I just read J.D. Meier's blog post regarding the new p&p App Arch Guide 2.0 which includes the new Microsoft Reference Application Architecture. I was not very surprised but to be honest, I was very pleased to see that it is about 95% the same as our internal Reference Architecture at netzkern, which I presented about 3 months ago in an internal technical training.

It seems that Microsoft also agrees in other areas with our methods. This post on Microsoft's Agile Architecture Method is nearly identical with parts of our Software Project Lifecycle Guide, an internal hands-on booklet for specifying requirements, estimating, managing projects and creating solution architectures.

This is just a short post to everyone who is waiting for part 5 of my SharePoint and Sitecore series. Of course I received your mails and I'm aware of the fact that it is eagerly awaited, but I have to put all of you off for another week. My article series already produced three additional projects in consulting and to keep business going I had to handle those jobs with priority. Thank you very much for your patience and stay tuned!

Taking a look at Microsoft .NET these days, I'm really glad that I've chosen to make it my primary platform about four years ago. Although I still tend to miss some enterprise features in the platform like EJB 3.0, ESB frameworks and Web Beans ("JBoss Seam") in Java EE, I have to say that the technologies presented at PDC are really exciting.

There is, however, a certain "gap" in Microsoft's philosophy: The integration of the managed world and the operating system. As we know now that Windows 7 is based on MinWin, an initiative of Microsoft to "clean up" the base system of the Windows kernel and to decouple the layers of the system, some of us start to think about when Microsoft will eventually replace the Win32 API with a managed API on top of a completely revised CLR. Microsoft already implemented Singularity, a "managed" operating system with an extended C# language called Sing# (which is basically Spec# with some OS extensions). I think, they learned a lot of stuff in this project and they learned a lot of things from RedDog, also known as "Windows Azure" these days.

Combining that knowledge from all those projects like Singularity, Windows Azure and the work on MinWin, I would expect Microsoft to put additional effort in building "RedHawk" (which is the code name for the managed Win32 replacement). I for myself have never been a low level guy, although I developed some Linux kernel modules for fun. I love the Web, I love SOA and I love to work with managed platforms like .NET and Java EE - but I have to admit that from time to time it would be great to be able to do some "basic things" using my preferred languages without having to switch to C++.