with the database backup. That is a whole different ...

The Northwest .NET Users Group has been kind enough to invite me to speak at their February meeting. It will be on 2/17 at 6:00p – 8:00p, located at 333 North Summit Street, Toledo, Oh . I will be speaking on cloud computing, what it can mean to you, and what the Azure Services Platform is. Given enough time, we will even look at some code. I hope to see you there!

Many modern systems are now being designed with SOA principles in mind. This usually means they are designed as a composite application of several services working together. As part of this structure, you usually need a way for the different services to communicate. A common way is to use an Enterprise Service Bus, or even just naked, direct SOAP calls. This works when the systems are synchronous in nature. But if the service you are leveraging is very asynchronous, meaning it is more like a back end processor, or bulk processor, then you are likely going to end up working with queues. The advantage to queues is that they help enforce some loose coupling to your architecture. Just make sure that you pick a queue-ing technology that supports the protocols the consumers will need (ie SOAP, REST, COM+, etc.) If you are working with Azure, then you can easily leverage the queue infrastructure already build into the storage fabric of Azure. Before you dive in, there are a few things you...