TFS: Branching and Merging Video

“The ability to branch and merge source code with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server can really enable a team to build software in a more agile and maintainable manner. But choosing the best branching strategy can be a bit overwhelming at first. In this interview we ask Doug Neumann, Group Program Manager for Team Foundation Server, to give us a Branching and Merging primer.” (from MS channel 9)

see the video guidance: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Rory/Branching-101-with-Doug-Neumann-Visual-Studio-Team-Foundation-Server/

Sticky Sessions, Load Balancing, Failover and Availability

All HTTP load balancers support “sticky sessions”: Requests in the same session must be forwarded to the same server node unless there is a failover. You must turn on sticky sessions in your setup. In an ideal world, all nodes in a replicated cluster have the same state; thus, the load balancer can forward any request to any node. But in a real cluster, the network and CPU resources are limited. It takes time to actually replicate the state from node to node. Without sticky sessions, the user gets random HTTP 500 errors when the request hits a node that does not yet have the latest replicated state.

fromjboss doco with some minor editing on my part to keep it just at the concept level.

ASP.Net 2.0 Security Deployment Review Guide

Interesting guide/checklist if your looking to do a security review for your ASP.Net deployments:

“This How To shows you how to perform a security deployment review for an ASP.NET 2.0 application to identify potential security vulnerabilities introduced by inappropriate configuration settings. The majority of the review process involves making sure that correct configuration settings are applied to the machine-level Web.config file and your application-specific Web.config file.

• Learn what’s new in ASP.NET 2.0 security configuration.
• Review ASP.NET 2.0 configuration settings to improve security.
• Learn about the new special directories in ASP.NET 2.0, and their security implications.
• Learn how to lock down your machine-level settings.
• Learn how to configure <machineKey> for a Web farm scenario.
• Learn how to encrypt a connection string in a Web farm scenario.
• Learn how to use obfuscation with ASP.NET 2.0.

“

see:

http://www.guidanceshare.com/wiki/How_To:_Perform_a_Security_Deployment_Review_for_ASP.NET_2.0

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

from JD Meir, check out the following link for some really useful tips: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998530.aspx

Summary from the link: This guide provides end-to-end guidance for managing performance and scalability throughout your application life cycle to reduce risk and lower total cost of ownership. It provides a framework that organizes performance into a handful of prioritized categories where your choices heavily impact performance and scalability success. The logical units of the framework help integrate performance throughout your application life cycle. Information is segmented by roles, including architects, developers, testers, and administrators, to make it more relevant and actionable. This guide provides processes and actionable steps for modeling performance, measuring, testing, and tuning your applications. Expert guidance is also provided for improving the performance of managed code, ASP.NET, Enterprise Services, Web services, remoting, ADO.NET, XML, and SQL Server.

What is Architecture?

ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 defines architecture as: “the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution.”

Personally I am fan of the Bredemeyer team. Their definition in their VAP process is a lot more ‘punchy’, and makes a good deal more sense to a business audience. They simply put it as:

“The Technical Expression of Business Strategy”.

Microsoft Enterprise Architecure Portal

This portal has some useful EA stuff on it:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/architecture/bb469938.aspx

I particualrly like the ‘A Day in the life of an Enterprise Architect’ article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb945098.aspx