Microsoft
Architect Forum Conference

Opening Key Note:
Cloud as business and technology differentiator!?

In our opening key note, Ulrich Homan, the Chief Architect of World-Wide Enterprise Services from Microsoft Corp. will give us a 360-degree-view of the impact of the emerging cloud-business and technology-models. Come to see and discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly...

Cloud Computing

Session title: Cloud Computing – A Crash Course for Architects
Speaker: Beat Schwegler, Microsoft WE HQ
Cloud Computing promises instant access to unlimited compute, storage and application resources… and this all comes with zero capital investment. However most companies can’t or won’t move all of their assets to the cloud. What applications, services and capabilities benefit the most from cloud computing? To answer this question, we will discuss the promise and dynamics of cloud computing, including the regulatory requirements, financial aspects and last but not least the technical capabilities. Session title: Microsoft Online Services Experience – Delivering SharePoint as a Cloud Service
Speaker: Ulrich Homann, Microsoft Corp.
SharePoint is an emerging platform of incredible power and flexibility. How does Microsoft Online architect and manage an environment supporting millions of users and how can I take advantage of that investment? Lessons learned! Session title: Multi-Tenant Architectures in Software-as-a-Service Solutions
Speaker: Rainer Stropek, timecockpit.com
“Software as a Service” (SaaS) is a software distribution model that uses the Internet to deploy, maintain and run software solutions. For the first time ever small and medium software vendors have the possibility to reach the large number of small businesses around the globe (the “long tail”) and offer solutions as services to them. Applications that are built to be used by thousands of customers have the need to be configurable and customizable to a high degree. This has a strong impact on the applications’ architectures. A single code base and a limited number of deployed instances has to serve a large number of customers (=tenants) although the users’ view on the system may be very different. In this session Rainer Stropek presents challenges that software architects are typically faced with when building such configurable multi-tenancy solutions. In the second step Rainer shows possible solutions. In the final part of his talk he will discuss applicable mechanism for multi-tenancy in the Windows Azure Platform. Secure & powerful services communication through the Cloud: Windows Azure platform AppFabric
Speaker: Christian Weyer, Thinktecture
Service-oriented applications are often faced with various connectivity obstacles. When you want to build services-based communication for peer-to-peer messaging or enable rather advanced communication patterns like publish and subscribe, usually a firewall and/or a NAT gets into the way. The Cloud can be a viable solution for realizing ubiquitous communication in a safe and secure manner. Christian Weyer will introduce you to the Windows Azure platform AppFabric. The AppFabric consists of the Access Control Service and the Service Bus. These cloud services enable a number of interesting and advanced security, communication and messaging scenarios. Come and see how to leverage these unique services with your existing WCF skills or by simply applying HTTP and REST for interoperable solutions. Session title: Case Study: Remote Service – Software Delivery Service based on Windows Azure
Speaker: Harald Balik, Siemens
In the last year during the Windows Azure TAP program, Siemens IT Solutions and Services developed a cloud based version of a Software Delivery Service for devices located all over the world. The aim of this case study was to evaluate Windows Azure as a platform for Remote Service and compare the costs of that solution with the costs of the actual solution already offered by Siemens IT Solutions. This session will give you an overview of the experiences made during the TAP program, and will also give you an insight into the architecture of a hybrid cloud solution consisting of on-premise parts, cloud parts, and client parts located on the devices. Session title: HP Experience – High-Performance Grid Storage Architecture for Cloud Services
Speaker: Friedrich Jäger, HP
SQL, Exchange, SharePoint is an emerging solution scalable for enterprise customers. Customer Business requirement and Microsoft Cloud Computing Services needs unlimited storage grow and flexibility. How does HP architecting a scalable storage solution to grow from small to enterprise business... even for the cloud?

Methodologies, Processes

Session title: Architecture in Agile Projects – How-to get it done right
Speaker: Mitch Lacey
Architecture. Big design up front or cowboy, design-it-as-you-go coding? In agile projects we hear that BDUF is evil. Does that mean that agile requires no architecture? Is there no more need for architects in agile projects? Both could not be farther from the truth. In this talk, Mitch Lacey, former Microsoft Program Manager, will walk you through a case study of one of his projects to show you how they architected a system that required 99.999% uptime and supported 5 million users – all while using Scrum and XP. Session title: Architectural Strategies
Speaker: Andreas Hejl, Siemens
Strategies describe the solution space to achieve specific non-functional requirements like performance, availability or modifiability. In this session we discuss the different strategies an architect has to think about, when he designs his application towards these requirements. Additionally we will see, how different patterns, frameworks and components help to implement those. Session title: Software-to-Business Alignment and Traceability
Speaker: Per & Sten Sundblad, Microsoft Regional Directors Sweden
In this session we start by discussing and coarsely defining business architecture, software architecture and software engineering, and why it is so important to separate them from each other while aligning them to each other. Afterwards we will dive into a strong case for software-to-business alignment in context of both, immediate and long-term value. We will also refer to the Visual Studio 2010 UML session to show, how the way we use UML in that session leads to a close alignment of software architecture to business architecture. At the end you will get a complete process that outlines, how you can get from a structured business architecture down to your service portfolio and service design. Session title: Behavior Driven Development: How to evolve systems that provide real business value
Or: using a DSL to confirm expected system behavior
Speaker: Christian Hassa, Techtalk
Nowadays almost everyone follows some kind of agile software development practice with the goal to deliver true business value for the least possible efforts. However, establishing agreements on specification details is tough when you truly want to apply agile principles: tracing and validating them in each iteration throughout the product life cycle is what most teams struggle with, when it comes to reality in their projects. Another key challenge is to overcome the communication barriers and silo attitude of different project stakeholders. Classic approaches rely on stakeholder specific artifacts such as product requirements document, functional specification, architecture and design concept, test specification, etc. – which tend to be inconsistent and often even contradict with each other. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is a practice, which ties well into agile methodologies like Scrum, and helps solving these challenges: project stakeholders collaborate to evolve a domain specific, human readable language, which is used to give examples of the expected system behavior. These examples can be bound to the actual implementation, which allows automated verification. The talk gives an introduction to the concept of BDD and shows, how it can be put into reality using SpecFlow, a Cucumber compatible BDD tool for the .NET platform.

