I’m sure lots of people are blogging a ton about PDC stuff, but I wanted to call out two things quickly.

First is Microsoft Max. I have a friend on this team, so I’ve heard a bunch about this. Given the number of pictures I have taken of my kids, I can’t wait to play with this in earnest.

Second is LINQ or Language Integrated Query and it’s use in C# 3.0 and VB 9.0. I started to write a language a few years ago called Dart (named after my dog) that had SQL-esque commands that were strongly typed. So I’m really impressed with what they’ve acomplished in LINQ. Not only is it doing strongly typed queries in the lanugage, they even can do joins across stores! In the keynote demo, they joined a query of running processes with data from a database. So now any C# or VB developer has their – or should I say will have their – own query processor around at the ready!

Michael cornered me on Tuesday to record a PDC05 Buzzcast with Mike Burner about the Architecture Symposium. At PDC03, the Architecture Symposium was one of the more popular and successful aspects of the overall confernece (though it was marred by a major room change issue that caused literally hundreds of attendees to be forced to watch from the hallway outside as the room was literally overflowing) and we’re looking to do something engaging again this year.

Like last time, the Architecture Symposium will be held the last day of the conference, Friday from 8:30 until noon (with breaks of course). After lunch, we’ll have a panel discussion featuring Gregor Hohpe, David Ing, Tony Redmond, Steve Swartz.

Here’s the full symposium abstract:

You’ve had a tantalizing week of cool technology, but now you need to transition back to your real job: making all of the pieces work together. The PDC Architecture Symposium will zoom you through the solutions lifecycle – from requirements to modeling to requirements to iterative development to requirements to operational feedback (which you might look at as another set of requirements) – showing you how traditional best practices and recent innovations can be used together to build robust solutions that accelerate business value creation.

Topics include:

The Architecture of Connected Systems
In the beginning there are the models – from the thing you scrawl on a napkin at lunch to that enormously complex diagram that your network architect carries around in a cardboard tube. What models are worth creating, and how do they relate to each other? Who are the key stakeholders for each, and how can you help them talk to each other? This session explores how to decompose value chains into your key models – your process and work flows, the information at the heart of your processes, and the access, deployment, and other operational models that you need to stay trustworthy and compliant. We will then map these models into a collection of services, orchestrations, and policies that define a highly integrated solution.

Building Connected Systems
With so much complexity and so many stakeholders, how do you build the right thing on time? This session explores the techniques to iterate agilely through a connected system project, including the patterns and practices for building solutions that combine messaging, workflow, structured information, and human interaction across platforms and across organizational boundaries. How can we give the right access to everyone in the value chain, respecting the very real boundaries around information and process control? How do we keep our models current, and use them to communicate with all of the stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle?

Managing the Connected Systems Lifecycle
As each iteration of your connected system is deployed and used, new requirements and system refinements emerge. How do we design in the operational hooks that give us the insight to learn from our deployed solutions? How do we re-factor and version our services and orchestrations to improve service reuse, scalability and operational efficiency? The key theme is driving collaboration between development and operations groups from the earliest design phase through the ongoing maintenance of the system.

As Michael said on the buzzcast, you just can’t miss the Architecture Symposium. See you there.

The calm before the storm, as they say…

Things have been quiet around here between new baby & final TechEd prep. I think we’re in pretty good shape, though we’ll see how we look tomorrow. One good piece of news is that Dick Carlson, who manages the Hands-on Labs, sent out a list of labs either not received or that have blocking bugs. No ARC track labs on either list. That’s a good sign…

Last night was the track owner dinner at Sea World. Funny, we had a track owner dinner at Sea World last year in San Diego. Is this a trend? It was fun to hang out with the other track owners and drink rather than have to sit around a table and plan. Didn’t get to see Shamu up-close-and-personal like last year, but we did go ride the Kraken roller-coaster. Pretty cool, though reminiscent of Batman at Six Flags in SoCal. One slight bummer – some of us waited extra to ride in the front, but I was to big for those seats! And it wasn’t a weight problem (though I could certainly use some work on that front), it was a barrel chest problem.

Today, my pal Chris is driving up from Hobe Sound and we’re going to hang out this afternoon. I used to see Chris all the time, but then we both switched jobs and he doesn’t have much chance to come out to the left coast. Last time I saw him was at an architect forum last spring in Orlando, when again he drove up to see me. However, I hear there may be a helicopter ride in the cards today, so I’ll try and keep the “when are you coming to see me for a change?” grief to a minimum.

I’ve even gotten a chance to write up some thoughts on two new projects and to play around with the new DSL Toolkit CTP. Of course, having an extended battery for the plane ride was the reason I could do all that.

See you in the cabana on Monday…

So we’re one week out on TechEd. This time next week, the final prep will be done and we’ll be ready to let this thing fly. Some of the core team goes down this week, though as a track owner, I’m not really needed on site until Sunday.

What a difference a year makes. Last year, I was freaking out – it was my first TechEd. Now I feel like the old hand at this. Of course, I wouldn’t have made it through last year with out the assistance of a few key individuals. Among others was Esther, who just started blogging for this year’s TechEd. She’s got a long post about the track cabanas. Last year, they were a big hit, but there were a few glitches. Esther writes about some of the changes they made this year to address those issues.

If you’re going to TechEd, make sure to stop by the ARC cabana and say hi.

Shortly after joining the Architecture Strategy Team, we worked with MSDN to re-launch the .NET Architecture Center. While we’ve had good success with that site, we realized after running it for several months that we needed a new approach in order to engage architects of all kinds. While Solution Architects are a key audience of ours that is well served by our MSDN site, there are also enterprise and infrastructure architects that we want to be able to engage with via the website. For these audiences, the MSDN site is not really the optimal channel. So today we’ve launched a new site – the Architecture Resource Center on microsoft.com. We’ve also re-launched the MSDN site, now called the MSDN Solution Architecture Center.

One of the key differences you’ll notice about the sites is that we have a new way of categorizing our content. Previously, we used a topic based approach with categories such as service oriented architecture and application architecture. Now, we have a taxonomy with categories for think ahead, learn more, solve now and share ideas. This gives us a new way of differentiating content such as Metropolis, which really is about the future of architecture, from content such as the Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide, which really is about solving a specific design problems today. Over time, as we add both more content as well as more personalization features, we think this approach will make it much easier for our customers to find the content they are looking for.

Of course, as “community guy”, I’m most excited about the Share Ideas section. In addition to a site wide RSS feed, we also have an aggregate architecture blog (and RSS feed)  featuring both Microsoft architects like myself and Simon Guest as well as and 3rd party architects such as Architect MVP’s Jimmy Nilsson and Barry Gervin as well as Architecture Advisory Board members David Ing and Martin Fowler. There’s info on the new architecture certification, upcoming events and webcasts as well as profiles of my coworkers on the Architecture Strategy Team.

Finally, I’m very excited to announce that JOURNAL is becoming The Architecture Journal and that you can sign up for a free print subscription to this great quarterly publication. We saw a huge traffic spike when JOURNAL was introduced on Architecture Center last spring, so I’m thrilled that that great content will now be available in print format delivered right to your home or office! Watch for print copies of the Best of the Journal issue at TechEd.

Of course, with any new venture, there will be tweaks, hiccups and improvements. Please leave a comment or email me with your thoughts, opinions and suggestions on how we can continue to improve this site to meet the needs of all kinds of architects.