With an industry focus on building rich applications for client computers and devices and augmenting their functionality with services in the cloud, designing performant, robust architectures is becoming a greater challenge. "Distributed systems" used to mean connecting different machine within the enterprise to consolidate functionality in a line-of-business application. Today, this could mean providing core business capabilities via services to a multitude of client application on multiple platforms, devices and continents.

This quarter's ArcReady is on architecting solutions for the modern distributed system. Here is the official write-up on the event:

Nearly every application we build today has dependencies to other systems. How do we design them to work together to meet our goals? How do we decide what to build and what to buy? Do we host it ourselves or in the cloud? With a bewildering array of choices, the biggest challenge we face today is how to architect robust applications with the right technologies to meet our user’s needs and integrate nicely into our existing IT ecosystems.

Join our Central Region Architect Evangelists for a great discussion on architecting distributed applications using all the latest technologies and best practices.

Session 1: Blueprints for Success. In this session, we will survey the modern architecture landscape from the ground up, including infrastructure, application, and client solution choices. We’ll discuss how current industry trends are shaping our architectures and present an innovative architecture mapping technique for analyzing our customer’s needs and aligning them to today’s technologies and solution patterns.

Session 2: Making It Real. In this session, we’ll take a look at several case studies to learn how to apply the mapping technique from Session 1 to architect real world solutions that add true business value. We’ll examine applications we use every day and take a walk through a Microsoft reference architecture that explores many of the decisions we face when building modern distributed applications.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Architects and Senior Developers who are interested in becoming an architect.

WHERE ARE THE EVENTS?

Events are held in 4 cities across Microsoft’s North Central District.  Please join us for one of these free events.

· Minneapolis, MN September 16, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

· Omaha, NB September 18, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

· Kansas City, MO September 23, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

· St. Louis, MO September 25, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am