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Windows Azure Architecture Guide Part 1 – Released
2 Jul 2010 
The Microsoft patterns & practices team are up to it again. Fresh on the heels of releasing the Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 guidance, they’ve recently released part 1 of the Windows Azure Architecture Guidance.
What’s in the Windows Azure Architecture Guide – Part 1?
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| The Guide | “Introduction to the Windows Azure Platform”provides an overview of the platform to get you started with Windows Azure. It describes web roles and worker roles, and the different ways you can store data in Windows Azure. It’s probably a good idea that you read this before you go to the scenarios.“The Adatum Scenario” introduces you to the Adatum company and the aExpense application. The following chapters describe how Adatum migrates the aExpense application to the cloud. Reading this chapter will help you understand why Adatum wants to migrate some of its business applications to the cloud, and it describes some of its concerns.
“Getting to the Cloud” describes the first steps that Adatum takes in migrating the aExpense application. Adatum’s goal here is simply to get the application working in the cloud, but this includes “big” issues, such as security and storage. “How Much Will It Cost?” introduces a basic cost model for the aExpense application running on Windows Azure and calculates the estimated annual running costs for the application. This chapter is optional. You don’t need to read it before you go on to the following scenarios. “Automating Deployment and Using Windows Azure Storage” describes how Adatum uses PowerShell scripts and the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) to automate deploying aExpense to Windows Azure. It also describes how Adatum switches from using SQL Azure to Windows Azure Table Storage in the aExpense application and discusses the differences between the two storage models. “Uploading Images and Adding a Worker Role” describes adding a worker role to the aExpense application and shows how aExpense uses Windows Azure Blob Storage for storing scanned images. “Application Life Cycle Management for Windows Azure Applications” discusses how to manage developing, testing, and deploying Windows Azure applications. This chapter is optional. You don’t need to read it before you go on to the last scenario. “Adding More Tasks and Tuning the Application” shows how Adatum adds more tasks to the worker role in the aExpense application. In this phase, Adatum also evaluates the results of performance testing the application and makes some changes based on the results. |
| The companion samples | The samples illustrate all scenarios covered in the book. They provide a “single box” experience with minimal infrastructure requirements. |
Patterns & Practices Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 Released
The Microsoft patterns & practices team has recently released Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 Guidance.
What’s in Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010?
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| The guide | “Application Foundations for SharePoint 2010″ describes approaches you can use to address the challenges of testability, flexibility, configuration, logging and exception handling, and maintainability; it also explains how to use the SharePoint Guidance Library components in these areas.
“Execution Models in SharePoint 2010″ provides deep technical insights into the mechanics of the full-trust execution environment, the sandbox execution environment, and various hybrid approaches to executing code in SharePoint applications. “Data Models in SharePoint 2010″ explains new list and external data functionality and data access techniques, key design decision points that can help you to choose between standard SharePoint lists and external lists, and techniques and patterns to address large lists and list aggregation. “Client Models in SharePoint 2010″ provides guidance on how to best use the new client-side functionality to access data and build richer client experiences with Silverlight and Ajax. Each section also contains a set of how-to topics. These explain how to perform specific tasks that the team found challenging to discover. |
| Reference Implementations | This release includes eight reference implementations that you can deploy to a SharePoint 2010 test environment. The reference implementations reinforce the key concepts in the guide and illustrate how to build applications that reflect real-world scenarios. Each reference implementation includes a detailed scenario and design overview, an explanation of the design decisions the team faced for the implementation, and an installation script to automate setup. This release includes reference implementations for the following scenarios:
|
| The SharePoint Guidance Library | The library is a collection of reusable classes delivered as source code that address common challenges in application development for the SharePoint platform. This release improves on the previous release of the library by adding support for sandboxed solutions and taking advantage of new SharePoint features. The SharePoint Guidance Library consists of three key components:
|
Just released from Patterns & Practices: Developing SharePoint Applications
The Patterns & Practices team has recently released new guidance around building collaborative applications on the SharePoint platform.
The goal of this release is to help customers understand how to develop large scale, content-driven SharePoint applications that extend the value of existing line of business systems. It essentially focuses on three primary objectives:
- Large Scale – Show customers how to build a large scale SharePoint application. This includes guidance on building in the manageability, configurability, and performance expected from large scale applications.
- Content Driven – More advanced SharePoint applications often include many sites and combine custom coded logic with created content. The guidance demonstrates areas like custom navigation and publishing, composing web parts with published information, and managing a consistent UI.
- Extend LOB Systems – SharePoint can aggregate and extend information from Line of Business systems to end users, enhancing structured business process with informal processes through collaboration. The guidance shows how to integrate security considerations into business services, and demonstrate how to create collaborative sites that help manage business events like incident escalations and order exceptions.
This release integrates new guidance with the original release of the SharePoint Guidance – November 2008 guidance (now retired) into a single download.
The guidance package contains the following components:
| Component | Description |
| SharePoint Guidance Library | A set of reusable components that helps developers manage configuration, build repositories for SharePoint lists, log traces and events, and use service location. |
| Guide | The documentation includes a variety of topics, such as how to use design and application patterns, how to integrate LOB systems with SharePoint applications, building scalable applications, upgrading SharePoint applications, and using SharePoint capabilities to create, and deploy content. It also includes the design decisions made for the Partner Portal and Training Management applications and explanations of their implementations. |
| Contoso Partner Portal Reference Implementation | This SharePoint application shows how Contoso created an extranet where it can interact with its partners. Among the items demonstrated are techniques for building manageable and scalable enterprise applications, and how to incorporate publishing and page composition features, flexible navigation, collaboration sites, and LOB integration. It includes more advanced techniques than the Training Management reference implementation and requires Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2. |
| Contoso Training Management Reference Implementation | This SharePoint application illustrates how the Contoso Human Resources department manages its training course offerings. It shows how to solve many basic SharePoint challenges that you might encounter when you develop your own applications. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is required. |
To download this release, click here.
Unity v1.2 for Silverlight Released
Quick Links
MSDN Site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd362339
Community Forum: http://codeplex.com/unity
Description:
The Patterns & Practices team has recently released a port of the Unity Application Block to Microsoft Silverlight 2. This release includes the following capabilities and packaging:
- The single Microsoft.Practices.Unity.dll file in the Silverlight version contains all the classes from the three separate desktop DLLS: Microsoft.Practices.Unity.dll, Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder2.dll, and Microsoft.Practices.Unity.StaticFactoryExtension.dll. You only need to reference and deploy the one assembly in your Silverlight projects.
- Becase of the differences in the Silverlight security model, only public types can be created and injected by the container. The desktop version allows you to also inject internal types.
- XML configuration is not supported.
- The Unity interception mechanism is not supported.
An updated quickstart is also included.
Application Architecture “Pocket Guides” Now Available
There have been a number of customer inuqiries to the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide 2.0 team for smaller, more focused guides. As a result, the team has created a series of application architecture pocket guides based on our Application Architecture Guide 2.0. Each guide is focused on a particular topic. We prioritized topics based on customer demand. Some customers wanted a focused guide on just the Agile Architecture Method, while others wanted a focused guide on the particular type of applications they build (Web, Rich Client, … etc.)
Application Architecture Pocket Guides
Here’s the initial set of pocket guides:
- Agile Architecture Method Pocket Guide
- Web Application Architecture Pocket Guide
- Mobile Application Architecture Pocket Guide
- RIA Architecture Pocket Guide
- Rich Client Application Architecture Pocket Guide
- Service Architecture Pocket Guide
You can browse the index of pocket guides at the pocket guide index page at our Application Architecture KB on CodePlex.
