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I have spent a lot of time through the night and some today to try to get my personal blog in order after the Mac options didn't pan out. We have a really important, large external release going out to two external banks next Friday but we stopped this week's Iteration to fix bugs that had been found. In XP, you don't keep going when you have bugs, you stop and fix them. VSTS/TFS TFS is still way too hard to install. The install that my experienced IT guy started last week finally got done last night and took him roughly 16 hours of work time to install including SQL Server 2005 Standard. That is still way too long. To "breadboard" TFS, I am putting in my Workflow Architectural Spikes. More later. Technorati Tags: .NET , VSTS , TFS , Team FoiFinancial and Banking , Extreme Programming , Agile , Agile Development , Workflow , K2 , Windows Workflow , Mocks Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I referred to my frustration in my post yesterday about "not really getting to post what you really want to." That is, to some extent, the catch of blogging in general, that there is a lot you can't say in "professional" blogs. I am an expressive person by nature. The second aspect is being on codebetter.com . I feel that CodeBetter is one of the best and most consistent sites in the development community and that we have made a huge difference in bring a whole aspect of Continuous Design and other state of the art development practices. I like to think we are helping to change the .NET community one post at a time from the drag & drop RAD mess to the disciplined TDD/Design Patterns/DI/Agile/Architecture world that we would like the .NET community to become; that there is another way besides just running Visual Studio; that investing in your craft and job makes a world of difference. With all that comes a great pressure on what I can blog. Now don't get me wrong: NO ONE at CB has ever said what I can or can not post. I have been given 100% freedom. I just feel an internal pressure to maintain extraordinarily high standards. Moreover, every once in a while, if I slip in something not mind blowing latest Agile post but personal or whatever, I might get some reader (rarely) saying "what is this ***?" My feelings really get hurt as I have blogged consistently relevant .NET content over 5 years in this community , something that only Simon Fell can also claim (Peter Drayton doesn't blog anymore). But it also produces a bit of anger in me as I stated from day one here, that I was going to blog what I want, whenever I want and that no one is paying me for doing this . I spend hours on each N&N post for instance. Thus there is no right for people to have expectations that they are entitled to something. If someone doesn't like a blog, get your own. It's also as easy to unsubscribe. That being said, I have thousands of loyal readers and there is huge degree of satisfaction Read More...
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Its suddenly over 80 degrees here today and went off for a drenching run. Team System/Team Foundation Server Big news of the day is that Microsoft has acquired TeamPlain , which makes the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team Server. Brian Harry says, "Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here . It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL." This is great news as this is the #1 question I always get from people whenever I bring up TFS. I don't know if its a news item but together with one of my IT guys I started standing up a TFS server yesterday. Before everyone panics, my motivation is pure experimentation at this part and I wouldn't use all of it anyhow (I would never leave NUnit and CruiseControl.NET) but I am interested in replacing an internal system + Wiki + other stuff into Work Item Tracking and maybe the source control. I am starting to get sick of Subversion but its seems to be doing right by the team. Speaking of TFS, Microsoft has let loose the plans for Rosario , the next version of TFS that is just past Orcas. Speaking of future plans, the same page has all the plans for the next year for VSTS. Geez, isn't anything secret anymore? :) WCF/Indigo/SOA Michele has been real busy! I know she's at DevConnections this week, the book is close to done (and its going to rock!) and last week she was at SD West 2007 and put up a slew of materials from it including great stuff on Contracts & Versioning, CardSpace and Identity. INETA Speaker Matevz Gacnik delivered an INETA talk on WCF session support, one of the bedrock's of our Service Interface Layer. He has the PPT Code I'm rocking out to Begin The Begin by R.E.M. from the album And I Feel Fine...The Best Of The IRS Years 82-87 Technorati Tags: .NET , Team Foundation Server , VSTS , Visual Studio Team System , Orcas , WCF , Windows Communication Foundation , Indigo , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft Read More...
