• Cloud
• Authorization
• Death of smart clients
• No-SQL and ORM
• BI becomes commodity
• Netbooks – and the Google ‘netbook’
• Deployment
• SVN ==> GIT or Mercurial

Cloud

No surprises here, with Amazon running this model ‘forever’, Google not too far behind and now even Microsoft has started to chime in as well. The are alliances and definitions for SaaS, IaaS, PaaS. This concept is here to stay, and in fact will affect us in significant ways.

Authorization/Authentication

This is the big play that will help make the cloud be really viable, and even work with managing external companies that need to work for your company (think PCI compliance and support). This model will be based on the claims concept that has been knocking around for a while now, all it needed was something to push it into the limelight. Clouds have started to push authorization / authentication! In addition when this matures to a ‘tipping point’ I have no doubt customers will start to ‘outsource’ their claims trust (with contractual backup!) to other companies. For example if your company needs to provide PCI support to a customer, today the customer will have to be provided the peoples names and assign them logon accounts and manage their passwords. This becomes a major overhead and can be relatively easily managed through a claims based authorization system. Naturally this wont happen within two years – but it is coming!

Death of Smart Clients

Companies will realize that Smart Clients (aka Prism, Click-Once web forms) are only a stop gap. Browsers will rule the application space within 5 years, and will have made significant inroads before 2012. Conceptually they all make sense, but in today’s platform varied world they are dead – but it seems not everyone realizes it yet!

No-SQL / ORM

It seems that there are two factors pushing these forwards, but the root of it is that the historical relational database has so much overhead associated with infrastructure, management and DBA’s – people are looking for alternatives. It has become increasingly common for application programmers to fear the rules of relational databases they have to integrate with as they have evolved into their own discipline. This leads into ORM and which really try to ‘ignore’ the storage mechanism and provide plain business value. The No-SQL group are in a similar boat, they are interested in scaling and maintainance and know traditional relational models don’t meet their business needs.

BI becomes a Commodity

Microsoft has been playing the “BI is coming, BI is coming” song for a while now. However it seems with the SQL 2008 R2 release we are starting to get commodity solutions. This in intern will coerce the competitors to step up. The good news for competitors is that Microsoft has got more pricey, its no longer the ‘cheap kid on the block’. Open Source is starting to catch up with its commercial cousins. Either way its going to be an interesting couple of years for BI.

Netbooks – and the Google one

We have heard the term many times before, and even had a couple of false starts. The difference now is:

1. Processing power has significantly cheapened – allowing more inexpensive offerings
2. Web/Cloud infrastructure is in place. No worries about email or docs being stored on line.

So we have pretty good netbooks now, but I suspect Google will potentially set the standard for the netbooks. If done right (as opposed to the Nexus!) they have a killer combination. This is one I’m really interested to see what happens!

Deployment

Vista didnt get much traction and XP is on its last officially supported legs, as such I suspect that companies will be rolling out Windows 7 over the next 2-3 years. This will stress the deployment tools, and require individuals that know deployment to step in. In addition to this Windows Server 2008 R2 only comes in 64 bit – software houses realize the time has come to admit they are going to have to invest in supporting 64 bit solutions. This is going to be unusual for customers as they have forgotten how to roll out such changes as it has been a while since the last great deployment upgrade. There will be lots of opportunities in this area!

SVN ==> GIT / Mercurial

It seems that the CVS savior is in the process of being usurped by the DVCS products. Specially GIT and Mercurial are the strong runners. Its a shame because I had waited a while for SVN to mature to a point and now GIT & Mercurial are eating up projects. Oddly at the time of writing this even the Microsoft sponsored CodePlex site now supports Mercurial !

Finally the one I didn’t add to the list is software parallelism programming models. I suspect this will mature with all the new multi-core processors that are coming out. However I think this will mature after 2012

Gareth

So for all us who have spent time searching, or had pages pointed out to us , for options  this is an excellent new years present!

Many thanks to the SQLite guys for both their product, and their handy dandy search feature!

