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CLR/Tools An excellent post from Scott Hanselman on Managing Change with .NET Assembly Diff Tools . As I said , during the MVP Summit I spent time with Patrick Smachia and Scott Hanselman looking at the absolutely amazing new beta of NDepend . Microsoft/Ajax/Web 2.0 is Bull**** Ayende already took Paul Graham to task for all the flaws in Microsoft is Dead. I just really despise this notion of Ajax is the savior of mankind and that this Web 2.0 stuff is anything more than bull****. As Ayende says, " The premise that Ajax is the new OS is flawed on many levels. I am writing this on a computer with fast CPU and quite a bit of memory, and I would really like those CPU cycles to do stuff that I want, not interpreted javascript in a browser window to give me something that is similar to what I want. There is a limited class of applications where Ajax applications makes sense. Gmail has the luck to hit every point on the list. Other applications are simply not viable on the web. I can't imagine an IDE on the web offering even close to the bare-bones functionality of Visual Studio, for instance, or the ease and power of Outlook. " Agile/Extreme Programming/Continuous Design Jeremy and I were going to co-author a paper on Continuous Design and Architecture for DevTeach before I pulled out of the conference. He begins the discussion with an excellent post here . I may turn in my (former) presentation into an article on this blog I love a post that is entitled " Just Some Thoughts This Morning " that turns into pretty profound thoughts on Continuous Design from Jeremy. Best part, and what I would emphasize is, "Just really good code. If I could have anything, and only one thing, it would be well written, well factored, clean, intention revealing code . Everything else is just trying to sprinkle on some heavy spices to disguise the fact that your code smells like rotten meat." Software Architecture Nice set of 10 Links for 4/9/07 My favorite links to Prag Dave: The RADAR Architecture: Read More...
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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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Sitting here on Saturday morning with a nice cup of Kona coffee. There just is no better coffee in the world. Strong but deceivingly smooth. I really miss our former annual trips to the Big Island that we used to take with my Father-In-Law and family before he got ill. We used to go up in the hills and buy direct from the growers. Umm, nothing better. The coffee may actually help me get over my funk morning as there is now a lot going on my personal life but you know you never get to blog what really matters Agile/Extreme Programming/Tools While Steve was off having a baby , I went back into the team pairing full time for this Iteration rather than doing do the advance work on Workflow and stuff. It felt really good and of course it was a challenge for me, as many of the particulars of the system have changed since I last paired and I had to actually relies on my pair more. What floored me, even though it shouldn't at this point, is just how good this team has gotten. Every single person on the team could explain any place in the code at any time and we were able to evolve the design and code together. It still blows me away the power of pair programming BTW, we are working on our THIRD release of our Collateral Management tools and architecture to at least two Top 50 Banks! Ayende has released Rhino Mocks 3.0 , the premier Mocking solution on .NET IMHO He was also on .NET Rocks talking about NHibernate and Rhino Mocks Since he still had time after the last two somehow, he also put out an hour long screen cast about Rhino Mocks Jeremy is Code Complete on Structure Map 2.0 Financial and Banking Mike Walker announces the OBA Reference Application Pack for Loan Origination Systems (OR-Loss ). This is a lot of great stuff here Mike is also doing a Financial Services Unwrapped IV Webcast Workflow Paul Andrews blogs about the 3rd performance paper released for WF Sylvain blogs that K2 BlackPearl Beta 1 TR2 is available. BlackPearl is the version of K2.NET built on WF CLR/C# 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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Smart Clients/Orcas I am extremely pleased to see the .NET Framework (and Microsoft) finally gain the offline sync services that I have been talking about for quite a few years in my work at Groove and Adesso . You will be able to do synchronization from WinForms and WPF apps that you could do from Groove apps (in my case WinForms) 4 years ago and Adesso 2-3 years ago now. OR/M Excellent introduction to NHibernate here more in a little bit Currently listening to Tarkus by Emerson, Lake & Palmer on album Tarkus Technorati Tags: .NET , Orcas , Data , OR/M , NHibernate , Software Architecture , , TDD , Agile , Agile Development , Extreme Programming , CLR , .NET Framework , Click Once , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Thank God, its Friday. Even after a full 32 ounces of strong Starbucks coffee, I still fell asleep on the train on the way in. Entity Framework/OR/M/LINQ The excellent Entity Framework discussions continue with Scott Bellware's fine Entity Framework Challenges Architecture One of my core principles of Agile Architecture that I will talk about in Monteal next month is that of Lighweight Modeling. Core to that, is what Scott Bellware said, That's "Model-Driven", not "Diagram Driven ." Like Scott says, I also put my model into the domain and evolving that model. I too don't find much use for diagrams, particuarly the waste of time Whitehorse ones or worse yet the Rational Rose ones. But, as Jeremy noted from his discussion with me , I *do* find the use of a very small subset of UML used rather precisely in drawing quick, non-durable model diagrams on the board. In fact, Jim Shore and I taught our team to do it in any part of the code base at any time. Harry channeling Nick , "Nick Malik on enterprise architecture : "Enterprise Architecture is not about 'building solutions right'. Enterprise Architecture is about 'building the right solutions'. Agile/Good Software Design Jeremy on the DRY principle and the Wormhole Anti-Pattern He also points to the great piece Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me . Agreed with all of it Jonathan has a niece piece that I vigorously nodded my head in agreement with, Pair Programming improves your Communication Skills .NET/CLR Scott Hanselman - A Better Way for Click Once and Firefox . Yes!! Misc