Announcing My New Book: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

So my new book is available for pre-order here and I’ve also published our companion website. This is not like any technical book you’ve read before.  Let me back up a bit.

Last May (2009) I was chatting with Ewan Fairweather of Microsoft and we agreed that with so many different Microsoft platform technologies, it was hard for even the most ambitious architect/developer to know when to use which tool.  A book idea was born.

Over the summer, Ewan and I started crafting a series of standard architecture patterns that we wanted to figure out which Microsoft tool solved best.  We also started the hunt for a set of co-authors to bring expertise in areas where we were less familiar.  At the end of the summer, Ewan and I had suckered in Stephen Thomas (of BizTalk fame), Mike Sexton (top DB architect at Avanade) and Rama Ramani (Microsoft guy on AppFabric Caching team).   All of us finally pared down our list of patterns to 13 and started off on this adventure.  Packt Publishing eagerly jumped at the book idea and started cracking the whip on the writing phase.

So what did we write? Our book starts off by briefly explaining the core technologies in the Microsoft application platform including Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, BizTalk Server, SQL Server (SSIS and Service Broker), Windows Server AppFabric, Windows Azure Platform and StreamInsight.  After these “primer” chapters, we have a discussion about our Decision Framework that contains our organized approach to assessing technology fit to a given problem area.  We then jump into our Pattern chapters where we first give you a real world use case, discuss the pattern that would solve the problem, evaluate multiple candidate architectures based on different application technologies, and finally select a winner prior to actually building the “winning” solution.

In this book you’ll find discussion and deep demonstration of all the key parts of the Microsoft application platform.  This book isn’t a tutorial on any one technology, but rather,  it’s intended to provide the busy architect/developer/manager/executive with an assessment of the current state of Microsoft’s solution offerings and how to choose the right one to solve your problem.

This is a different kind of book. I haven’t seen anything like it.  Either you will love it or hate it.  I sincerely hope it’s the former, as we’ve spent over a year trying to write something interesting, had a lot of fun doing it, and hope that energy comes across to the reader.

So go out there and pre-order, or check out the site that I set up specifically for the book: http://AppliedArchitecturePatterns.com.

I’ll be sure to let you all know when the book ships!