Follow up on Silverlight and SaaS

Sunday, December 14 2008 - , , - 0 comments

Back in May, I wrote a post speculating about using Silverlight on the server to allow tenants in a multitenant SaaS application to write and run custom code on shared servers. Silverlight provides a subset of the full .NET framework and provides a security sandbox -- both very useful in that kind of scenario. At the time I thought the idea was a little hare-brained. It had occurred to me while I was brushing my teeth one morning and it seemed interesting enough. I felt a little bit less hare-brained when Scott Hanselman posted in September about his discovery of Silverlight living outside the...

What is a service?

Sunday, October 19 2008 - - 0 comments

In last week's training , one of the biggest "Aha!" moments for me was an answer to the simple question "What is a service?" As someone who consumes a lot of guidance from Microsoft's p&p team , and looks to gurus like Nicholas Allen , Michele Leroux Bustamante and Juval Lowy for all sorts of WCF insights, my working definition of a service has been a very technical one. A service is a cohesive set of functionality described by a contract. In WCF terms, it's a .NET interface decorated with a [ServiceContract] attribute, along with one or more implementations of that interface. One of Udi 's...

Udi Dahan's distributed systems course

Sunday, October 19 2008 - - 0 comments

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Udi Dahan 's Advanced Distributed Systems Design using SOA & DDD in Austin, TX. I learned a ton and gained a much clearer understanding of SOA and how to design systems using that architectural style. I'll be blogging more about the subject over the next couple of weeks. This post is just to say a big thanks to Udi and to Headspring for sponsoring the course. It was a great week, and I was lucky to meet a bunch of great people. In addition to Udi: Aaron Jensen , Jacob Lewallen, Jimmy Bogard , Blake Carroway , Eric Hexter , and some other very nice...