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This is it, the big 150! The first New and Notable was on May 19, 2003 , (my first post was March 29, 2002 ) and I paid homage to the master, "I have always admired Mike's ability to look at the world out there and put it all into one great post, The Daily Grind . While I can't pretend to have Mike's writing ability, I would like to start moving to something similar instead of multiple seperate posts." I wish I had the discipline of Mike because if I posted daily I would be well towards 1000 instead of 150-) but hey I'm pretty proud of my record. I love this community and in the last 25 years this community (and Microsoft) have been real good to me and my family. I hope that what I have been picking here has been of good use to the community to keep you informed on key .NET activities as well as the architectural and design side. Thus, I go forth and pick: Entity Framework, ADO.NET 3, Orcas, MVP Summit One of the best writers in the community today is certainly Jeremy Miller . His latest post, MVP Summit Recapped: Linq for Entities, MonoRail, and Shameless Name Dropping , is a fine example of why. In one post, he is able to write quite elequently on complex subjects like the subtle design flaws in Entity Framework 3 and why WF 4 will rock your world. He is able to take a technology, stick to his design principles and stand his ground, educating and helping all involved achieve something better than was there before. He certainly wasn't the only one of us doing that but his post really captures the core design principles of no infrastructure code in business logic classes. Infrastructure is Infrastructure, business logic is business logic. We want the same thing: No marker interfaces, no codegen, no partial classes. Just plain "PO" and support for the Unit of Work pattern. David Laribee also talks on this area and makes clear that its a vision thing that doesn't really compare to NHibernate which is just OR/M; it's a full Read More...
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I have been working with the Office Live Services Beta for some months now. They just went live with my site over the weekend (although I still have to work on the domain name transfer) and it looks pretty good! I have a new Header and Home Page design. I have added my How-To STS/Window Authentication with ADAM/AD, Roles in AzMan with WCF to the refurbished WCF page . I added a new Domain Driven Design page under Software Engineering . My Presentations, as always are here . Hey, what else am I going to do while I am waiting for my flight? I would like and appreciate any and all feedback as comments here. What's good? What's bad? Knowing my blog and its subjects, what would you like to see? Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Software Architecture , INETA , MVP , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Yup, I'm still stuck in Seattle and I still feel like crap. Tomas just went off to the airport and I feel like the last MVP left in Seattle. Just want to get out of here and home but can't do that until tomorrow night. Lots of stuff stored up Entity Framework/ADO.NET 3/ORM/ASP.NET/MonoRail I consider my (and all the Code Better guys) biggest contribution to the whole Summit has been our conversations with the Microsoft Data Team on Linq for Entities . I would like to thank the Microsoft guys for being so open to feedback and understanding us In the meantime, Ayende went and did LINQ for NHibernate in his spare Time; does this man ever sleep???? Actually the second proudest moment came some of us CB bloggers with the special meeting with Scott Guthrie on how to make ASP.Net better support MVC much like Rails and MonoRail. My dissatisfaction with ASP.NET is well known and the reasons are expressed well by Ayende here on the leaky abstractions with WebForms and Jeremy Miller here . I expressed many times on my blog that I would just as soon go to Ruby on Rails if I had to do any Web stuff today. Several of the CB bloggers let me know about the goodness that is MonoRail. It's really awesome to see ScottGu have an MVC framework in the works as Jeffery talks about here Inheritance in the Entity Framework is the latest from the Data Team They also updated the 101 LINQ Samples that were included in the March CTP have now been updated to include the 101 LINQ to Entities Samples. To check out the newest samples download from here . Software Architecture/WCF/SOA Nice discussion from Harry on answering Dr. Nick's questions on SSB/WCF The Feb 2007 release of both the GAT and GAX have been released with Vista support but Harry has noted that you have to re-install all your guidance packages which is not so good Christian Weyer has some great slide decks from DevWeek 2007 Matias has an awesome post, " The holy grail of Enterprise SOA security " about SOA Enterprise Security using WCF Read More...
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This says it all. Technorati Tags: .NET , Agile , Agile Development , Extreme Programming , ORM , Data , Entity Framework , ADO.NET 3.0 , Orcas , MVP , Visual Studio , VSTS , Team System , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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In the last two posts 101 and 102 , I went pretty deep in some areas. I want to step back and do some more tutorial stuff. So the first question out of the gate is what is Workflow itself and where might you use it? In a nutshell, a Workflow describes and automates a Business Process. It can be described as a "reactive" program which tends to contain some traits: Workflow declared as a set of Activities Coordinates people and software Has real-world control flow Runs reliably and durably Tolerates dynamic change A Workflow is typically designed by a Process Designer using Business Process Analysis, Modeling, and Definition tools. That Process Definition is fed into a Workflow Management System. The WMS will have Users, Applications and Administrators/Supervisors. The WMS will present that Process Definition visually in some form and launch applications. From looking at workflows, we see that some challenges are present. Unlike non-reactive programs, workflows tend to be long-running and stateful. It may take 20 days for an order to be shipped for instance. There usually needs to be some controls to allow a person to override or skip a step in the workflow. Finally, we must be able to see into the workflow and see what state its in and visualizing control flow. Workflow is used in many scenarios like: Business Process Management (BPM) Document Lifecycle Management (Sharepoint, K2) BizTalk Orchestration Sales Management Line of Business Apps Many others... Enter Windows Workflow (WF). Unlike K2 and Sharepoint, WF is not a Workflow Management system or product. It is instead, a general purpose framework for building workflow into your own applications. It ships as part of the .NET Framework 3.0, and ships with both Vista and Longhorn Server. It is installable on Windows XP SP2 and Win2K3. Since WF is baked into Vista and later systems, and is a general framework, it is a single workflow execution engine for all Windows platforms. Indeed, products like K2, Sharepoint, Read More...