I was ROTFL when I read Lazycoder's rant , "Save me from having to type more angle brackets. Please. I’m tired of $#@$@ angle brackets. My “,” and “.” keys are worn to a nub. My shift key is floppy and has no spring left.No more angle-bracket based UI. EVER." Technorati Tags: .NET , Orcas , Entity Framework , 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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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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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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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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Architecture/SOA Blaine Wastell has posted that PAG planning an update of the Smart Client Software Factory to be released in late April of this year. They are encouraging feedback at http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient and enter critical items into the issue tracker ( http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient/WorkItem/List.... ). From where I sit, they have their Priority 1 stuff right with WPF Interoperability. We absolutely need to be able to move to WPF with the existing CAB/SCBAT infrastructure I have been listing posts on WS-RM and its implementation in WCF. Harry Pierson, has an autopost that builds on his recent epiphany about WCF and long running services. He speaks about his conversation with Shy and " At some point in the three years between March 2003 and February 2006, WS-RM went from being the enabler of long running services to "yet another misnamed WS-* protocol". And with it, WCF lost (never had?) the ability to support long running services (as I've written previously )." The main point is that it does not support RM-based durable messaging. As Harry says, "As I said before, lack of support for WS-RM based durable messaging isn't that big a deal. As long as you understand WCF's sweet spot - the current version's sweet spot anyway - and don't try and make it be something it's not, you should be fine. Furthermore, Shy mentions the need for an "interoperable Queued Messaging specification" and wrote that it's something he "expect that we will get to it in the near future". Here's hoping that spec is less flexible than WS-ReliableMessaging." CLR/Tools/Agile/TDD The most indispensable tool in the .NET universe, Reflector, has gone through a big update to V5! As Jamie states , "This is a significant update with lots of refinements and new features. Perhaps most significantly it includes support for C# 3.0 language features such as LINQ query expressions, lambda expressions and extension methods. See my screencast about using Reflector 5.0 from VS Orcas." He also Read More...
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Data/ADO.NET Orcas Two from the ADO.NET team: Entity Client and Nulls - LINQ to DataSets Part 3 Software Architecture/SOA/CAB Udi answers, Can or should SOA be implemented without Web Services? David Chappell on The Three Faces of SOA Eric Newcomer: WS-* vs. REST is not the question Another architect with a chronicle of How CAN and TDD helps doing better designs WCF/CardSpace Richard Turner gives an insightful report on RSA2007 especially on the "demo showed Wachovia 's website running on Corillian 's online banking platform using Arcot Systems ' security engine to generate managed cards and process token requests." Corrillian and Wachovia's work will be important for all of this in this sector as more and more backs embrace CardSpace and Identity management. We are seeing a lot of movement in this area. Jorgen provides some great links on Interoperability with WCF . This is an area that I am becoming more involved with Java systems communicating with our WCF Services. Dr. Nick continues with More Poison Message Handling Tomas on Writing a WCF Transport Channel - Part 1 Agile Architecture Uncertain Planning Nick talks about The minimum amount of architecture needed for Test Driven Design . .NET Framework 3/WF .NET Framework 3.0 training kit for WF, WCF and CardSpace [via Mike ] .NET 3.0 Middleware Technologies Day: Third Incarnation David Chappell: Why Workflow Matters WF, WCF and CardSpace training materials posted Technorati Tags: .NET , Smart Client , PAG , CAB , Software Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Windows Workflow , WF , Agile Architecture , TDD , .NET Framework 3 , ADO.NET , Orcas , Microsoft I'm listening to Street Life by Roxy Music on the album Stranded (Remastered) Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Found some time to blog. Smart Client/UI Architecture V2 of the User Interface Process Application Block (UIPAB) is out from PAG [via Mike ]. I must confess to being confused on how this is different than CAB as "designed to abstract the control flow and state management out of the user interface layer into a user interface process layer," which CAB does with MVP as well until I saw. "helps you write generic code for the control flow and state management for different applications types (for example, Web and Windows) and helps manage user's tasks in complex scenarios." So which do you use in Smart Clients and why? Software Design/DDD As I have stated our Architecture reflects a strong, "proper" DDD Layer . Teammate Steve, is also a big believer and we have both lost focus a bit on it as we have been swamped with other things. His post is a good reminder to check out the experience reports on the DDD site. One reader once said I was using buzzwords. I think not. Especially in a large Financial Collateral application it is vitally important to use the UbiquitousLanguage of the actual Collateral banking domain that the analysts use and design a business layer reflecting that. And yeah, I'm astonished how many .NET developers have never even heard of the fundamental DDD patterns when I talk about SOA/Architecture for INETA around the country Data/OR/M One thing that goes well with a true domain layer is an OR/M implementing the Domain Mapper pattern . The ADO.NET team (along with some bloggers), which lately found religion, talks about the Entity Data Model 101 - Part 2 WCF/Indigo Confused about all the many WCF configuration options? Tomas has an excellent post on understanding the admittedly complex WCF configuration schema. In return, you get fine-grained control Technorati Tags: .NET , Smart Client , PAG , CAB , Software Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Microsoft I'm listening to Paranoid Android by Radiohead on the album Edinburgh, Meadowbank Read More...