• [MSSQL - The Query Optimizer and Parameter Sniffing]
  • If you dont know about query sniffing, or came across it a couple of years ago and have forgotten. Give this a (re)read.
  • The key here is the “Optimize” for a typical parameter, I dont recall this existing in 2000. So if you are stuck with 2000 (you know who you are!), this obviously wont work!
• [Need to protect your C# code? Have a look at nCloak]
  • Article covering how nCloak does naming.
  • This isnt production ready, but if you have spare time it would be interesting to see how far this project can go.
  • This shows the benefit that Mono is bringing to the C# world!
• [Just got onto TFS? Ready to try GIT/Mercurial? Read more about branch strategies in DVCS]
  • Seems like only yesterday everyone was moving from VSS to TFS. Now GIT and Mercurial are on the scenes.
  • This article covers various strategies for CI or even “Promiscuous Integration”
  • Interestingly the DVCS (Distributed Version Control Systems) appear better suited to OSS projects than internal corporate ones.
• [Microsoft SDL Developer Starter Kit]
  • The Microsoft SDL Developer Starter Kit provides a compliation of baseline developer security training materials on core Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) topics.
• [OSSEC - open source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS)]
  • Its free! 2.2 came out September 8, 2009
  • It has a powerful correlation and analysis engine, integrating log analysis, file integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, centralized policy enforcement, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.
• [Microsoft releases mini-Fuzzer & Binary analyzer]
  • Finally , MS have released some simple fuzzers to help developers understand what they are facing from the black hats!
• [IT executive going to China? If you follow the guidance it will be expensive!]
  • Paraphrasing this short article wont do it justice.  Among the measures it recommends to IT executives regarding the protection of their computer equipment when traveling to that country are (wow is about all I can say!):
  • • Leave your standard IT equipment at home – buy separate gear to use in China
    • Weigh the machine before you go and when you get back
    • “Clean” thoroughly the equipment (re-image the laptop you used)
    • Throw away the mobile phone you used during your stay.
• [A Shortage of Technical Managers]
  • This just made me smile!

• Amazon SimpleDB Management in Eclipse
  • Seems like Amazon keeps on trucking. The key to the heart is providing tools to manage/develop things. This does what the package says!
• jQuery Ribbon 1.0 RTW and 2.0 sneak peak
  • Good web UI stuff built of jQuery – check it out.
• Windows PowerShell 2.0 RTM
  • For us non Windows 7 (roll on August 6th) and Windows 2008 R2 we will need to wait a little longer – but its out! Unfortunately we all have to wait to get it to a box near us
• Speed Up the Visual Studio Toolbox
  • I love things like this, so simple it shouldn’t even make the news roll – but it does because we hate it and there is an easy option to turn it off!
• Threat Analysis and Modeling (TAM) 3.0 Beta Available
  • Actually this was released a little bit ago, but its all good for those wanting to model threats in their SDLC.
• How to recover database from MDF in SQL Server 2005?
  • Always handy when the phone rings at 3am!

I would recommend reading up on the Community Promise as it seems highly sensible, here is one snippet from the page (there is more so read it!):

Q: Is this Community Promise legally binding on Microsoft and will it be available in the future to me and to others?

A: Yes, the CP is legally binding upon Microsoft. The CP is a unilateral promise from Microsoft and in these circumstances unilateral promises may be enforced against the party making such a promise. Because the CP states that the promise is irrevocable, it may not be withdrawn by Microsoft. The CP is, and will be, available to everyone now and in the future for the specifications to which it applies. As stated in the CP, the only time Microsoft can withdraw its promise against a specific person or company for a specific Covered Specification is if that person or company brings (or voluntarily participates in) a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft regarding Microsoft’s implementation of the same Covered Specification. This type of “suspension” clause is common industry practice.

I saw this heads up on Miguels blog the actual article can be found here and he has some other interesting tidbits about the future makeup on Mono:

In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.

Anyway this is excellent clarification, and particularly good timing to boot . It will be interesting to see what the web reaction to this announcement will be!

Gareth

It was here I found “Building your own Arcade Cabinet for Geeks”….

1. Cabinet and Power
2. Monitor and Mounting
3. Control Panel
4. Sound and Lights
5. Paint and Art
6. Computer Hardware and Software
7. Success and Conclusion

Absolutely no computer coding – but this is art!

PS If you dont read his blog (or listen to his pod cast) I do recommend it

Gareth

• Deploying IIS on a Failover Cluster
• Creating and Configuring a Generic Service Resource
• (Old)Microsoft iSCSI Target Software available to the public! -
• More on iSCSI
  • iSCSI is hugely important as this is an excellent way to setup clusters in a VM environment without having to be concerned with shared VM disks
• Building a SQL Server Cluster for Testing – Intro
• Building a SQL Server Cluster for Testing – Part2

BI

• Accessing Teradata using Reporting Services

Programming

• MEF Primitives
• Windows Workflow 4/WCF 4 Links

Architecture

• Unboxing Web-Oriented Architecture: The 6 Aspects Of An Emergent Architectural Style

Interesting

• Google Access your library Virtually
• Google Going After Exchange
  • This one has lots of future implications, and clearly shows Google looking to use Outlook client to move smaller business units to the Google App Cloud.

This blog will be a collection of my technical  thoughts covering C#,  SQL,  Azure,  Enterprise Data Warehousing, Cloud services and finally but not least security.

I absolutely love to read up on this stuff, now we will find out if I can write it.

Have fun and stay informed!

Gareth