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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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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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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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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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As my good friend Tomas notes , the Connected Systems Division (the people that did WSE, Indigo, Workflow and much more) are doing some pretty interesting "Cloud" services. At the moment these are experimental services you can play with but they don't yet have any SLAs or assurances. If that turns out to be the case, it will be a huge step forward and I would jump on it on my project. What do they have? They have an STS: Security Token Service that is an open identity provider that integrates with CardSpace to provide an authentication service. Having implemented a bare bones STS, I know this is not easy work and mine is far from complete. I need to use SAML, WS-Federation, CardSpace/OpenId to integrate with Java platforms and existing authentication providers. This is a HUGE win for us if we don't have to build it and IF Microsoft hosts it with the appopriate SLAs. Next up is the Relay Service which lets you expose a WCF based endpoint/service to the Internet from behind a firewall or NAT. Having worked with two companies in my past, Groove and Adesso, that had Relay Services and groked this area, I am real excited. The Relay Service uses whatever security policies you have and had defined with the STS so its secure. One scenario that is key for us is that we wanted to offer a "Direct" Service to two banks that want to collobrate with each other. We looked at doing that with with Dual Bindings in WCF but of course banks don't want to punch another hole in their firewall so this could be a great solution. Have a look! All this stuff works with the .NET Framework 3.0 and WCF. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Software Architecture , .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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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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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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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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As fellow CodeBetter Blogger Richard notes, in his very gracious post , I will be giving two talks on WCF for INETA this coming Monday in Oklahoma City. The deck is being refined once again with my latest Indigo learnings especially as we deploy in Financial Banks. I also hope to have new demos, perhaps integrating with WF! Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Apache Axis , Financial and Banking , WCF , WF , Windows Workflow , , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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