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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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CLR/Tools An excellent post from Scott Hanselman on Managing Change with .NET Assembly Diff Tools . As I said , during the MVP Summit I spent time with Patrick Smachia and Scott Hanselman looking at the absolutely amazing new beta of NDepend . Microsoft/Ajax/Web 2.0 is Bull**** Ayende already took Paul Graham to task for all the flaws in Microsoft is Dead. I just really despise this notion of Ajax is the savior of mankind and that this Web 2.0 stuff is anything more than bull****. As Ayende says, " The premise that Ajax is the new OS is flawed on many levels. I am writing this on a computer with fast CPU and quite a bit of memory, and I would really like those CPU cycles to do stuff that I want, not interpreted javascript in a browser window to give me something that is similar to what I want. There is a limited class of applications where Ajax applications makes sense. Gmail has the luck to hit every point on the list. Other applications are simply not viable on the web. I can't imagine an IDE on the web offering even close to the bare-bones functionality of Visual Studio, for instance, or the ease and power of Outlook. " Agile/Extreme Programming/Continuous Design Jeremy and I were going to co-author a paper on Continuous Design and Architecture for DevTeach before I pulled out of the conference. He begins the discussion with an excellent post here . I may turn in my (former) presentation into an article on this blog I love a post that is entitled " Just Some Thoughts This Morning " that turns into pretty profound thoughts on Continuous Design from Jeremy. Best part, and what I would emphasize is, "Just really good code. If I could have anything, and only one thing, it would be well written, well factored, clean, intention revealing code . Everything else is just trying to sprinkle on some heavy spices to disguise the fact that your code smells like rotten meat." Software Architecture Nice set of 10 Links for 4/9/07 My favorite links to Prag Dave: The RADAR Architecture: 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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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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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...
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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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As fellow CodeBetter Blogger Richard notes, in his very gracious post , I will be giving two talks on WCF for INETA this coming Monday in Oklahoma City. The deck is being refined once again with my latest Indigo learnings especially as we deploy in Financial Banks. I also hope to have new demos, perhaps integrating with WF! Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Apache Axis , Financial and Banking , WCF , WF , Windows Workflow , , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I don't really know what to call this post. I'm not as good as Palermo in doing 101 posts and I like to talk about the context so anyhow. Plus I'm not just a pretty link-blogger so away we go :). Way back in October, I talked about Re-Hosting the Windows Workflow Designer in our application . So the version that went out of our baseline Concentration product went without any workflow. I have been playing the Agile Architect the last few months scouting out the WF territory to see if we could accomplish our workflow architectural needs with WF. The short answer is Yes. If I had to summarize my months with WF is that WF is very powerful and capable. But a lot of that power comes from the fact that WF is such a general framework capable of being used in many different scenarios on Windows platform. There is no doubt that Microsoft providing such a powerful and flexible framework for developing workflows is so much better than having to develop our own framework, visual workflow designer, and runtime environment. But, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Because it is so general, you may have to do a lot of work to develop your domain-specific model and you will have to learn a lot about WF. You will still have to know about Workflow Architectures and deadlocks and all sorts of stuff. There are some in Redmond that seem to promote the view that you can just "drop" WF into your app and presto. One of the feedback items that us Architect MVPs gave the WF team last summit was this was dangerous. People have to be given guidance here. We have to leverage the decades of work that people like Eric Newcomer have already put into this field. People are using to transition UI pages for God's sake. In my original view of things, I thought I would re-host the WF Designer in our CAB Smart Client application giving Collateral Analysts a whole new power to design workflows. I thought, "wow, I can have analysts just drop Margin Calc and Collateral Demand activities 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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Found some time to blog. Smart Client/UI Architecture V2 of the User Interface Process Application Block (UIPAB) is out from PAG [via Mike ]. I must confess to being confused on how this is different than CAB as "designed to abstract the control flow and state management out of the user interface layer into a user interface process layer," which CAB does with MVP as well until I saw. "helps you write generic code for the control flow and state management for different applications types (for example, Web and Windows) and helps manage user's tasks in complex scenarios." So which do you use in Smart Clients and why? Software Design/DDD As I have stated our Architecture reflects a strong, "proper" DDD Layer . Teammate Steve, is also a big believer and we have both lost focus a bit on it as we have been swamped with other things. His post is a good reminder to check out the experience reports on the DDD site. One reader once said I was using buzzwords. I think not. Especially in a large Financial Collateral application it is vitally important to use the UbiquitousLanguage of the actual Collateral banking domain that the analysts use and design a business layer reflecting that. And yeah, I'm astonished how many .NET developers have never even heard of the fundamental DDD patterns when I talk about SOA/Architecture for INETA around the country Data/OR/M One thing that goes well with a true domain layer is an OR/M implementing the Domain Mapper pattern . The ADO.NET team (along with some bloggers), which lately found religion, talks about the Entity Data Model 101 - Part 2 WCF/Indigo Confused about all the many WCF configuration options? Tomas has an excellent post on understanding the admittedly complex WCF configuration schema. In return, you get fine-grained control Technorati Tags: .NET , Smart Client , PAG , CAB , Software Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Microsoft I'm listening to Paranoid Android by Radiohead on the album Edinburgh, Meadowbank Read More...
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Winter has finally set in with single digit temps and minus degrees wind chills but still no snow. WPF/Avalon Adam's WPF book is out and flying off the shelves apparently ! I have been looking forward to this one as his COM Interop book is the bible there. Feb CTP of WPF/E! New Docs, SDK and QuickStarts for the above Via Mike Harsh, Dave has put up a new WPF/E sample he built for a recent INETA talk that is a Reflection Editor .NET 3.0 Crash Course - Part 8: WPF Conclusion Tim Sneath , from the WPF Team, has been doing a series on great WPF applications that is up to 6. This hopefully proves that WPF is more than some pretty 3D demo thing and being used in real applications. #1: British Library Turning the Pages , #2: Electric Rain StandOut , #3: 90 Degree Radius Reports , #4: Otto , #5: TF1 , and #6: fnac.com LINQ/ADO.NET Orcas Entity Data Model 101: Part 1 Type safety - LINQ to DataSets Part 2 SOA As mentioned before, Dale Churchward is doing a series on "Proper SOA." He adds A Proper SOA is a Framework , A Proper SOA Must Work With Your Current Infrastructure and Legacy Applications , and A Proper SOA is Flexible Enough to Support Multiple Vendors, Software, and Hardware Harry on the Web Service Software Factory Kzu wrote a niece piece called " Building Software Factories Today " where he outlines some of the challenges and techniques you can use (and we will be using) to make effective factories on today's platform. [via Peter ] Financial and Banking Vertical/Architecture Mike has more on a topic near and dear to me: Software Factories for Financial Services Mike also shows how Microsoft is a clear leader in standards support for our Financial Industry. For us support for standards like SWIFT are critical BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT Architecture Nick says , "In think that one of the most valuable traits of an enterprise architect is the ability to push gently. In other words, if you find that a team is developing a solution that cannot be integrated or creates Read More...
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