I was fortunate enough to receive MSDN Ultimate Subscriptions as well as SQLDenis. I Think Denis's idea and contest to see who we can give these to is excellent. To support Denis and his idea, I'm adding another subscription that will be handed over once we read over the responses. That means your chances just got much better to enjoy the subscriptions and the benefits Visual Studio 2010 has to offer!

I thought I would share a recent question that was raised on LinkedIn, which asked:

Starting the Holy Wars on ESB? Who brings the best package deal to the table i.e IBM, MSFT...... Look at this way " A mid sized cash crunched has to implement ESB what are the options it has" or rather who should it be married to. Any thoughts

Tons of ESB from various players are in the market IBM, MSFT, Oracle , SAP but remember its a cash crunched company which requires the ESB. I can provide more details on the technical side. The idea is to throw ope...

Like Ayende said, It walks like a duck and it talks like a duck but it’s still to be determined what it wants to be. MEF looks like an IoC container but is it really that? No not really. Anyway here are some very good examples of what you can do with it.

The Microsoft Extensibility Framework

Creativity is a wonderful thing. It’s also something different for each of us, which is why sometimes our perspectives on the world can produce conflicting ideas on what is the right way and the wrong way to do things. This is a very common facet of the IT world, in particular making computer software, solutions and services.

We don’t need architects! …Do we ?

It’s important for us to remember that we develop software to “do something” that we want it to do. In which case we need to continually review the success of that software or...

So what is a CDM ?…

A Canonical Data Model is most simply explained as a standardised way of representing data that generically applies to multiple systems and data models - kind of like the master data model, but for semantics aswell as content. It can be used as a data model standard template for new systems development, or as an intermediary serialised data format - which is the aspect I’ll focus on mostly here.

Here’s an Example of using the CDM as an intermediary data format to integrate six systems with different data format requirements: Canonica...