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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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A great treat today was the Architect MVPs having a tour of the PAG Agile facilities with my very good friend Peter Provost. What they have accomplished, especially within the Microsoft office system, is pretty amazing. I will publish pictures later as this information is alll public. They have constructed a number of rooms (maybe 6) that are re-sizeable to serve differing team sizes on the fly. In each room, they have created an Agile "War Room." They have pairing stations like I talked about here that we did. The walls of the room are a special kind of glass that are actually full Wall Talkers for collobrative design. Each of the pairing stations has two flat screens on pivoting equipment so that you can adjust the screens to work the way the pair does. All the cabling has been put under a raised hidden floor. Each room has a projection wall that the computers can connect to via Vista's features. All the people sit together in one of these rooms but the interesting thing is that they wanted to have glass so that the developers could still have a view of the outside and not be a "cave." There is a lot more I am sure I am missing but I encourage you to dig up Peter's posts on this. My group, when we moved to Philly, also spent a chunk of money making a first class Agile facility. We have a large open space with wall talkers. We have a a bunch of pairing stations with dual monitors. The pairing stations are flat in the sense that any pair of people can go up to any station with the chairs and go. Like Peter's groups, we created an area behind for quieter time, to do email. People use their laptops in this area to do email, etc. We don't even have email and such on the pairing stations. We created a base Win2K3 system image with all our tools, seetings (NUnit, etc) and have the exact same image on all stations. More on this later. 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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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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Now that I got my Feed Demon back, I actually have some stuff in the queue that is not so "new" but perhaps still "notable." Architecture/CAB/Smart Client Oldie but goodie: Eugenio has compiled a list of CAB and Smart Client Software Factory Resources You can also see my mini-tutorial combined with an Agile sense with CAB Smart Clients in an Agile World Part 1 , and Part 2 Microsoft Software Factory Architect Jack Greenfield on Ad-Hoc and Systematic Reuse where he differentiates the two and points out that the "i n the software factories book , we explain that systematic reuse is effective, but ad hoc reuse is not." Indigo/WCF/SOA/BPM/BPEL/Workflow More goodness from Tomas with IServiceBehavior, IDispatchMessageInspector, and Endpoints A pair from the master, David Chappell, with Why BEPL is Like Bytecode , and Standardizing the Right Thing: BPMN or BPEL? Avoiding OneWay Deadlocks from Nicholas Allen Data/SQL Server CTP6 of Data Dude (i.e. VSTS for Database Pros) is out . Cameron has the scoop on the new features. Other/Tools IE7 has made it out of beta and is released The very useful CodeSmith is out in a public Beta 4.2 Agile Martin Fowler calls it the ImprovementRavine Pattern: " If you care about what you do, you care about getting better at it. This involves reflecting about how you do things, and trying out new techniques to see if they make you better. Even if other people recommend new techniques, the only way you know if they work for you is by trying them out yourself and seeing if they improve your performance.The trouble is that improvement, particularly with new techniques isn't linear. Often there is a ravine that opens up when you try a new strategy ." Seventeen Tips for Iteration Planning [from Agile Advice ] Technorati Tags: SOA , Service Oriented Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , Software Architecture , BPEL , Data , Agile , Agile Development , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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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...
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I noticed that my Feedburner feed picked up a couple of hundred subscribers all of a sudden and wasn't sure why. I know I was good in Syracuse but there weren't that many people-)). I was floored and honored to learn that Scott Hanselman , in his 2 5th Hanselminutes , had listed me in his 20 or so Favorite Blogs and had highly recomended my blog for my New and Notable posts as well as saying nice things. Scott is, of course, a giant in our community and I highly recomend you read his blog as well as subscribe to his show. For new readers, I started this blog in March 2002, when there were only Peter Drayton , Simon Fell , and myself as Microsoft blogs. I was an " Interop Beast " as Scott and Carl talk about but lately, I post a lot about my daily experiences in being an Architect & Lead on an Agile team that has been actually using Indigo/WCF for almost a year now. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I am very pleased that two of my good friends, James Avery and Jim Hol mes are working on a most excellent book, Windows Developer Power Tools. I was helping Jim with some WCF stuff and now I am a full fledged Tech Reviewer with all the benefits such as lack of sleep that come with it-). Anyhow, I can't say anything other than boy is this book going to rock !! But don't take my word on it, see nine chapters on Safari Rough Cuts ! Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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