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So, last time around , I left off at the issue about my struggles with the ExternalDataService that ships in WF and purports to be the general mechanism to get data in and out of a workflow. Harry responded that he didn't like EDS and that I get real intimate with the WorkflowQueuingService that low-level communication infrastructure that ExternalDataService builds on top of. I also heard from Matt Winkler in email who pretty much pointed in the same direction, emphasizing that EDS is an abstraction that sits on top of a pretty basic queuing mechanism that you can program against and build on. One is not restricted to HandleExternalEvent, ExternalDataExchangeService but I would have to build the abstraction in the host to route the messages into the queue, and then have activities that wait on the queue. The first point of this post is to make my readers aware of this option and the documented EDS is not the only option for data in/out. One of the other main areas is WCF Integration, which actually can be achieved on top of the WorkflowQueuingService . We (at work) will not be able to use Orcas as our workflow deliverables are by this August and banks will not accept 3.5 for quite some time (if not years). So I have to build my own WCF/WF Integration. The first place I looked was the WCF Activities for WF project on CodePlex . This excellent project by Marcel builds a necessary infrastructure. For instance, there is an base InputActivity class that implements the IEventActivity Interface for event-driven activities. /// <summary> /// Base class for activities that dequeue data from a workflow queue /// </summary> public abstract class InputActivity : Activity , IEventActivity , IActivityEventListener < QueueEventArgs > { That class provides an abstraction over the queues and events. From there, you can derive a WCFInputActivity. It looks like good stuff that I can use. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Financial and Banking Read More...
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Still real tired from my Oklahoma trip , partying with Raymond sure is exhausting-). Agile/Development Tools On my short list for some time now, is to switch from NUnit to the definitely superior MbUnit. My friend Andrew has done some great work with this tool and he has a new release out with the beta 1 release of MbUnit 2.4. New features in this drop. I really need to switch and get my team to switch over. It's just been an inertia thing with NUNit as I knew all along MbUnit was better Testing private methods for .NET 2.0 rom Ben Hall. Database rollback support for .NET 2.0 from Cathal Connolly and Todd Menier. NUnit style explicit support from Graham Hey. Speaking of NUnit, they also have a new release, NUnit 2.4 Release Candidate (2.4.0). The Release Notes are here and include some nice features: A new syntax and internal architecture for Asserts is being introduced in this release, based on the notion of constraints found in JMock and NMock. The Assert.That method is used to make an assertion based on a constraint Assert.That( actual, constraint, message, args ); Assert.That( actual, constraint, message ); Assert.That( actual, constraint ); The constraint argument may be specified directly using one of the built-in constraint classes or a user-defined class. It may also be specified using one of the syntax helpers provided as static methods of the Is class, such as Is.Null Is.Empty Is.EqualTo( object ) Is.CollectionContaining( object ) Is.SubsetOf( collection ) SCSF is one of the most visible Microsoft projects being done in an Agile way. They are crazy as us doing one week Iterations. Blaine has some reflections on Iteration 3 . CB brother, Jeremy asks what OSS tools are you using in development? As I answered there, they include: NUnit CruiseControl.Net FitNesseDotNet RhinoMocks Subversion TortoiseSVN Ankh Wiki Speaking of tools. my good buddy Tomas (see you next week!) has a nice list of Text Editors One of the things Raymond and I discussed in Oklahoma was Read More...
