Architecting an enterprise or web application for high performance, scale, and availability can be a challenge without an appropriate caching strategy. One approach is to leverage a distributed caching platform to support the needs of performance, scale, and availability. In this ARCast episode, Scott Hanselman and Joe Shirey discuss Microsoft's codename "Velocity" project and how it supports building out these types of applications as well as what architects and developers need to think about when implementing a distributed caching approach.

On July 10th, Microsoft announced the RTM of Silverlight™ 3 and the RC of Expression™ 3. Today, I’m very happy to be able to tell you that the final release of Expression Studio 3 is now available.

This is truly a coming-of-age for the Expression products. They’ve always been solid, but with this release they have the full range of features and functionality that many of us knew could be there but just wasn’t yet. I mean, the SketchFlow™ rapid prototyping tool alone should be enough to get you jazzed about Blend™ 3.

These tools have always been produced for use primarily by designers, but I’ve found that I’ve become very dependent on Blend to layout the interfaces for my WPF and Silverlight applications. This is a growing trend I’ve seen picking up stream over the past few years, creating an interesting hybrid role I like to call “the devsigner.” We all knew it would happen eventually, but Expression has really made this practical since all of the Expression products use the same project and source code files as Visual Studio™, creating a designer-developer collaboration that you just can’t find anywhere else.

If you haven’t tried any of the Expression products before, give them a try. You can download a 60-day trial from the Expression web site. Also, there is tons of information available on the product teams’ blogs.

For more information, here are some good sites to bookmark:

• Expression Products web site
• Silverlight team blog
• Expression Web blog
• Expression Blend and Design blog

On 30 – 31 March 2009, at Weston Manor, Oxford UK a group of senior IT architects from across the industry met to consider the coming ‘Cloud’. What it is, what it means for business and the software profession and what has Microsoft been up to in the cloud. This episode is part 2 in the series, what Microsoft is doing in the cloud computing space.

On 30 – 31 March 2009, at Weston Manor, Oxford UK a group of senior IT architects from across the industry met to consider the coming ‘Cloud’. What it is, what it means for business and the software profession and what has Microsoft been up to in the cloud?  This episode is part one of the discussion, what the cloud means to the user.