Brian On Software

Microsoft has many valuable resources for .NET developers under its MSDN umbrella: newsgroups, blogs, forums, magazines, etc.  One very valuable resource from Microsoft that seems to be ignored by most developers is The Architectural Journal:

The Architectural Journal is an independent platform for free thinkers and practitioners of IT architecture.  New editions are issued quarterly with articles designed to offer perspective, share knowledge, and help you learn the discipline and pursue the art of IT architecture.  The Architectural Journal reaches over 67,00 subscribers worldwide.

I think one reason that it isn’t getting much attention is because its “feedless”, meaning you can’t directly subscribe to a feed, through your browser, that will notify you whenever a new issue has been published.  So in order to get notified when a new issue has been published, you need to subscribe through a fairly simple, but tedious, subscription workflow.  Once subscribed, you’ll get the quarterly journal as a PDF as soon as it’s released.  In short, here are the steps you should follow in order to subscribe to The Architectural Journal:

Go to the e-newsletters page in the Profile Center.  You may be required to sign up for a Windows Live ID account if you don’t have one already.  You may use your current email account or create a new one if you don’t have one.  From there, you follow these three steps:

1. Find The Architectural Journal in the list of available communications on the left and select it.
2. Press the Subscribe button.  You should now see your choices in the list on the right.
3. Select your delivery format: HTML (suggested) or plain text.

(Note: it would’ve been much easier had someone put an RSS feed link instead.)

So that’s it! Now, you should be getting four issues per year.  All great content about software architecture topics.  All free.  Past topics include:

• Distributed Computing
• The Role of an Architect
• Mobile Architecture
• Software + Services
• Web Architecture
• And more.

You can also skip the whole subscription process and directly download the current and previous issues in English, French, Spanish, etc., as a compressed (ZIP) file.