Tim Sneath introduces a new Silverlight sample developed by Vertigo Software (excerpt taken from his blog post)

"Video.Show is an end-to-end solution that provides a reference-quality sample for user-generated video content sites. Taking advantage of all of our latest technologies: .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, LINQ, Silverlight, Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming, Video.Show provides support for uploading, encoding, tagging, viewing and commenting on videos. Since not many people are building video sites like YouTube that have millions of videos, we've optimized the experience for sites with tens to thousands of videos."

The source code for this reference sample has been posted to CodePlex.

This is a really exciting release for the Solution Accelerators Team. The concept of the Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) series is to distill down to the core decisions required for planning and designing the IT infrastructures necessary to support business services. The first wave of released guidance introduces the series and focuses on new virtualization technologies from Microsoft, including SoftGrid Application Virtualization and Windows Server Virtualization in Windows Server 2008.

The Infrastructure Planning and Design series is an evolution of Windows Server System™ Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies; each guide addresses a unique infrastructure technology or scenario. All guides share a common structure including:

• Definition of the technical decision flow through the planning process.
• Listing of decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
• Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
• Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

These guides complement product documentation by exposing and focusing on infrastructure design options.  The guides included in this release include:

IPD Series Introduction Guide

Planning the next generation of technical infrastructure for corporations is a complex and daunting task. The IPD series is designed to present the reader with the most concise planning guidance for Microsoft technologies. It also provides a means to validate design decisions with the business to ensure that the solution meets the requirements of both business and infrastructure stakeholders. This guide describes the background for the IPD series as well as the format of each guide and defines characteristics common to the series.

Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology Guide

There are several different forms of virtualization that need to be understood as a basis for making the right technology choice. Server hardware virtualization, server software virtualization, presentation virtualization, application virtualization, and desktop virtualization are all valid options for organizations considering which services to virtualize and how to implement these technologies. The goal of this virtualization overview guide is to enable you to rapidly and accurately select which Microsoft virtualization technology or technologies to use for specific scenarios. You will then be able to proceed with the planning and design process for that virtualization technology by using the appropriate Infrastructure Planning and Design guide.

SoftGrid Application Virtualization Guide

Microsoft SoftGrid® Application Virtualization is the only virtualization solution on the market to deliver applications that are never installed, yet securely follow users anywhere, on demand. It dramatically improves IT efficiencies, enables much greater business agility, and provides a superior end-user desktop experience. The Infrastructure Planning and Design Series: SoftGrid Application Virtualization assists designers in the infrastructure planning process for SoftGrid by providing a clear and concise workflow of the decisions and tasks required for each method. This guide enables you to plan the infrastructure required for meeting your application virtualization service goals.

Windows Server Virtualization Guide

A virtualized computing environment can improve the efficiency of your computing resources by utilizing more of your hardware resources. Windows Server virtualization enables you to create a virtualized server computing environment using a technology that is part of Windows Server® 2008. The Infrastructure Planning and Design Series: Windows Server Virtualization guide discusses Microsoft virtualization options using Windows Server virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. The guide explains design considerations at critical decision points and helps with plans for an optimized server virtualization architecture to meet organizational goals for performance and consolidation.

The final release of the Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is now on MSDN.  The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, frameworks, reusable components and samples for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions.

Some of the core capabilities provided by the ESB Guidance include:

• Policy driven mediation:
  • Itinerary-based service invocation that supports lightweight service composition at the time of message publication. The Itinerary mechanism dynamically resolves service endpoints and mediation requirements, and routes messages using any resolver that ships with the Guidance. This approach allows developers to implement loosely coupled patterns such as VETO/VETRO.
  • Provides dynamic resolution of endpoints and maps using the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework. This supports dynamic resolution of endpoints and transformation requirements, as well as providing custom configuration to services, effectively decoupling the consumer from the services. 
  • Exception Management Framework for unified exception handling, mediation and reporting.
• Connecting systems: 
  • Performs namespace normalization of messages.
  • Provides IBM JMS/WMQ connectivity.
  • Supports messaging patterns that enable dynamic service aggregation, message routing, message validation, and message transformation.
  • Incorporates service registry and repository integration using UDDI and WS-MetadataExchange.
• Management and monitoring:
  • Includes the ESB Management Portal that provides:
    • Exception mediation and fault management.
    • Message repair and resubmission.
    • Exception notification and alert engine enabling user/group subscriptions.
    • BizTalk endpoint and registry integration, management, and publication.  Support auto publication from the BizTalk Administration Console
    • Reporting and analytics for exceptions, alerts, subscriptions and registrations.
    • Basic auditing on message saves, edits and resubmits
• SOA governance:
  • Provides integrated SOA governance solutions developed by AmberPoint and SOA Software.

Microsoft recently released the initial version of Software + Services Blueprints.  These blueprints are a series of source code and guidance packages designed to provide an architectural bridge between vision and implementation by making it easier to build S+S applications.

The blueprints serve as a good starting point for designing an developing S+S solutions through source code, architectural guidance, and step-by-step workflow on software construction.  Each S+S Blueprint is focused on the following core areas:

• Media/Community
• eCommerce
• Office Business Applications (OBA)
• Mobility

with future S+S application areas being planned.  A CodePlex Project Site has been created and will serve as the "hub" for all information, code, and documentation around this great solution offering.

Microsoft recently announced the release of a new search solution, based on SharePoint Products & Technologies called Microsoft Search Server 2008.  On the Microsot Enterprise Search Team Blog, the search team unveils the latest product as a part of the SharePoint family that provides an optimized search solution for your organizations business data.  There are two versions of this product, a full Server version and Search Server 2008 Express, which you can download now as a release candidate.

You can view a demo of Search Server Express here.  The full version is not yet available, however, the featureset between Search Server 2008 and Search Server Express 2008 is very similar therefore allowing you to get a flavor of what the full server version will be like by evaluating the express edition.

Taken from SharePointPedia's "About Us" page...

SharePointPedia.com is a web site where people discover and share useful content about SharePoint and SharePoint related products and technologies. It’s a social computing application built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Anyone with a Windows Live ID may become a registered user and can then submit content recommendations or requests, leave comments, or just vouch for whatever you like. Note that SharePointPedia is not a wiki. It’s a “pedia” in the sense of being a compendium of useful content, but rather than being limited by just wiki functionality, it leverages the much broader set of capabilities in SharePoint. SharePointPedia is also about community, where you can find and connect with others, who have similar interests as you or who recommend content relevant to you. We hope that you will find SharePointPedia useful, and we would greatly appreciate your feedback to make it even better.

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation SDK has just been released.  It allows the ability to use WF modeling and host WF-based workflows in BizTalk Server.

The release of this SDK will hopefully answer the many questions developers have had with regards to when to use BizTalk Server vs Windows Workflow Foundation for a process related application and will hopefully showcase the "better together" story in that both technologies are quite complimentary.  The SDK also ships with a sample of how to build a wrapper BizTalk orchestration for a WF-based workflow that can be deployed to BizTalk Server.  This presents a powerful solution as it provides the flexibility of WF coupled with the robust services provided by BizTalk Server, like adapters, business activity monitoring and tracking infrastructure, deployment management, scalability, etc.

This SDK Sample provides a good alternative to having to face the sometimes difficult choice between BizTalk Server or WF by directly allowing you to choose both.

So download today and let us know what you think!