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  • New and Notable 179

    Ever hear the story of the guy who responded to ScottW's Facebook NJ Developers and DonXML 's same email and gets addicted to Facebook ? CLR/Rotor Phil Haack has a most excellent tip on an easier way to see the Rotor code. Instead of doing the whole multi-hour Rotor unzipping and building dance, you can view most of the code online here ! Design Patterns/UI/CAB/Software Design/Agile Jeremy continues his brilliant series with his Build Your Own CAB #14 . I'm not going to quote the whole title as it has too many buzzwords to type :) Speaking of buzzwords, Chris combines a mouthfull in his most excellent post: NUnit, NBehave, DSLs, Fluent Interfaces - and other popular gibber jabber. You should read it. Windsor/IoC Jeremy Jarrell has started an excellent series on tools that we Agile developers use. The first piece is an excellent down-to-earth tutorial on Windsor, the Inversion of Control (IoC) container piece of the Castle Project , the same guys that bring you MonoRail IronRuby Scott Hanselman continues the Iron Ruby juice with a WPF Sample in IronRuby talking via C# to Wesabe WCF/Distributed .NET Matevz Gacnik has an interesting post where he managed to get distributed transaction scenario working using WCF , MTOM and WS-AtomicTransactions . [tags: CLR, C#, Rotor, WPF, LINQ, DLR, IronRuby, Castle, Windsorm MTOM, Distributed Transactions, Design Patterns, CAB, UI Design] Read More...
  • New and Notable 154

    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...
  • New and Notable 152

    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...
  • New and Notable 151

    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...
  • Refurbished New Home Site

    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...
  • All I Can Say is a Big Amen!

    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...
  • New and Notable 148

    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...
  • New and Notable 145

    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...
  • New and Notable 134

    Completely buried with two projects and the main one is going to CTP #2 at a major back in Paris/London next week so going to scrape this together quickly. I have also been pairing with Steve back on the main project on solving performance problems - yesterday, he and I optimized a section of the system where an operation was taking 25 to 30 minutes and got it down to 30 seconds! Now that's a good boost! I have much in my head concerning where we are at and my current feelings on being agile, architecture and such but they will have to wait. I tried to blog about the Apple iPhone announcement but couldn't muster up enough interest... Architecture and SOA, Agile SOA and BI Impendence Mismatch Arnon has great comments on a presentation (via Shahid Sah's blog) by Ron Jacobs on the Software Architect's Role. he says, "In this presentation, entitled Architects and the Architecture of Software , Ron compares the architect's role to that of an explorer, advocate, and designer," and "However, I would personally replace "advocate" with "mentor", and "explorer" with a "polymath" or "Renaissance" man. I'd also add a leader and visionary (although Ron mentions that as part of the discussion on explorer)." I agree with his additions, at least how I see my role. He also has some outstanding comments on Agile Iterations and what I really want to write about (and finding) when I have time: "To me, that is just a reminder why JEDUF is important. I find that in projects that are large or overly complex "sacrificing" one, two, or even three iterations for handling technical risks and forming a candidate architecture goes a long way ( and I don't care if this makes my project not agile. I am fine if it is pliant , lagum or what-not)." I am actually finding its quite a bit more than 1-3 Iterations depending on the project and environment. Actually this ties in with Jim's Design Maps . Cazz on Building Software Factories Today Richard Venyard on SOA Algebra WCF/Indigo Harry finds Indigo daunting Read More...
  • Our Agile Project Goes into Ship/Performance Mode

    So, I have been writing a bunch of posts over the last 14 months, how we have been using Agile, actually full Extreme Programming practices to build a multi-million dollar Enterprise Software platform and application for the banking sector. We certainly have seriously stressed Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to their limits as this is not a small piece of software, but a large Enterprise solution that gets sold into the top banks in the world. We certainly have proven that you can use Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to build a 1.8 million dollar Enterprise product family. have talked about being an Agile Architect and why it's neccessary, how we went to CTP in July , the Process we use, our tools , and even our failings . So, after 48 Iterations we finished all the functionality we had agreed with Business was necessary for a "Phase I" delivery of our Next Generation/V5.0 product, as our Next Generation architecture will span an ambitious set of goals and products on top of this platform. Business and Development agreed together that we would stop and start a three week Iteration of fixing bugs in our backlog, testing and eating our dog food. In Extreme Programming, you are really not supposed to carry over bugs out of the Iteration but this was extremely hard with one week Iterations. We turned out very well overall as all the testing found just over 100 total bugs for 14 months work which is an order of magnitude less bugs than our previous product development techniques. In addition, we have over 1,000 unit tests and the code is well factored, clean and maintanable. The best part is the whole team understands it, not individuals. I actually haven't written about it but I have been working as Agile Architect the last few months on the next phase and not as part of the Iterations directly. These involve a whole lot of Workflow, Reporting and much more. Anyhow, I made a stand with my management the last 3 weeks and insisted that I code and Read More...
  • New and Notable 122

    Family morning at the Gentiles means the whole family watching Radiohead from 1994 while waiting for the Starbucks to come... Software Development Ayende points to this great list Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money and asks what excites you as a developer? As I said in a Retrospective last night, its not about money for me or just a job (expressed as "Build Something That Matters"). If I can't have the passion for my project, my career as a Software Architect, taking the responsibility for my own career, than I need to find something else to do because this is far from the least stressful job out there. You had better be in it because you love it and love to create and ship stuff that delights customers. Otherwise I can go weave baskets out in New Mexico... Data/OR/M/Software Architecture Jeff Palermo notes that we'll see Microsoft's OR/M soon and I can't help thinking BFD and its about time. After years of misleading developers that Stored Procs and database-driven architectures and apps were the only way , is too late? Many of us who have been doing this for a while and come out of other environments are already way ahead using Wilson OR/M, NHibernate, LBLgen and others. And everyone gushes "oh, ah, LINQ is so cool!...... I really like my friend Peter's piece Specifications are Like Object-Oriented Messages . A must-read! Avaon/WPF XamlPadX Updated! Vista Tim Sneath has Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes Technorati Tags: Software Development , Data , OR/M , LINQ , Avalon , Windows Presentation Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , CLR , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
  • New and Notable 121