Patterns, Practices

Session title: Systematic Architecture Design
Speaker: Michael Stal, Siemens Corporate Research
There are many possible ways to create a software architecture. Unfortunately, books on software architecture rarely provide hints how to systematically address the task of software architecture design. Here the Onion Model comes to your rescue. It presents a model of systematically mapping project-relevant forces such as requirements or business constraints to architecture decisions, taking the type and priorities of these forces into account. Speaker: Michael Stal, Siemens Corporate Research
Session title: Architectural Refactoring - One step back to get several steps further
Many software engineers and responsible managers get addicted to “featuritis” in software development projects, giving more value to adding new functionality than to stabilizing the architectural base. Unfortunately, this behavior often leads to design erosion. Design erosion is the consequence of causing accidental complexity by introducing unsystematic quick and dirty patches to a software design. “Panta rhei” (everything changes) represents a well-known quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclit. If everything changes all the time, we need to cope with change without sacrificing quality. Architecture Refactoring is one important step in each iteration to prevent design erosion. It supports this by regular discovering architecture smells and getting rid of them early. The keynote will introduce architecture refactoring together with its benefits, liabilities, as well as limitations. Session title: Visual Studio 2010 UML for the Architect
Speaker: Per & Sten Sundblad, Microsoft Regional Directors Sweden
In this session we’re showing the UML support in Visual Studio 2010 from a practical architectural point of view rather than from a product perspective. We are discussing and demonstrating proven practices to enable business and software architects to work together by covering the following:
• Relationship between business processes and use cases, • UML Use Case modeling for requirements, • Component modeling for user applications, services, service endpoints, and service interactions, • UML Interfaces and Classes to represent service, operation, and data contracts, • Extending Visual Studio 2010 UML using the Extension Manager to allow for stereotypes and properties better suited to service-oriented architecture than the built-in ones. Session title: Scalable, evolvable, understandable
Event-Based Components as Building Blocks for Software Systems
Speaker: Ralf Westphal, One-Man-Think-Tank, Germany
What would you say if software could be put together from parts like electronic circuits? This vision is decades old, but has not materialized yet. There is a market for software parts called “user controls”, there is infrastructure to plug together components (DI containers, add-in frameworks). But still something is missing to let you architect software like machines. Existing software components still don’t really are like electronic parts or lego building blocks. This session is going to show how software components can be turned into true software parts to be on par with hardware parts. They just need to be freed of subtle topological dependencies. That’s simple and leads to many benefits: software then can be planned much more naturally on different levels of abstractions, code mirrors the design 100%, i.e. the architecture can be re-generated from code reality if need be (“reverse MDA”), implementation will be much more systematic and can partly be carried out by tools. A more systematic approach also leads to easier code instrumentation and in addition provides a platform for new standard components plus increased reusability. And finally true software parts pave the way to multi-core usage and distributed software. All this and more requires just a small mental shift. The pieces of the puzzle have been on the table for years. Now’s the time to put them together to make software easier to design and easier to understand. Session title: Designing and Implementing claims-based solutions using the Windows Identity Foundation
Speaker: Mario Szpuszta, Microsoft Österreich GmbH
Claims-based security is one of the most promising concepts for strong and flexible authentication and authorization in your custom solutions. Furthermore combined with federated identity, claims-based security allows building bridges between security domains in a loosely coupled way. Claims-based security and identity-federation are built on open and interoperable standards such as WS-* and SAML – therefore platforms such as the .NET Framework need to provide components to support these standards in an easy-to-use way for developers. The Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is such a framework built on-top of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the .NET Framework 3.5. In this session you will learn about the core concepts of claims-based and federated security, its advantages and how you can use .NET and the WIF to design implement solutions for the real world! We will start exploring WIF from the very basics up to some more advanced concepts. Therefore you should be equipped with good WCF-know-how to get most out of this session.

Parallel Computing

Session title: DryadLinq – A simple, powerful and elegant
programming environment for large-scale, data parallel applications on HPC environments
Speaker: Xavier Pillons, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Corp
This will be brand-new content – session abstracts coming later. Session title: HPC – What’s there today and what are we investing in...
Speaker: Xavier Pillons, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Corp.
This will be brand-new content – session abstracts coming later. Session title: Scalable Computing from Multi-Core to Multi-Site with the Application Space
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Eva Kühn, Ralf Westphal, Technical University Vienna
With the growing number of processors within a single computer, making software that can process multiple tasks in parallel is becoming more and more important to enable efficient scaling. When additional scalability beyond a single machine is needed, things are getting very complex because developers need to combine multiple technologies that are very different to handle.

In this session we want to present the Application Space, a small framework providing means for easy and efficient scaling from multi-core to multi-site based on Microsoft’s Concurrency & Coordination Runtime (CCR).

After giving a brief overview of the CCR, we will show you how the Application Space works and present some examples that show how easy it is to implement well known parallel and distribution patterns.