There have been a number of customer inuqiries to the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide 2.0 team for smaller, more focused guides. As a result, the team has created a series of application architecture pocket guides based on our Application Architecture Guide 2.0. Each guide is focused on a particular topic. We prioritized topics based on customer demand. Some customers wanted a focused guide on just the Agile Architecture Method, while others wanted a focused guide on the particular type of applications they build (Web, Rich Client, … etc.)

Application Architecture Pocket Guides

Here’s the initial set of pocket guides:

• Agile Architecture Method Pocket Guide
• Web Application Architecture Pocket Guide
• Mobile Application Architecture Pocket Guide
• RIA Architecture Pocket Guide
• Rich Client Application Architecture Pocket Guide
• Service Architecture Pocket Guide

You can browse the index of pocket guides at the pocket guide index page at our Application Architecture KB on CodePlex.

Microsoft has recently revamped it's customer facing Architecture Portal.  It now features a selection of sessions from PDC 2008 that are particularly appealing for the architect audience.  Sessions can be launched on demand in the same page, maximized to full screen and eventually downloaded.

But wait, there's more!

The Patterns & Practics team has been releasing a lot of valuable material as of late, including new whitepapers or sample kits like the Unity dependency injection container or Enterprise Library v4.1.

In addition to the great content published on the Architecture Portal, you'll also find architect-focused content aggregated from non-MS news and media feeds (e.g. infoQ, Redmond News, etc)

Hope you find these resources helpful!

Quick Links

• MSDN Site: SharePoint Guidance
• Future Friendly URL: http://www.microsoft.com/spg
• Download: SharePoint Guidance - November 2008
• CodePle Site: http://www.codeplex.com/spg
• Community Forum: http://www.codeplex.com/spg/thread/list.aspx

Guidance at a Glance

This guidance helps architects and developers build SharePoint intranet applications.  The guidance contains a reference implementation that demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and lifecycle management challenges.  This guidance discusses the following:

• Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging
• Design tradeoffs for comon decisions many developers encounter
• Implementation examples demonstrated in the reference implementation and in the QuickStarts
• How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration
• Set up of development, build, test, staging, and production environments
• Managing the application life cycle including upgrade
• Team-based intranet application development

The following areas are not discussed in this version of the guidance:

• Content-oriented sites that use web content management
• Internet and enterprise-scale SharePoint applications
• Multilingual SharePoint applications
• Scale or security testing of SharePoint applications