Happy New Year!

Wow, it’s been a while since I've had a chance to write a post as it’s been a whirlwind beginning of a year already!

Last week we had a chance to visit 6 European cities in 6 days as we talked to a number of companies about using our Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) to solve a wide variety of problems. So thank you to everyone we talked to in Prague, Munich, Frankfurt, Erlangen, Zurich and London! (We didn’t intend to go to Zurich, but the events in London on January 16th gave us a chance to experience the cities hospitality…)

One of the blog’s I’ve been following (besides Bob’s here at Appistry) is Marc Andreessen’s from my old nemesis Netscape. I really have enjoyed some of the insights Marc has shared around startup’s, VC’s and most recently, Career Planning.

In his career planning post, he shares a couple of rules that really resonated with me and I think they are worth repeating. Marc’s career rules –

Some of my peers here at Appistry have been rubbing my nose with the filtering power of grep for filtering command line utilities on 'other' operating systems for some time now. So I'm VERY excited to have figured outhow touse Microsoft's PowerShell to filter error message from our command line logging tool. - The riddle of filters.

The PowerShell syntax that really threw me involved using SQL like search syntax to build a filter. I really thought that using 'like' or 'contain' attributes on a string compare would work great, but it didn't work that way… .

Per my last post, I've been architecting a fabric application that would consume Twitter.com messages (timelines in the Twitter API vernacular), store them in SQL Server and generate some usage reports that I wanted to post in a graphical way on the web.

The implementation of fabric client that consumes the REST messages from Twitter.com was straightforward. Loading the Twitter public user timeline via the xmlDoc.Load works great, and parsing the last twenty messages via the xmlDoc works great.

xmlDoc.Load(url);

So all of this Twitter talk has me thinking about how I would create a massively scalable Twitter-like service on the fabric- Since I threw out the challenge about creating your own .NET Twitter using a fabric. Something along the lines of what Twitterverse is doing might be interesting.

So the basic idea is a fabric application that could consume thousands of messages (I would like to say per second, but I don't think our network admin would appreciate the sustained bandwidth grab - but we'll see) via the twitter public timeline API and do some near real time analytics via the fabric.

I talk a lot about what the fabric does and how you can create fabric applications. But, did you know that you can get the software for your own three worker fabric for free?

Check it out, the Right From The Start program. Details can be found here -

http://www.appistry.com/rightfromthestart/details.html

The software for three of your own commodity based workers with software based load balancing, automated fail over and automated software deployment should be enough to create your own version of Twitter !

Until next time..

Mark

I posted a new page to the blog today that describes how to Create a .NET client application that calls the the fabric task that I created in an earlier entry.

I've explained in a previous post from a high level what a Enterprise Application Fabric is, and what I wanted to do today is dive into some of the architectural concepts and fabric terminology that are helpful to understand as you consider fabric enabling your application.

The concepts you could consider when fabric enabling your application include -