    Wow, four days in a row, gol darn, I might just be getting predictable and dependable with these posts-). Agile/Extreme Programming The Halloween/Nov Carnival of Agilis ts is up! There is a great section called "What Makes a method Agile" and this which I'll take the liberty of quoting in its entirety, " Robin Dymond questioned the agileness of the MSF for Agile process template by asking Who the hell is Ron Miller and WHY is he redefining Agile for MSF in the Scrumdevelopment Yahoo! Groups discussion. While this is a long discussion, many thought leaders participated including Ken Schwaber, Mike Cohn, David Anderson, Scott Ambler, Ron Jeffries, and others. David Anderson has a follow-up blog post ." Expresso Fueled Agile Development (great name! I'm French Roast Fueled at the moment!) points out that Ideal Day's Aren't... . Martin hits on the head, as usual, with FeatureDevotion , "The key to beating off the waterfall is to realize that, as Dan puts it, agilists value Outcomes over Features. The feature list is a valuable tool, but it's a means not an end. What really matters is the overall outcome, which I think of as value to the customers." CLR/Rotor Richard Lander on Loading by Identity and Assembly Identity Concept Software Architecture/SOA/WCF Part 2 of WCF Oracle Application Server WS-Security Interoprability Part 2: from Oracle to WCF Richard Veryard weighs in on Rocky's post, Semantic Coupling, the Elephant in the SOA Room Technorati Tags: SOA , Service Oriented Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , CLR , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
  • Sam's Professional .NET Book List

    Based on a discussion I started here , I have created an Amazon Essentials list " Sam's Professional .NET List " of what I think should part and parcel of every Professional .NET Developer's collection. It's also part of my profile here . Check it out! Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
  • New and Notable 111

    Sipping the first cup of coffee, ah yes, there's a possibility I'll be awake soon... Windows Vista The big news is a major new release of Vista, Build 5472 is available now on Connect and I believe its good enough to make a public release on MSDN Extreme Programming/Agile I'm thrilled to see my good friend and Agile Guru Jim Shore's announcement about his first fully-accredited XP course !! Jim is a consultant on my team and he can make your organization go wicked fast and produce great software too. Notice, "XP course", not Agile. Interview with Andy Hunt (of Pragmatic Programmers) on thier new book, Practices of an Agile Developer TDD Worst Practice: Test Driven Debugging ; I hate when people do this and say they are doing TDD. I've said it once, I'll say it again; if you are spending time in the debugger for logic and business verification, you are wasting your companies money and time. Write a test. The debugger is only for very weird, intractable exceptional situations where there is no other recourse. If you see every testing situation this way, well you need to learn about TDD-) ...more coming CLR Greg Young continues his exceptional blogging at a level that excites me with Performance: String Reverse . I better get back to my CLR Internals blogging before Greg blows me off the scene-)) Indigo/WCF/SOA Fellow Codebetter blogger Steve Herbert continues with Asynchronous Web Service Calls - The Truth Behind the Begin...End...Functions Part 2 Tools/Community Microsoft has aquired SysInternals . I'm both thrilled and scared. Obviously they are buying the talents of Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, both of which know Windows Internals better than, well, most of the Windows team-). I'm scared for what will happen to the best free tools on the planet and frankly tools that must be installed with every new or repaved system. I'd advise you to go download them now while you still can. As both Scott and I have said, Mike Gunderloy is the supreme master of these kind Read More...
  • New and Notable 110

    Welcome new readers! There are a number of great posts that caught my attention today. In addition, I have started my 3rd CAB article to be posted here as well as getting my Syracuse WCF slides up on the site. Agile/Extreme Programming/TDD Now, Scott Ambler has taken the ugly heavyweight monstrosity, Rational Unified Process (RUP) and tried to morph it into the Agile Unified Process (AUP) . I have a lot of respect for Scott and his huge contributions to many areas of Agile but I am frankly sick and tired of making Extreme Programming politically correct for brain-dead software companies and watering it down further and further with these kind of things. The tendency these days is to further dulute "Agile" (I hate that term) methodologies to make them palatable. Enough. [via Mike] Ayende on Rhino Mock Limitations The 5C's of Agile SCM Brian Marick list the things on his mind as he goes to Agile 2006. Also see his Reafctoring, Redefine d Twelve Benefits of Writing Unit Tests First Ruby/Rails Rails Not a DSL or Ruby a DSL? CLR The BCL team wants to add arbitrary length Integer/arbitrary precision Double classes and would like your feedback Brad Abrams announces a very good looking video cast series from Microsoft teams: Live from Redmond . I notice that Steve Lasker is doing the first one on Smart Client: Offline Data Synchronization and Caching for Smart Clients. I looked at and used some of Steve's stuff by permission when I was presenting on Occassionally Connected Smart Clients and it is great stuff! All the other talks look great as well. Greg continues to rock with Method Calls: Part 1 (Normal Calls) Avalon/WPF/Smart Clients The man, Charles Petzold has shipped his Avalon book to the printers. This is one that I am highly anticpating! Peter was interviewed by Dr. Dobb's Journal on CAB , the Smart Client Software Factory and Agile Software Development . WCF/SOA Tomas on Async Web Calls and the 2-Call Limit Data/LINQ/OR/M Ralf Lämmel and Erik Meijer. Revealing the X/O Read More...
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