Is it obvious that I’ve been rounding up bloggers on my extended team of architects and architect evangelists? Here’s another: Raj Wall blogged the first of what appears to be several posts about Patterns of Successful Software Projects. I like this as it really starts to expand the idea of what is a pattern. If you look at EASOT, you’ll notice a “Development Architecture Viewpoint” that has the following description:

The development architecture viewpoint is concerned with implementing the other architectures. Applications must be built and maintained in a systematic, efficient manner. The development architecture is composed of elements related to this effort, such as design and development tools, repositories, build master utilities, test suites, tracking tools, and other tools.

In my TheServerSide.net Tech Talk, I pointed out that Test Driven Development is a pattern. I know there are a lot more development architecture patterns. Raj’s post starts to define the terms in this area of the pattern space. Can’t wait to see what Raj has to say about project context – the more I work with patterns, the more important I realize context is.

A couple new MSFT architect bloggers to note. Maarten, author of the recent Dealing with Concurrency article, details his issues with CRUD. David “Lottery” White has restarted his blog and writes about the practical architect. Bill O'Brein blogs about presenting on patterns at TechEd Europe. Both Simon and Kevin have both been experimenting custom MQ transport providers for WSE2 - Simon using MQ Series and Kevin using MSMQ. Tim Ewald is back in blog on the PluralSight site, blogging about the differences between XSD and OO inheritance. And my old teammate Marley explains the game of Spoons. Not sure what that has to do with architecture, but it appears my old team had a very good time in Atlanta.

Cool thing about blogs – sometimes I learn about stuff happening inside the big house from outside in blogs. Case in point – Scottpointed out to the Lookout download. I also found out about the COmega site from Don (though honestly, I knew about that one before. That is before it changed names.)

Update: Lookout’s download site changed, back to a page on http://lookoutsoft.com instead of a page on http://download.microsoft.com. Strange, but true.

John was just in here admiring my Nomad Zen Xtra. I’ve got nearly 500 albums loaded, over 6000 songs, and I’ve only filled it half way. On my recent trip to Atlanta, I realized I regularly travel with 220 GB of storage. 60GB internal laptop drive, 60GB multibay drive, 60GB Iomega external portable USB drive and the 40GB Nomad Zen. I can even get really obscene and make it a round 300GB, with my new Argosy drive enclosure (thanks to Peter for recommending Argosy) and extra 80GB drive.

I’m behind on blogging. Not just writing, I’m behind on reading blogs as well. I hit 1000 unread posts today, and scrapped them all. I can offer up excuses like I was on the road most of July so far, my son hasn’t been feeling well, the start of the fiscal year is always busy (all true – I had to get up and soothe Patrick back to sleep after he woke up coughing as I wrote this post) but there’s no real point in making excuses. I started an outlook task list of “Shit to Blog” back at TechEd, and so far I’ve only removed two items from the list. Part of the reason for that is that I’ve been reading Software Factories which isn’t generally available, so I’m holding off on blogging my thoughts until the book ships. Next week, I’m off for New Zealand and Australia for TechEd, which is going to be awesome but probably mean still less blogging.