Microsoft System Center products and solutions help capture and aggregate knowledge of IT infrastructure, policies and best practices to help IT organizations build manageable systems and automate operations to reduce costs, improve application availability and enhance service deliver. Dhananjay Mahajan interviews Vij Rajarajan, GM of System Center, about his vision of the future of System Center and how it is poised to help Enterprises prepare for new industry trends and challenges. We will learn how System Center fits in the Dynamic IT and broader Microsoft strategy, as well as how Enterprise IT Architects can help prepare their organizations for upcoming changes.

It is common to hear of massive IT failures; projects that are over budget, late, poorly aligned to business needs, or all of the above. Often, the resulting losses are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cause is almost always the same: uncontrolled complexity. The solution to complexity is simple — or more specifically, simplicity.  This talk is about the mathematical models of complexity and the methodologies needed to control it. Complexity is the most insidious problem facing IT architects. Control it, or it will bury you! David Solivan interviews Roger Sessions about his book 'Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises'.

It’s back and bigger than the first time. The announcement was made yesterday that registration for the St. Louis Day of .NET was made yesterday. This time around, it’s more like the Days of .NET, because the conference organizers have extended the conference giving you two full days of great content.

The Day of .NET conference will take place on Friday, August 28th and Saturday the 29th at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, Missouri. Just a few of the topics that will be covered at the conference include C#, Silverlight, Expression Blend, Visual Studio, WPF, WCF and lots, lots more. The conference will also include a Friday evening social at the Home Night Club and guests are welcome to attend.

Registration for the event is only $100, which is really nothing when you consider there will be over 40 technical sessions from both local and national speakers, breakfast and lunch on both days of the event, the Friday evening party and lots of cool door prizes. That’s a ton of value for only $100.

Reserve your seat for the event by registering online today. This will be a very informative and extremely fun event. Don’t miss out!

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft released the shipping dates for Windows 7 yesterday. According to the Windows 7 team blog, the final released bits for Windows 7 will hit RTM some time in the second half of July with general availability on October 22, 2009.

The post also described a free upgrade program for those who purchase new PCs running Windows Vista prior to October 22nd, but no details are available yet on the timing or details of the program.

This is an extremely exciting announcement. Windows 7 has received overwhelmingly good reviews from users and analysts, even those who were highly critical of Windows Vista and of the Microsoft platform in general. If you want to try our Windows 7 today, be sure to download the release candidate and try it out. I’ve been running the RC on my primary machine for several weeks and haven’t run into any performance or stability issues at all. In fact, it’s hard for me to sit down at a Vista machine anymore. Windows 7 will spoil that experience for you altogether.