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There! Enough things in one title? The thing is that Steve Eichert and my whirlwind day covered all of that and more. Let me explain. So, for two weeks, Steve and I have been off discussing/pairing on some big ticket "Infrastructure" items. There are many things on the list and we have been applying both heavy design discussions on the whiteboard with practical prototypes or solutions. These areas have covered the whole spectrum from what will the world look like in 3 months, 6 months, a year, 3 years to caching architecture to workflow to to parallel computing to replacements for CAB to Services to reporting and much more. Yesterday, we spent a day on our "Reporting Strategy or Reporting Architecture." Being a large Enterprise platform, it is very important to have a comprehensive Reporting story on both the Smart Client side as well as on the Server side. I'll just leave it very generally that there are certain kind of reports for us that are really "Statements" and then Ad-Hoc Reporting. My story for most of the last year and half has been SQL Server Reporting Services . I have had good experiences with it at Adesso even as reporting on Oracle. Of course, there is that "small footprint" of having a "reporting database" for SQL Server but virtually all the "Enterprise Reporting" solutions require some footprint. However, lately it has become totally apparent to us that virtually every single Bank customer of ours is an Oracle shop only other than very small hedge funds and we have really de-emphasized SQL Server. Its still in our CI build and code gen but we are now optimizing for Oracle. Anyway, we wanted to keep the Statement stuff simple. Forget a whole reporting thing for that. We really only need to generate pretty much canned statements with customizable logos and footers. So Steve and I began to look at a whole bunch of HTML to PDF or .NET libraries for PDF generation. We ended up feeling real good Read More...
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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...
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TGIF!! I am super busy right now designing a multi-CPU/multi-threaded Parallel Calculation Engine and diving into the science of Parallel Computing. I'll have some links when I get a chance. Windows Workflow Tomas talks about Silver , the integration of WF + WCF. The marriage is sorely needed because, as I have posted here , the current situation well, sucks. Silver uses Queues and bypasses EDS completely, which is what anyone needs to do to have any real success of communication into Workflows. Because we could not use Orcas here, we actually implemented our own version of the mechanism to avoid the hell that is EDS. Jon Flanders , the guy that helped me with the above, also worked on the PageFlow Sample that has been updated to V1.1 Even more interesting is that he has working on this project for hosting Workflows inside of BizTalk. This is very interesting as developing your own host is so not trivial, but I totally challenge Paul's assertion that " No BizTalk Experience Required ." Architecture Steve Jones has a post YAGNI, Requirements and why scaling isn't always important that I totally agree with and is in-line with what I try to do as an " Agile Architect ": "Split information exchange from the business services, and worry about the scaling that is appropriate for your information exchange. Don't worry about technical purity and some "wonder" architectural approach. Don't over engineer because if you do X (or R) then it will scale to 100,000 users, but your requirements say "6". Software Design/Agile/XP/Design Patterns/CAB Number 11 for Jeremy in his continuing excellent series on UI Design Patterns in Build your own CAB #11 - Event Aggregator Jeremy has another big AMEN post for me in his Design for Testability , which really goes with my Writing Maintainable Code post, "" Done, done, done " isn't just writing code. It's writing code and verifying that that code works correctly. Read More...
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Software Design/Agile/XP Ayende provides the substance and answers to Frans in the Working software over Comprehensive documentation and Documentation can be ambiguous in the most insidious ways . Since these posts substantially cover what I like to think I would say and believe (and say it better), I'll let them be the pointers from my Writing Maintainable Code post as they pretty much say it all See also Ayende's earlier Understanding Bad Code WCF/CardSpace Rick Strahl on Hosting a WCF Service in a non-.NET Client Getting CardSpace Tokens Programmatically Technorati Tags: Software Design , Agile Development , Extreme Programming , WCF , Indigo , CardSpace Read More...
