Anith Gopal

patterns & practices has released Application Architecture Guide Layer Diagrams for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition.

Architect Innovation Café is a set of 60-minute Software Architect-focused Webcast to educate on the latest trends/topics and how new technologies can align with your business needs.  Two sessions are offered this week that are of interest.

Here’s a quick summary of software and tools that offer best practices for you to use in your software from patterns & practices : Enterprise Library v4.1 is a collection of reusable software components that help developers with common development needs such as logging, validation, data access, and exception handling. They can be used “as is” or extended or modified by developers as needed. Unity Application Block v1.2 is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection.

The Windows 7 Client Software Logo Toolkit helps you figure out how ready your software is for Windows 7. In fact, almost all applications that work with Windows Vista are already ready

A reviewer recently pointed to an update to a post from last week: Getting a Quick Start with Windows Live Calendar (post from Thursday, July 30). Simply replace these steps below in Six simple ways to get the most out of Windows Live Calendar.

Windows 7 is on it’s way. Windows 7 will be generally available (GA) on October 22.

Attachmate was among the very first to earn the Compatible with Windows 7 software logo. In this video, Product Marketing Manager Kris Lall and Test Lead Chinh Vu talk with me about the whole application certification process

I’ve spent the past year touring the US talking about all things XAML : WPF, Silverlight, Visual Studio, and Expression Blend.  I started the year a complete Blend neophyte,  but thanks to watching Brad Cunningham and John Bowen of InterKnowlogy work their magic at XamFest, I learned enough of Blend 2 to not break my apps. Then at MIX09, I got a peek at Blend 3 and started using it heavily.  Over the last 3 months, I’ve learned quite a bit about it and would like to share those experiences with the developers among you who want to learn it yourselves.  I’ll go feature by feature, starting with those available in the current public build .  From there, I’ll dig into those that are soon to be available.  Regardless, each is a great feature worthy of a posting of its own, so please let me get started… Blend 3’s Great Feature #1 is its ability to generate sample data from nothing.  This means you can start prototyping, iterating, envisioning, and ideating without having to write code or otherwise hack to get data to show up in the tool you’re using to design the user experience.  You data can be boolean values, images, numbers, or strings, as shown below and your strings can be formatted in a large number of ways

This free online video training series, Looking at Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 in the Technology Community Preview ,  for developers is an early look at the new Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. It includes sessions covering Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 Framework, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, Velocity, Parallel Computing, Test Driven Development, and Visual Studio Team System 2010. Each session is a half hour to hour long.  Here are the sessions and released dates: Introduction to .NET 4.0

Windows 7 will be generally available (GA) on October 22. Windows Server 2008 R2 will be broadly available about the same time

Service Pack 2 for both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are now available on Microsoft Download. You can download the service pack at  for x86 , ISO and 64-bit flavors . The updates will pushed through Windows Update at the end of June

One of the questions I’m often asked at XAMLFest events has been how a developer can write rich Internet applications (RIA) that are portable between Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight . And while there are differences, there are many more similarities. And a lot depends on back-end REST Services.