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New ITG Series Book: Understanding SCA  
# Monday, July 20, 2009
 
One of the things I do is act as series editor for Addison-Wesley's Independent Technology Guides. The latest book in this series, Understanding SCA (Service Component Architecture), has just been published. Written by Jim Marino and Michael Rowley, it's like all the other books in the ITG series: an intro to an important new area.

We sometimes describe the series as containing the first book a developer should read and the only book that developer's manager needs to read. Toward this end, Understanding SCA provides a broad overview of the topic along with enough depth to give you a solid grasp of the basics.

I continue to believe that SCA gets less attention than it should (including from the vendors that claim to support it). Perhaps the publication of Jim and Mike's book will help change this. SCA is unquestionably an interesting technology.

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Windows Azure and ISVs: A Guide for Decision Makers  
# Tuesday, July 14, 2009
 
New platforms, including Windows Azure, are successful only if people write applications for them. This implies that one of the most important audiences for Windows Azure--maybe the most important--is independent software vendors (ISVs). Just as ISVs have adapted to new platforms in the past, they now need to decide how to adapt to cloud platforms like Windows Azure.

To help them sort through the options, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored paper (available here) that's aimed at ISV decision makers. My goal in the paper is to explain how and why ISVs might use a cloud platform like Windows Azure, as well to illuminate some of the challenges.

Using the cloud certainly isn't appropriate for every app and every ISV. Still, ignoring this new platform style strikes me as potentially suicidal. There's no way to avoid coming to grips with this emerging world.

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Good Books  
# Wednesday, July 01, 2009
 
In the last few months, I’ve run across lots of good technical books. Here are a few of my favorites:

- RESTful .NET, by Jon Flanders. Like most former SOAPafarians, I’ve come to be a big believer in the value of REST. SOAP still has value, but a RESTful approach is better in plenty of situations. Microsoft’s WCF added explicit REST support a while ago, and Jon’s book is the best introduction I’ve seen to building RESTful services in .NET. Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword to this book, and I was really happy to do it. Jon is just great at what he does.

- Programming Entity Framework, by Julia Lerman. Any technology that attempts to provide an object/relational mapping seems to attract controversy, and the ADO.NET Entity Framework is no exception. Whatever your view of the technology, though, you need to get this book if you care at all about the area. Julie provides a very coherent high-level description, along with as much detail (nearly 800 pages) as you’re ever likely to need.

- Microsoft.NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise, by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello. Anybody who is or aspires to be a .NET architect should buy and read this book, right now. To my knowledge, there’s nothing else like it available, and it fills a gaping hole in the .NET world.

- 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, edited by Richard Monson-Haefel. I have an embarrassing fondness for books that are full of short, independent essays, especially when they’re on a topic I deeply care about. This book, written by dozens of different people, is a collection of maxims with supporting descriptions on the general theme of software architecture. Like me, you’ll probably disagree with many of them, but hey—that’s half the fun of reading a book like this.

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