TechEd is almost upon us – just over one week to go. We had our last track owner meeting yesterday. I’m chasing down speakers for slides (I actually have some already!) and figuring out what seems like a million final details for our track cabana. In addition to the great sessions, we’ve got some cool stuff happening at TechEd this year. Some I can’t quite talk about yet (watch this space) but I did want to remind all TechEd attendees about the Architect Road Rally happening Sunday night, after the precons. Space is limited and subject to first come, first served registration, so register right away!

Since this blog is now being syndicated on Architecture Center, I thought I should repost links to a recent pair of entries I wrote entitled “Is the Middle-Tier Endangered?” and “The Endangered Middle-Tier, Part 2“. The basic premise of the posts is that as computer hardware gets faster and service-orientation aims to carve our course-grained applications into finer-grained services, the value of running the business logic on a separate tier diminishes greatly. Add an improved programming model to the database (such as the CLR’s addition to SQL 2005) and I feel that, eventually, it will make more sense to run the services in-process with the database instead of on a separate tier. We’re not there yet – in addition to continued hardware improvements, we need a major improvement to the overall management infrastructure – but I think it will happen. The question is, do you think it will happen?