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.

.NET Rocks has had a slew of architecture related guests recently. Rocky, Tim and now Clemens. Carl and Rory, keep up the good work!

All it takes is one bad trip to remind me why I took a job that only requires a handful of trips a year. Pat mentioned that this is the week of our big annual internal training event in Atlanta. We had a two day pre-training event for all our field architects. (which explains the lack of posts around here.) We need to keep them in the know about the content and programs we are working on back at corporate, plus these are great bunch of people so it’s always nice to hang out with them. Too bad the travel has been such a nightmare.

My flights into and out of Atlanta were each several hours late. Getting an elevator in the hotel took forever – once over 15 minutes! The 70-story Westin was booked to capacity, and I guess everyone wanted an elevator at 8am in the morning. But given that “booked to capacity” is a desirable state for any hotel, why didn’t they design for that eventuality? I mean, it’s not exactly an edge case scenario. Then, I left the pre-training early to visit a customer in Minneapolis. The customer meeting went great, but we had a miscommunication on the meeting time and I missed my flight home. So now I’m hanging around the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport hoping to get home flying standby.

It was pointed out to me that I’m not supposed to be visiting customers anymore, and after this trip I’m inclined to agree. However, you can’t solve real world problems if you don’t get out and experience real world customers and their real world problems from time to time. Usually, I meet with customers who come for executive briefings on campus. This meeting in Minneapolis grew out of one of those on-campus briefings. And since I was on the road anyway, I didn’t think it would be a big. Next time, I think I’ll opt to attend via Live Meeting.

For TechEd, we got a big banner to hang in the lunch room to advertise Architecture Center. When we got it back, we hung it in the atrium of building 18 – our new home. Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? In the pic, from left to right, are my boss Adam Denning, yours truly (in desperate need of a haircut) and John deVadoss. Massive thanks to Richard and Megan who got the banner hung in the first place.