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  • New and Notable 155

    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...
  • New and Notable 153

    Its suddenly over 80 degrees here today and went off for a drenching run. Team System/Team Foundation Server Big news of the day is that Microsoft has acquired TeamPlain , which makes the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team Server. Brian Harry says, "Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here . It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL." This is great news as this is the #1 question I always get from people whenever I bring up TFS. I don't know if its a news item but together with one of my IT guys I started standing up a TFS server yesterday. Before everyone panics, my motivation is pure experimentation at this part and I wouldn't use all of it anyhow (I would never leave NUnit and CruiseControl.NET) but I am interested in replacing an internal system + Wiki + other stuff into Work Item Tracking and maybe the source control. I am starting to get sick of Subversion but its seems to be doing right by the team. Speaking of TFS, Microsoft has let loose the plans for Rosario , the next version of TFS that is just past Orcas. Speaking of future plans, the same page has all the plans for the next year for VSTS. Geez, isn't anything secret anymore? :) WCF/Indigo/SOA Michele has been real busy! I know she's at DevConnections this week, the book is close to done (and its going to rock!) and last week she was at SD West 2007 and put up a slew of materials from it including great stuff on Contracts & Versioning, CardSpace and Identity. INETA Speaker Matevz Gacnik delivered an INETA talk on WCF session support, one of the bedrock's of our Service Interface Layer. He has the PPT Code I'm rocking out to Begin The Begin by R.E.M. from the album And I Feel Fine...The Best Of The IRS Years 82-87 Technorati Tags: .NET , Team Foundation Server , VSTS , Visual Studio Team System , Orcas , WCF , Windows Communication Foundation , Indigo , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft Read More...
  • New and Notable 150!!

    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...
  • 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...
  • Windows Workflow 103 or WF Part 3 - Introduction to Workflow

    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...
  • New and Notable 147

    Harry wonders if it has been a slow week. It started that way for me but its certainly not now with both work and the Orcas CTP release. I was getting so bored with .NET in general and even WCF/WF lately. Its really been a long time for me with something new. Vista is so one year ago, WCF too, etc. Last night/this morning when playing with the new Orcas bits was the first time I've felt that excited in months. The blogsphere has been busy to I think. Architecture/SOA/BPEL/Workflow The first piece of great news, from Harry , is that Architect Extraordinary, Pat Helland has retaken the Red Pill! Harry rightfully skewers BPEL as, "BPEL is just the latest attempt at "write once, run anywhere" and will meet with the same limited success of previous attempts." (Executable) BPEL efforts remind me of the awful committee mess that produced the vile Corba. I do think that Abstract BPEL is useful though to, as Harry says, "to exchange of the publicly viewable parts of a process with a partner in order to make two processes work together." There has to be some way to exchange Workflow definitions and it doesn't look like its going to be XPDL . BTW, this comes after a post from David Chappell , who stated, "no one should interpret the announcement as an embrace of BPEL-based development by Microsoft." Like David, I run across very few organizations (we actually have workflow in 65+ banks & hedge funds) that ask for or use BPEL. Bart talks about a WF scenario I am beginning to worry about: what about multiple workflows calling into the same Local Communication Service concerning possible threading and synchronization issues? J .D Meir announces PAG's first release of the Visual Studio Team System Guidance . This is really cool and really necessary as they will get guidance to Architects and Developers faster my updating emerging practices. I highly encourage all .NET developers to avail themselves of this valuable tool Via Frans , I found the blog of Jeroen van den Bos who has Read More...
  • Latest on Agile Project, Reorgs, and Interop

    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...
  • New and Notable 142

    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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