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Thanks Oklahoma City and especially Raymond for a great 2 days in the city! It was 76 degrees and I had a blast. Raymond was the best host a speaker could ever wish for and the group was great. One thing that is different from other groups is that they have both a lunch meeting (hour and 15 minutes) and then an evening meeting (2 hours). So I had over 60 people at the lunch meeting and then another 25-30 at night. I put up both PDFs on my Presentations page. The AM meeting I paired down to 22 slides, which for me is a record in conciseness :). I completely rewrote the long night presentation from all the other times I gave it last year and I put in all new material on Service Interface Layer, Service Adapter, Entity Translators, and Repository patterns as well as adding new SOA and WCF stuff. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Harry wonders if it has been a slow week. It started that way for me but its certainly not now with both work and the Orcas CTP release. I was getting so bored with .NET in general and even WCF/WF lately. Its really been a long time for me with something new. Vista is so one year ago, WCF too, etc. Last night/this morning when playing with the new Orcas bits was the first time I've felt that excited in months. The blogsphere has been busy to I think. Architecture/SOA/BPEL/Workflow The first piece of great news, from Harry , is that Architect Extraordinary, Pat Helland has retaken the Red Pill! Harry rightfully skewers BPEL as, "BPEL is just the latest attempt at "write once, run anywhere" and will meet with the same limited success of previous attempts." (Executable) BPEL efforts remind me of the awful committee mess that produced the vile Corba. I do think that Abstract BPEL is useful though to, as Harry says, "to exchange of the publicly viewable parts of a process with a partner in order to make two processes work together." There has to be some way to exchange Workflow definitions and it doesn't look like its going to be XPDL . BTW, this comes after a post from David Chappell , who stated, "no one should interpret the announcement as an embrace of BPEL-based development by Microsoft." Like David, I run across very few organizations (we actually have workflow in 65+ banks & hedge funds) that ask for or use BPEL. Bart talks about a WF scenario I am beginning to worry about: what about multiple workflows calling into the same Local Communication Service concerning possible threading and synchronization issues? J .D Meir announces PAG's first release of the Visual Studio Team System Guidance . This is really cool and really necessary as they will get guidance to Architects and Developers faster my updating emerging practices. I highly encourage all .NET developers to avail themselves of this valuable tool Via Frans , I found the blog of Jeroen van den Bos who has Read More...
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So after two days of downloading at broadband speeds, I finally got all the pieces of the Orcas Mrach CTP downloaded. Doublce-clicking on Part1.exe expanded the other 8 RAR files. Once that was done, I used Virtual PC 2007 on top of my Vista Ultimate desktop OS. I left the setting at 1 GB of RAM. I then attached to the VPC image and there I was staring at a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise login. The VPC image seems to be put together well. In addition to Orcas (Visual Studio 9), both SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 are present. A nice bonus is that TFS is fully installed saving a lot of work. So far, I have just created a Team Project in VSTS/TFS and the speeds are ok. I am going to be digging in during parts of the weekend, so I'll have more as I go along. Technorati Tags: .NET , .NET Framework 3 , Orcas , LINQ , OR/M , Windows Workflow , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , WF , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I am really excited about this drop! Too many great things to mention. I'll have to check if I can say anything about the pieces I have been involved with. Get the installable bits here and the VPC image here . Technorati Tags: .NET , .NET Framework 3 , Orcas , LINQ , OR/M , Windows Workflow , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Ah Saturday morning where we can sleep in, ah no wait...I have kids to wake me up at the crack of dawn... Software Architecture The PAG folks continue to deliver their goodness with their first weekly drop of the new version of the Smart Client Software Factory and they looked like they brought over some of the cool stuff from the Mobile version: What’s New In this drop, you have the first look at: • New Application Blocks. We have ported over four application blocks that were previously available as part of the Mobile Client Software Factory. We may refactor, remove, replace, this code in the future (we value your input), but we currently have the following: o Disconnected Agent Application Block. This application block provides management features for execution of Web services from occasionally connected smart clients. With a disconnected service agent, the device can maintain a queue of Web service requests when offline (disconnected) (emphasis mine) and then replay them when a connection to the server application becomes available. o Connection Monitor Application Block. This application block monitors and exposes the available connections and the associated networks. o Endpoint Catalog Application Block. This application block provides features to expose the physical addresses and other details of remote services. o Data Access Application Block. This application block provides support for SQL Server Compact Edition. This application block will be replaced when the factory migrates to the next version of Enterprise Library. Jeremy Miller continues his excellent posts and talks about something Steve and I approach in our architecture: Don't Let the Database Dictate Your Object Model . I have to admit to being dragged a bit by Steve into this approach with OR/M and dropping the whole data-centric database-out view I have had for many years. Also see his My Least Favorite Kind of Requirements Undocumented WCSF Feature: Global Exception Handling Udi tackles Can, or Read More...
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