Patrick Chang

To state the obvious: with mission-critical applications, your mission will fail around the same time your applications do. This truism is of immediate concern to .NET developers involved with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), the loosely coupled software services that now support all kinds of business processes, including supply chains and customer-facing online applications. Failures or even brief slowdowns can take immense tolls because, well, the company's mission itself is affected. But monitoring application performance in a SOA can be especially challenging because loosely coupled architectures introduce a paradox: while the communication between disparate systems has been simplified, the environment in which these services are deployed is exponentially more complex. This complexity makes it ever more difficult to manage the overall system performance an... (more)

Enabling Next-Generation Portals

Enterprise portals are fast becoming the foundation of the Web-based economy thanks to their ability to give enterprises, trading partners, and customers global access to enterprise applications, back-office systems, and IT infrastructures. This ability has made enterprise portals appealing as the infrastructure of choice for enterprise IT organizations and has helped organizations justify the considerable expense of migrating from legacy systems. However, what Web-based systems, such as portals, gain in global access and economy, they can sacrifice in stability and manageabilit... (more)