In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talked about administering thousands of web servers from a system’s architect viewpoint. He mostly detailed the performance counter monitoring used by MySpace, the system profiler and the system administration site demoing the tools for the audience to see how it works.
In this interview taken by InfoQ’s Ryan Slobojan, Dan Farino, Chief Systems Architect at MySpace, talks about the system architecture and the challenges faced when building a very large online community. Because MySpace is built almost entirely on the .NET Framework, Dan explains how a .NET product scales on hundreds of servers.
InfoQ sat down with Walt Ritscher at VSLive Toronto to talk about WPF, Web 2.0, and Microsoft code naming conventions. Listen to Walt share where he thinks WPF excels and who will build the killer apps in WPF. Walt provides a quick history on AJAX, where to use it and why it took 7 years to become relevant. Walt also lets us in on his new favorite Windows technology, Windows PowerShell.
Microsoft recently announced the Release Candidate of Web Deploy 3.0, their tool for packaging and deploying web applications. The new version includes support for IIS8 on Windows Server 8, PowerShell cmdlets, and automated backup.
Microsoft is starting to release more details on Windows PowerShell Workflow. Also known as PSWF, this feature of PowerShell 3 allows administrators to “reliably executing long-running tasks across multiple computers, devices or IT processes”. Since we are talking about Windows Workflow, the term “long-running” can mean hours or even days.
ThoughtWorks recently published the latest update to its Technology Radar; a report produced to help technology decision makers understand emerging trends in software development techniques, tools, languages and platforms. There are some interesting observations of interest to Agile software development teams.
Microsoft has released a beta of a new tool called Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell. This tool is essentially a specialized search engine for PowerShell scripts. It allows administrators to browse and search for scripts in TechNet Script Center and PoshCode as well as their own corporate repositories.
Microsoft's recently-released WMF 3 Beta includes PowerShell 3, in addition to updates to WMI and WinRM. PowerShell 3 introduces several new features, including workflows, a new scripting environment, and performance improvements.
PowerShell 3 which will be released as a part of Windows Management Framework 3.0 is currently in CTP. Apart from being based on the DLR, it has a lot of new features such as better workflows, simpler syntax, delegation of credentials, robust sessions and more.
PowerGUI brings PowerShell scripting support to Visual Studio. This extension by Quest Software leverages the PowerGUI standalone tool to provide syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, debugging and more for PowerShell scripts inside Visual Studio.
The new Windows Management Framework 3.0 CTP 1 provides Windows administrators with updated tools to more easily manage Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, and the upcoming Windows 8 platforms. This framework has 3 main components: Windows PowerShell 3.0, WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), and WinRM (Windows Remote Management).
