I’ve been trying out Pivot in the last few days, downloaded from here. Pretty amazing thing, crossing the power of DeepZoom with structured information. I can’t help but imagine the application of these technologies to information stored in business databases, intranets, or even as a navigation metaphor in your computer/file system or code. There ...

As reported by IASA, the Certified IT Architect at the Professional Level (CITA-P) has now replaced Microsoft’s Certified Architect (MCA) program. The information about the new certification can be found here. A curiosity: «In the six years of the MCA program, 113 solutions and infrastructure architects completed the certification. The CITA-P ...

Details for Version 2.0 of the BizTalk ESB Toolkit (Brian Loesgen) Complex-Event Processing (CEP) Explained for BizTalk Users (Charles Young) Interview Series: Four Questions With … Ewan Fairweather (Richard Seroter) BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyser v1.2 (Released 5/6/2009) BizTalk Hotrod (Issue 6, April 2009) Index: Writing Great ...

Good information via Pat Helland’s weblog, on UC Berkeley’s Paper “Above the Clouds: a Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”.

This news is a few days late, but couldn’t let it pass: the 2009 version of BizTalk is out on MSDN for download. This is another evolutionary release, containing a large set of improvements ont he previous 2006 R2 version, including .Net 3.5 SP1/VS2008 SP2 support and much more. You can check everything that’s new on the deck of the presentation I ...

Tiago Pascoal and myself are doing a webcast with a repeat of our session at DevDays 09, as part of Microsoft Portugal’s “Best of DevDays” webcast series. :) The webcast will happen on April 21st, in portuguese. If you are interested, the you can register here.

Ok, so I finally made up my mind, after getting feedback that apps like the Zune Software, Live Mesh, and VMWare Workstation seem to work under the Windows 7 beta, and went for an upgrade from my main Vista laptop. Here are some notes on the process: The upgrade itself took some time (4-6 hours), and apart from one of the pre-conditions ...

This year the usual TechDays event focused exclusivelly on Dev contents, and reduced to two days. I was help at IST’s campus on Tagus, a smaller but also cosier space. I did three sessions, all of them on the ARChitecture track: ARC206 Patterns & Anti-Patterns. I did this session together with Tiago Pascoal, and we mostly talked about ...

My first session this year at DevDays09 will be ARC206, with Tiago Pascoal. We’ll be discussing mostly architecture anti-patterns, with loads of real life examples. It’s today at 14:30 on room A03, at Instituto Superior Técnico, this year’s venue. Overview to follow later.

Microsoft just published a very interesting an in-depth 86-page document about BAM, one of the most under-used features of BizTalk Server, “Business Activity Monitoring in Depth for Developers”. You can download if here, and find more overview info about it here. Highly recommended. Additionally, if you have been following the new features of ...