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So, since I am out here in Irvine CA for our annual meeting, and I have just pushed out a Plaxo update to everyone, I guess it's time to let you all know that I have joined Neudesic as a Principal Consultant II, heading/responsible for the Connected Systems/SOA practice for the East Coast. I will have a bit more to say soon. I would expect this blog to change focus to SOA, BizTalk, WCF, WF, and all Connected Systems especially in large Enterprise accounts that is now my respoinsibility to run and enable the growth of. We have a lot of openings for experienced people with at least 7-10 years experience and I have a team to build for the East Coast so contact me if you would like to be part of it. 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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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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I haven't felt like blogging much lately. Some of that is due to how much is going on at work (much more on that when I feel like it) but I have also haven't really felt jazzed about blogging lately. I want to, and am starting to devote more time to get myself into the gym and my family, both of which have higher priority, of course. I should at least empty out my flagged items in Feed Demon as the size of the list drives me crazy-). WPF/WPF/Avalon My good buddy Walt wants to know " What are the Top Five Things you want to know about WPF/e ?" He is speaking at several conferences this year on the subject, so if you want to influence his choices, head on over! Simon talks about the Regatta Manager as his #7 Great WPF application and as the 2nd production WPF ever . It definitely seems that WPF is picking up some real momentum in real applications vs demos Speaking of that, Tim Sneath continues his series with Great WPF Applications #7: Skandia Cowes Week CourseSetter Software Architecture/SOA Mario Szpusztra posts his whitepaper on his point-of-view on Microsoft's strategies around Service Orientation, BPM and ESB. Its a good read I agree with Harry on his reaction to Anne Manes of the Burton Group says the time is right for UDDI , calling it the "foundation for governance". I agree that UDDI may be a piece of the puzzle but I have seen nearly zero uptake on UDDI. As Harry says it's all about "desire" rather than discoverability Arnon continues his "What is SOA Anyway?" series with Part 4: SOA Defined and Part 5: Summary SQL Server/Data Congrats to Data Dude team on shipping ! You can get it here , more details from Gert here WCF/Indigo A nice series of posts emerged on Indigo beginning with a post that Harry sent me and asked me to review. I think Harry is right on in his How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WCF with his realizations about the relationship between duplex contracts and durable services. As we all know, it was a V1, and stay tuned! Also in this thread Read More...
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A N&N from Brussels Belgium where I am up in the middle of the night (again I wake up at 3AM!) with my sleep hours all screwed up. I am enjoying my week here nonetheless. I don't know quite what to make of Brussels. Some parts remind me quite a bit of Paris but there is this weird mix of "modern" glass buildings although the style is a bit "older" than such US buildings. I don't know, I'm jet lagged and probably making no sense. The (potential) customer we are visiting is actually quite large > 3,000 employees most in one large building and I have been working hard on a "High Level Technical Document." Its' certainly some BDUF but this is a large SaS type architecture across 3 data centers that has many Enterprise issues (levels of Failover, SLAs, SQL Server Hot Mirroring, Perimeter Zone Security, etc. to deal with and get right. Anyhow, the food is good and there is a lot of espresso-). Architecture The Open Group (the TOGAF guys) has scheduled what appears to be an interesting conference on Enterprise Architecture and SOA in San Diego [via Architecture Blog ] Avalon/WCF Karsten gives an update on the North Face In Store Explorer WCF application that floored many of us at PDC05 and has now been deployed . He also reminds, "Note that the white paper written about this application is still relevant and worth reading. The code samples all work just fine on the final bits and have some useful code as far as state management, image montages and a 3D carousel." My good friend and fellow Smart Client track speaker, Walt Ritscher has started a new WCF blog at http://wpfwonderland.wordpress.com - Subscribed! Check out XAML to IL Explained Part 1 , WPF/e Example - Game of Life WCF/Indigo/SOA Nicholas Allan has his best of 2006 (and what a year it was for him/them!). Also check out Zen Faults Other Ted Neward has his predictions for 2007 , of which I mostly agree with all of them but one of the best qualities of Ted Read More...
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Last night of the Winter 2006 tour was great. I did do some new things so the slides and code are up on my Presentations site . My family and I enjoyed the Sayre Mansion . Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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So, I have been writing a bunch of posts over the last 14 months, how we have been using Agile, actually full Extreme Programming practices to build a multi-million dollar Enterprise Software platform and application for the banking sector. We certainly have seriously stressed Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to their limits as this is not a small piece of software, but a large Enterprise solution that gets sold into the top banks in the world. We certainly have proven that you can use Extreme Programming/Agile techniques to build a 1.8 million dollar Enterprise product family. have talked about being an Agile Architect and why it's neccessary, how we went to CTP in July , the Process we use, our tools , and even our failings . So, after 48 Iterations we finished all the functionality we had agreed with Business was necessary for a "Phase I" delivery of our Next Generation/V5.0 product, as our Next Generation architecture will span an ambitious set of goals and products on top of this platform. Business and Development agreed together that we would stop and start a three week Iteration of fixing bugs in our backlog, testing and eating our dog food. In Extreme Programming, you are really not supposed to carry over bugs out of the Iteration but this was extremely hard with one week Iterations. We turned out very well overall as all the testing found just over 100 total bugs for 14 months work which is an order of magnitude less bugs than our previous product development techniques. In addition, we have over 1,000 unit tests and the code is well factored, clean and maintanable. The best part is the whole team understands it, not individuals. I actually haven't written about it but I have been working as Agile Architect the last few months on the next phase and not as part of the Iterations directly. These involve a whole lot of Workflow, Reporting and much more. Anyhow, I made a stand with my management the last 3 weeks and insisted that I code and Read More...
