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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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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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Today, the "breakout" sessions begun. In other words, we started drilling down with the product groups; for me that is Solution Architect. Some of the sessions I can't even name as even the code words are not public but I did want to mention that we had a great session and discussion (on the present) with Jack Greenfield on "The Future of Software Factories and Q &A with Jack Greenfield." Leaving out the future, we had a great discussion on a topic I generated when I told Jack that although I buy the notion totally of Software Factories (we use WSSF, CAB, Smart Client Factory to mention just a few) I had a really hard time buying the notion of Software Product Lines as it really smacked to me of Big Design Up Front, something I abhor as an Agile Architect. The answer was a good one, revolving around the idea of harvesting best practices, frameworks, etc of Product #1, #2 and it doesn't have to be some huge heavyweight notion of designing the product line in advance. I think that's how I understood it. Technorati Tags: .NET , Software Factories , Software Architecture , MVP , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! 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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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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A N&N from Brussels Belgium where I am up in the middle of the night (again I wake up at 3AM!) with my sleep hours all screwed up. I am enjoying my week here nonetheless. I don't know quite what to make of Brussels. Some parts remind me quite a bit of Paris but there is this weird mix of "modern" glass buildings although the style is a bit "older" than such US buildings. I don't know, I'm jet lagged and probably making no sense. The (potential) customer we are visiting is actually quite large > 3,000 employees most in one large building and I have been working hard on a "High Level Technical Document." Its' certainly some BDUF but this is a large SaS type architecture across 3 data centers that has many Enterprise issues (levels of Failover, SLAs, SQL Server Hot Mirroring, Perimeter Zone Security, etc. to deal with and get right. Anyhow, the food is good and there is a lot of espresso-). Architecture The Open Group (the TOGAF guys) has scheduled what appears to be an interesting conference on Enterprise Architecture and SOA in San Diego [via Architecture Blog ] Avalon/WCF Karsten gives an update on the North Face In Store Explorer WCF application that floored many of us at PDC05 and has now been deployed . He also reminds, "Note that the white paper written about this application is still relevant and worth reading. The code samples all work just fine on the final bits and have some useful code as far as state management, image montages and a 3D carousel." My good friend and fellow Smart Client track speaker, Walt Ritscher has started a new WCF blog at http://wpfwonderland.wordpress.com - Subscribed! Check out XAML to IL Explained Part 1 , WPF/e Example - Game of Life WCF/Indigo/SOA Nicholas Allan has his best of 2006 (and what a year it was for him/them!). Also check out Zen Faults Other Ted Neward has his predictions for 2007 , of which I mostly agree with all of them but one of the best qualities of Ted Read More...
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I thought Thanksgiving morning is for adults to be sleeping in. Instead, not only are the kids up at the crack at dawn but one (the eight year old) is playing games on Vista and asking for Starbucks, while the nearly 4 year old is clamoring for princess attention. And Angus is eating hats and everything else he can find.... CLR/Rotor Today, we begin where it all started...1999 for me and the CLR with the very welcome addition of a new CLR blogger Patrick Dussand who is the Lead Architect of the CLR/UIFX group and the Chief Architect of the .NET Frameworks. He relates How it All Started...Aka The Birth of the CLR. Since we haven't heard from Chris Brumme in a while, here's hoping Patrick will fill in the gaps for us CLR wonks. Maoni introduces him . While there, check out Part 2 of his series on hangs Workflow article over on MSDN for Creating Custom Activities in WF [via Mike Taulty ] Mike also talks about CallExternalMethod in WF Vista Jim Alchin on ReadyBoost in Vista Speaking of my son playing games on Vista, Microsoft has a new effort called Games for Windows that Robert points to here . It's Microsoft's intentions to right their wrongs re PC Gaming and make Windows Vista an excellent gaming experience. There making it a requirement that these games have to run on Windows and XP. That is what I am finding with Direct/X 10 and the two Games for Windows titles I have bought so far Misc 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in : Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS [via Scott ] Technorati Tags: Windows Vista , CLR , .NET , Workflow , Microsoft Office 2007 , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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