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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 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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I referred to my frustration in my post yesterday about "not really getting to post what you really want to." That is, to some extent, the catch of blogging in general, that there is a lot you can't say in "professional" blogs. I am an expressive person by nature. The second aspect is being on codebetter.com . I feel that CodeBetter is one of the best and most consistent sites in the development community and that we have made a huge difference in bring a whole aspect of Continuous Design and other state of the art development practices. I like to think we are helping to change the .NET community one post at a time from the drag & drop RAD mess to the disciplined TDD/Design Patterns/DI/Agile/Architecture world that we would like the .NET community to become; that there is another way besides just running Visual Studio; that investing in your craft and job makes a world of difference. With all that comes a great pressure on what I can blog. Now don't get me wrong: NO ONE at CB has ever said what I can or can not post. I have been given 100% freedom. I just feel an internal pressure to maintain extraordinarily high standards. Moreover, every once in a while, if I slip in something not mind blowing latest Agile post but personal or whatever, I might get some reader (rarely) saying "what is this ***?" My feelings really get hurt as I have blogged consistently relevant .NET content over 5 years in this community , something that only Simon Fell can also claim (Peter Drayton doesn't blog anymore). But it also produces a bit of anger in me as I stated from day one here, that I was going to blog what I want, whenever I want and that no one is paying me for doing this . I spend hours on each N&N post for instance. Thus there is no right for people to have expectations that they are entitled to something. If someone doesn't like a blog, get your own. It's also as easy to unsubscribe. That being said, I have thousands of loyal readers and there is huge degree of satisfaction 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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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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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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Yesterday was registration today. I got to spend some time with Patrick Smachia and Scott Hanselman looked at the absolutely amazing new beta of NDepend . Patrick has built a new powerful query language and some great visualizations into the tool that absolutely convinced me I need to use this for myself and my team. The Code Better team,of which there are like 9 of us here has been doing a lot of hanging out as well. Last night, we had a regional dinner for the Americas. All I can say is that both Beth Massi and Nick Landry were out of control during Kerioke! -). After that, I joined Rod Paddock, Jim Duffy, Claudio, Scott Swigart and about 20 others in seeing 300 , which rocked! Today, we had a Bill Gates keynote. I am under NDA for the whole week so I can't say anything really other than experiences. I thought the Bill keynote was not one of his best. We had good sessions today culminating with a great one from Don Box and Chris Anderson, where they sort of revealed what they are working on but again can't say anything. We also had God Anders Heilsberg present an awesome presention on LINQ. Great discussions all day with CB's Jeremy Miller on Agile Architecture and many other agile design issues. If I were to get anyone on the planet to work with us, Jeremy would certainly be at the top or near the top of that list............. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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