Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

Just saw a friend, Richard Seroter the “Architect Extraordinaire”, publish a new book from Packt – Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform; his second book after SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009. Even though technical books usually don’t make it onto NY Times Best Sellers and that they usually don’t help the authors retire from their full-time jobs, putting one together and making it through the publishing process is still a very significant effort. Thus I just want to say, congrats Richard! :)

The new book covers different architectural perspectives, and provides a nice overview on the latest shipping technologies on the Microsoft enterprise platform including WCF/WF 4.0, Windows Server AppFabric (which is one of the most interesting things on the Microsoft platform today IMO, including the Windows Azure AppFabric), BizTalk Server, SQL Server and StreamInsight, and Windows Azure platform. It then goes into more detail around various types of application and data integration patterns (and at different levels; not just messaging patterns), and discusses the trade-offs and best practices for the multiple solutions that can be used to apply each pattern, and scenarios.

It’s not another one of those “what’s possible with cloud computing” books. The authors took a pragmatic approach to identify and describe today’s real-world architectural issues and patterns, from simple workflows, the requisite pub-sub, content-based routing, message broadcasting, etc., to complex event processing, master data synchronization, handling large data and burst Web traffic; and provided architectural considerations (including on-premises and cloud-based models) and options on how these commonly encountered patterns can be implemented with the components of the Microsoft enterprise platform.

Kudos to the authoring team!