Author Archives: John
New msnbc.com developer blog
We just launched a new blog to talk about the technical details of how we build msnbc.com: Development @ msnbc.com. I’m going to be posting there, along with some of my colleagues: Paul Kearney, Bryan Wheeler, and others coming soon… Until … Continue reading
US Election Day – or “What I did since my summer vacation”
My wife and I had a wonderful vacation in France this summer. Since then, I’ve been neck deep helping msnbc.com get ready for the US elections on November 2. I’ll talk more in the future about the Elections service and … Continue reading
Identifying the services within a service oriented CMS
In my previous post I talked about avoiding a database oriented architecture (DOA) and choosing a service oriented architecture (SOA) for our content management system (CMS). The next big question is: How do we divide our CMS into large-grained sets … Continue reading
Database Oriented Architecture is DOA
As we began work on a new CMS for msnbc.com, one of the major pain points with the existing system that we wanted to address was its database oriented architecture – or DOA. No, not the popular video game (searching … Continue reading
New publishing platform for msnbc.com and todayshow.com
For the past 18 months or so I’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone on a project to rebuild the publishing platform for msnbc.com, which is also used to run todayshow.com and a bunch of other NBC News sites. Just over a week ago… … Continue reading
Business services, EDA and asynchronous messaging
Business services are not the same thing as web services. A business service is a high-level concept: a large-grained, cohesive set of business functionality. Everywhere you see the word “service” in this post you should think “big chunk of business … Continue reading
On Configuration
[I recently wrote this up for work, and thought it was worth re-posting here.] These ideas come almost entirely from Udi Dahan and how he implemented nServiceBus, but unfortunately I can’t find where he said it. It may have been … Continue reading
The life and times of an ASP.NET MVC Framework request
[I recently wrote this up for some folks at work, and thought it was worth re-posting here.] In this post I’ll detail what happens during a request to the default ASP.NET MVC site that you get when you create a … Continue reading
What is dependency injection?
[I recently wrote this up for some folks at work, and thought it was worth re-posting here.] Dependency injection is a hot topic these days. You hear terms like “dependency injection”, “inversion of control”, “IoC container”, “DI container”, etc. a … Continue reading
Follow up on Silverlight and SaaS
Back in May, I wrote a post speculating about using Silverlight on the server to allow tenants in a multitenant SaaS application to write and run custom code on shared servers. Silverlight provides a subset of the full .NET framework … Continue reading
