Richard Seroter is a principal architect at an industry-leading biotechnology company, a Microsoft MVP, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced that the first generation objects of their WF technology are being deprecated in the upcoming .NET 4.5 release. WF, which is a workflow engine leveraged by .NET developers as well as a handful of Microsoft server products, has multiple new capabilities in .NET 4.5 while officially putting application that leverage the old .NET 3.0 objects on notice.
The Open Group recently published three standards that aid organizations that are building infrastructure-as-a-service offerings and service oriented architectures. In concert, these standards provide expert advice in the form of best practices, questionnaires, and templates for SOA and cloud-scale infrastructure architecture.
In late December 2011, Microsoft announced the pre-release of a set of services labeled Windows Azure Service Bus EAI Labs. These enhancements to the existing Windows Azure Service Bus make it easier to connect (cloud) applications through the use of message routing rules, protocol bridging, message transformation services and connectivity to on-premises line of business systems.
There are over a dozen Enterprise Architecture certifications available and they are becoming increasingly critical when hiring and evaluating architects. Microsoft’s Mike Walker categorized these certifications into a Reference Guide that can help architects better understand which certification(s) to pursue.
Cloud service provider Tier 3 has released Iron Foundry, a .NET-friendly fork of VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service. Iron Foundry gives the sizeable number of .NET developers an open source alternative to Windows Azure and lets them participate in the increasingly popular Cloud Foundry ecosystem.
Microsoft has released new tools to accelerate development of custom components in Dynamics CRM 2011 solutions. At the same time, they published an update to Dynamics CRM Online that includes better integration with Office 365 and the introduction of social capabilities.
Enterprise Architects may be disproportionally concerned with portfolio consolidation, standardization and simplification instead of offering leadership in business technology innovation. This is the proposition offered by Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins in a recent blog post.
Microsoft HealthVault, the web-based solution launched in 2007 for electronic medical records, recently released new capabilities for end users and platform developers. This release introduced incremental changes to a maturing offering in this emerging area of healthcare IT.
