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Good Books
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009
In the last few months, I’ve run across lots of good technical books. Here are a few of my favorites:
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RESTful .NET, by Jon Flanders. Like most former SOAPafarians, I’ve come to be a big believer in the value of REST. SOAP still has value, but a RESTful approach is better in plenty of situations. Microsoft’s WCF added explicit REST support a while ago, and Jon’s book is the best introduction I’ve seen to building RESTful services in .NET. Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword to this book, and I was really happy to do it. Jon is just great at what he does.
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Programming Entity Framework, by Julia Lerman. Any technology that attempts to provide an object/relational mapping seems to attract controversy, and the ADO.NET Entity Framework is no exception. Whatever your view of the technology, though, you need to get this book if you care at all about the area. Julie provides a very coherent high-level description, along with as much detail (nearly 800 pages) as you’re ever likely to need.
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Microsoft.NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise, by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello. Anybody who is or aspires to be a .NET architect should buy and read this book, right now. To my knowledge, there’s nothing else like it available, and it fills a gaping hole in the .NET world.
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97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, edited by Richard Monson-Haefel. I have an embarrassing fondness for books that are full of short, independent essays, especially when they’re on a topic I deeply care about. This book, written by dozens of different people, is a collection of maxims with supporting descriptions on the general theme of software architecture. Like me, you’ll probably disagree with many of them, but hey—that’s half the fun of reading a book like this.
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The Microsoft Application Platform: A Perspective
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Monday, June 22, 2009
I spoke at a Microsoft conference in Holland last month, and a video of one of the talks I gave is now online. Its title is
The Microsoft Application Platform: A Perspective, and it covers a potpourri of different things: the relationship between application platforms and business strategy, a simple model for thinking about application platforms today, a look at the on-premises and cloud platforms of various vendors using this model, and more.
Now that I think about it, a better title for this session might have been
Things David Thinks are Interesting in the Application Platform World Today.
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Perspectives on Application Lifecycle Management
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Thursday, June 11, 2009
The first of the four short papers I wrote recently on ALM,
What is Application Lifecycle Management?, was published a few weeks ago. The other three are also now available. They are:
All four were sponsored by Microsoft, but they're not about Microsoft technologies. Instead, they're intended to help IT decision makers think about ALM in a broad sense.
IT innovation is fundamental to creating new value in the world, and ALM is fundamental to IT innovation. Understanding this topic and getting good at it ought to be on the top of every IT organization's agenda.
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On Being Independent
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Thursday, June 04, 2009
If you're interested in working as a technology consultant, either on your own or for a consulting firm, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Aaron Erickson's book
The Nomadic Developer: Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting. It's a first-rate description of the consulting world, looked at from many different angles. Anybody who's even considering this career path ought to buy this book.
The book's last chapter is a collection of short essays contributed by people who've made a career in consulting, including me. Addison-Wesley, the book's publisher, gave me permission to post my contribution. Called
On Being Independent, it's available
here.
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An Update to Introducing the Azure Services Platform
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Monday, June 01, 2009
Microsoft has made some important updates to various parts of the Azure Services Platform. Accordingly, I've updated the overview white paper I wrote on Azure last fall. The new version is available
here.
The biggest change is in SQL Data Services, which now will provide a standard relational datastore. This is really important, as the absence of relational storage was a gaping hole in the original announcement. It's great to see that Microsoft is fixing this.
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An Update on Windows Azure
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Tuesday, May 19, 2009
I sat down with
Bob Familiar from Microsoft last week in Los Angeles to talk about Windows Azure and cloud computing in general. Bob's a smart guy (and a fellow musician), and I really enjoyed the conversation. If you're interested, the video of our discussion is
here.
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