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I am still reeling from seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Mars Volta 2 nights ago in Philly at the Wachovia Center. The Peppers were beyond grea t with Frusciante taking a very active lead role. Many of the songs contained a full-out Hendrix-type feedback solo in it that showed the depth of his talents. I think Stadium Arcadium is their best album since Blood, Sex, Magic (which they pulled out the title song the other night!!). You can't beat a start of Can't Stop-> Dani California! Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands (although hard to take at times) and I am listening to the brilliant new Ampheture right now which they played in full the other night. Live, they come off as a wall of sonic noise and Bixler-Zavala wailing singing, an assault on the senses that drove people nuts (my wife wanted to leave!) and their greatness only came through in sporadic moments (Viscera Eyes). Okay, a lot of stuff today. Number one, I want to congratulate my good friend and master of these types of posts, Mike Gunderloy for hitting The Daily Grind 1000 !! Mike is an incredible asset to the community and a terrific writer to boot. If you are one of the rare people not already subscribed, get your ass over there this minute and make it so! I have started to write (for work) a Workflow XOML loader and executor. I want to do something like XamlPad or even Snippet Compiler to execute my workflows. I have the hosting of the runtime down and loading the XAML/XOML. More later. WCF/SOA/Indigo/BizTalk/Workflow/Distributed .NET Another good friend of mine, Tomas Restepo. has some great stuff: He released his MSMQ Activities for Windows Workflow Foundation. He addresses MsmqListenerService concerns with the above Gets answers for the question of how to get the SOAP Action associated with a given operation when all you have is the OperationDescription for it Points to Ralph Squillace s post an walkthrough entry of how metadata publication (MEX + WSDL) is enabled in Windows Communication Read More...
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Anonymous asked a real good question on my last post that I think I need to share my answer with all of you. Well Sam, have you ever thought why you're always on the 'bleeding edge'? You see to me, if you're a trainer, you need to "sell" to your customers. But if you try and earn a living and get your customers working with good and stable software, you shouldn't be pushing the latest. Then of course there's the MS evangelist, who just pushes everything MS whether good or not, whether original or copy. Just add some buzzwords, throw an MS in front and there's "cutting edge" technology for you. I hope one day this all slows down for the benefit of all. Here is my response: SamGentile said: Thanks for the comments. Personally, I'm on the bleeding edge because thats what excites me and pushes me from stagnation. It's made me a better INETA speaker and Architect over all. For instance, I got on the NGWS/.NET bandwagon in 1999. I bet my career on it and when .NET shipped in 2002, I was a great 2 years ahead of anyone which landed me great consulting gigs at Microsoft, Groove and others. Its the way I drive myself but its also what keeps me excited and not bored. A great Architect designs for the next 12-18 months, implements for the next 6 and the last 3rd of their job is to see the "Big Horsey" picture 1-3 years out. I try to combine all three because my employers demand a three-headed architect like that and write it into my job description. In terms of "selling", I * never * sell anyone anything whether Microsoft or otherwise. I take my moral and technical responsibility *extremely seriously* and only make recomendations based on business needs and requirements and knowledge of a particular technology . Technology for technology sake is just a geek excersise. Its only when technology satisifes business needs that its worth anything . Thats why I practice Agile: to keep it grounded in real business Read More...
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I mentioned back months ago how well things were going back in Iteration 20 . Since that time, we have been consitently hitting our weekly Iterations with the previously noted one here . We did learn a lot from that Iteration and move on not repeating the mistakes. Specifically, the problems revolved around in-adequate task breakdown and bad estimates. It is very important not to get a sense that the Planning Meeting *must* get done by some time and perhaps jepordize proper task breakdown. We hurries through our planning and thus screwed our iteration. During our Monday morning Iteration meeting, we have a demo of working software that we did the week before. It is vitally important in Extreme Programming to have working, integrated and tested software at all times and be essentially "shippable" at any Iteration boundary or at least Release boundary. You will see how that played into shipping our CTP. We also have a Retrospective where we get real honest about what went well and what didn't and what we can improve from the previous Iteration. Then we enter the Planning Game. Business presents stories. We come up with enough that we think will match our present Velocity and then the whole team does Design. We break down all the stories into Tasks. During that, it's vitally important to allow enough time to discuss what database tables need to be added/modified, what objects in the Domain Model get effected, overall approaches; i.e. design. At the same time, we cannot let it descend into the lowest details and out of control. So it's a balancing act. As mentioned before, Jim and I introduced one-week Iterations way back here as an way to raise the Sense of Urgency and get everyone's head in the game and get everyone to own the product. Frankly, the team was underperforming at the time but since that time, we have become an awesome machine with Friday after Friday delivering on our objectives. The team has gotten so *great* that they now love the One Week Iterations and 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 go to Ohio tommorrow morning for a mini-tour for INETA Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday, I will be in Toldeo for the Northwest Ohio .NET User's Group and then Wednesday I will be driving to Dayton for the Dayton .NET User's Group. Come on out and learn about Service-Orientation and a deep dive into Indigo. I will be going out both nights after to answer questions and meet people. Hope to see you! Looks like we are going here after the Toledo meeting tomorrow night (new downtown location). Notes: Night one of the tour was a big success and I rocked. I got to hang out with Jason Follas for hours before who is a great guy. About 25 people showed up. By all accounts it went well. We went out to Tony Packo's after which just was one of the best meals I have ever had in my life! A big thanks to Jason and Greg Huber for a great day. Onto to Dayton in the morning! Technorati Tags: INETA , WCF , Windows Communication Foundation , SOA , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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