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I haven't felt like blogging much lately. Some of that is due to how much is going on at work (much more on that when I feel like it) but I have also haven't really felt jazzed about blogging lately. I want to, and am starting to devote more time to get myself into the gym and my family, both of which have higher priority, of course. I should at least empty out my flagged items in Feed Demon as the size of the list drives me crazy-). WPF/WPF/Avalon My good buddy Walt wants to know " What are the Top Five Things you want to know about WPF/e ?" He is speaking at several conferences this year on the subject, so if you want to influence his choices, head on over! Simon talks about the Regatta Manager as his #7 Great WPF application and as the 2nd production WPF ever . It definitely seems that WPF is picking up some real momentum in real applications vs demos Speaking of that, Tim Sneath continues his series with Great WPF Applications #7: Skandia Cowes Week CourseSetter Software Architecture/SOA Mario Szpusztra posts his whitepaper on his point-of-view on Microsoft's strategies around Service Orientation, BPM and ESB. Its a good read I agree with Harry on his reaction to Anne Manes of the Burton Group says the time is right for UDDI , calling it the "foundation for governance". I agree that UDDI may be a piece of the puzzle but I have seen nearly zero uptake on UDDI. As Harry says it's all about "desire" rather than discoverability Arnon continues his "What is SOA Anyway?" series with Part 4: SOA Defined and Part 5: Summary SQL Server/Data Congrats to Data Dude team on shipping ! You can get it here , more details from Gert here WCF/Indigo A nice series of posts emerged on Indigo beginning with a post that Harry sent me and asked me to review. I think Harry is right on in his How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WCF with his realizations about the relationship between duplex contracts and durable services. As we all know, it was a V1, and stay tuned! Also in this thread Read More...
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Winter has finally set in with single digit temps and minus degrees wind chills but still no snow. WPF/Avalon Adam's WPF book is out and flying off the shelves apparently ! I have been looking forward to this one as his COM Interop book is the bible there. Feb CTP of WPF/E! New Docs, SDK and QuickStarts for the above Via Mike Harsh, Dave has put up a new WPF/E sample he built for a recent INETA talk that is a Reflection Editor .NET 3.0 Crash Course - Part 8: WPF Conclusion Tim Sneath , from the WPF Team, has been doing a series on great WPF applications that is up to 6. This hopefully proves that WPF is more than some pretty 3D demo thing and being used in real applications. #1: British Library Turning the Pages , #2: Electric Rain StandOut , #3: 90 Degree Radius Reports , #4: Otto , #5: TF1 , and #6: fnac.com LINQ/ADO.NET Orcas Entity Data Model 101: Part 1 Type safety - LINQ to DataSets Part 2 SOA As mentioned before, Dale Churchward is doing a series on "Proper SOA." He adds A Proper SOA is a Framework , A Proper SOA Must Work With Your Current Infrastructure and Legacy Applications , and A Proper SOA is Flexible Enough to Support Multiple Vendors, Software, and Hardware Harry on the Web Service Software Factory Kzu wrote a niece piece called " Building Software Factories Today " where he outlines some of the challenges and techniques you can use (and we will be using) to make effective factories on today's platform. [via Peter ] Financial and Banking Vertical/Architecture Mike has more on a topic near and dear to me: Software Factories for Financial Services Mike also shows how Microsoft is a clear leader in standards support for our Financial Industry. For us support for standards like SWIFT are critical BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT Architecture Nick says , "In think that one of the most valuable traits of an enterprise architect is the ability to push gently. In other words, if you find that a team is developing a solution that cannot be integrated or creates Read More...
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