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Agile/TDD/Software Development MbUnit 2.4 RTM Rhino Commons, Repository<T> and Unit Of Work Setting up Windsor for auto registration of components Acropolis Brad Abrams has a follow-up post that has a lot more information including videos, links and tutorials As I figured, my friend Brad Wilson says it nice and neatly: CAB is dead! Long Live CAB! Glenn follows that up with what you need to know to migrate from CAB to Acropolis ASP.NET/Ajax/Visual Studio ScottGu has been doing these great weekly roll-up posts lately; Here's one from May 31st SQL Server Katmai Yes, there is a CTP already [via Euan ] Ayende has a Developer's Perspective on Katmai Windows Workflow The Page Flow WF sample that Jon showed me is out. It is tremendously useful and includes some nice tooling Speaking of Jon, he posted the code for his WCF and WF session at TechEd Community Ayende quite correctly says, " It's Not a War, It's Not even a hot argument " in response to Kevin . As I said there , "I said something to the effect that there is no war, there is not even violent disagreement. There are passionate people that deeply care about their craft and like to debate ideas. I might see 'can't we just get along?' as just accepting the status quo. I think we should constantly question the status quo, step out of our comfort zones to learn from each other. I have learned a lot by Ayende's questioning personally. I know O/RM for instance is 'new' for many of us and it challenges many assumptions over the years that Microsoft (wrongly) told us over the years with SPs. As I have expanded my horizons, I have learned a lot with the daily use of O/RM in my project and it has changed a lot of what I assumed and knew." Technorati Tags: Acropolis , Agile Development , Windsor , MbUnit , TDD , ASP.NET , SQL Server , Windows Workflow 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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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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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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In a post on January 25th , I said, "I posted yesterday that we had shipped our Enterprise Collateral Management solution based on our new architecture. As I said, we still have a lot more to do ." I provided a concise list of the methodologies, technologies and tools that we used in our 14 month cycle. To update where we are now, it will be necessary for me to give a little more context. First, when I mention "our company", we are actually a Division exclusively devoted to Collateral Management. This division, in turn is part of a much larger worldwide company that has at least 6 more financial sector products dealing with other aspects of managing risk. That company then, in turn is part of a huge Ratings company. The rest of the products are (mostly) integrated into one suite that we sell. Ours is not. One reason is that the various products have been organized into self-contained product groups. That means that we had our own development, marketing, sales, product and management for just Collateral Management. Five or six weeks ago, our company went through a rather large reorganization that aligned things by a global R&D, global Marketing, etc. I think this is an extremely good thing. Our product is now "owned" by R&D which also owns all the other products that are part of the suite and otherwise and we are detached from product so we can focus on development. We can also look at integrating into the suite and bi-directional learning. One consequence of this is now instead of my boss reporting to a VP of Collateral Management, he reports to a Senior Director in R&D who owns a product out of our large offices in Manhattan. The cool thing is that Josh Madden is a 20 year+ veteran developer/architect like me who has done great things in the Financial area for companies like Reuters. He gets development. The other cool thing is that his other product group also uses a lot of Agile techniques and greatly appreciates our total XP environment. One more thing: 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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I have already said my piece on the Vista launch but also Office 2007 launches today which really rocks. The much better Outlook 2007 is worth the price of admission alone IMHO. Vista and Office Launches Vista Launch Page Bill Gates Keynote European Launch Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor Office 2007 Launch Page Nial Kennedy on launch in San Francisco Microsoft Debuts Vista in Global Marketing Blitz Robert McLaws posts on all those great Vista Updates that finally showed up last night on my Update. Can someone get me to stop playing Hold 'Em Ultimate Extra, my fingers hurt -) Software Architecture/SOA Pablo asks "CRUD Service for Service - Is a Bad Practice?" I think it depends, and as Robert Wilczynski says in the comments, some kinds of CRUD are fine, but the greater anti-pattern is chatty contract/interface. What's your thoughts? Pablo also talks about Services in .NET Part 1 Edward has started a new series of posts about factory basics called 'Factories 201', and he has kicked that off with a post entitled "What are they (concretely)?" [via Jezz Santos ] Arnon continues his excellent architectural writings on his Architect Blog with What Is SOA Anyway?: Part I, Ambiguity and Anyway? Part II, Hype Soma talks about Software Factories [via Harry ] WCF/Web Services/Workflow William Tay makes the very real case for why WS-ReliableMesaging is vital. I mean, when people *** about WS-*, I don't get how its not obvious that "the main characteristics of Web services is communication over unreliable communication channels such as the Internet employing unreliable data transfer protocols such as HTTP, SMTP and FTP" and many of us need things like WS-RM and other standards to build real service-oriented systems that actually do something. Luckily for me, Indigo bakes all this goodness in so it's just an attribute to me The master, David Chappell, tells us What's Really Important About SCA ( Service Component Architecture )? YAY! Mark Mercuri tells us the good news that the current Read More...
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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...
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In comments to my post about our Agile project entering ship mode, a reader asked for more information about our use of CAB. While I intend to write more about OB and performance, here is a bunch of posts about CAB and our use of it during the last 14 months: Occasionally Connected Service Oriented Smart Clients New and Notable 93 New and Notable 94 Pair Programming at 33,000 Feet CAB Smart Clients in an Agile World Part 1 CAB Smart Clients in an Agile World Part 2 CAB, SCBAT and GAT New Drop of SCBAT Truckin' Along with Iteration 19 and Indigo/Contract First with Services BAT MSDN Architecture Webcast: Extending Microsoft patterns & practices ObjectBuilder Outlook Bar Workspace for CAB! How To: STS/Windows Authentication with ADAM/AD, Roles in AzMan with WCF Connecting up AzMan Roles with WCF Behaviors and CAB CTP and Diagnosing WCF, CAB and other Exceptions New and Notable 110 New and Notable 116 The Cabana Project and CAB Our Agile Project Goes into Ship/Performance Mode Technorati Tags: Software Development , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , Extreme Programming , Smart Clients , CAB , SCBAT , OCC , MVP , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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