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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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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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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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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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Today, the "breakout" sessions begun. In other words, we started drilling down with the product groups; for me that is Solution Architect. Some of the sessions I can't even name as even the code words are not public but I did want to mention that we had a great session and discussion (on the present) with Jack Greenfield on "The Future of Software Factories and Q &A with Jack Greenfield." Leaving out the future, we had a great discussion on a topic I generated when I told Jack that although I buy the notion totally of Software Factories (we use WSSF, CAB, Smart Client Factory to mention just a few) I had a really hard time buying the notion of Software Product Lines as it really smacked to me of Big Design Up Front, something I abhor as an Agile Architect. The answer was a good one, revolving around the idea of harvesting best practices, frameworks, etc of Product #1, #2 and it doesn't have to be some huge heavyweight notion of designing the product line in advance. I think that's how I understood it. Technorati Tags: .NET , Software Factories , Software Architecture , MVP , 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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We finally saw some snow here but it was under an inch. Today, my team has a release party. After 14 months and over 80 iterations, we have shipped on top of our architecture an enterprise collateral management solution and deployed in a large bank in Paris and London and they have accepted it. We have a lot still to do in essentially building the full portfolio of products on the new architecture that we had on the very old COM based one of the past but today is a celebration! Windows Workflow Mark has updated the source for WFPad to work with the latest WF. This is a must have if you are doing WF development Introduction to Hosting Windows Workflow Foundation [via Harry ] Provides an overview of how an application hosting Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) can manage and monitor running workflows and gives an overview of the runtime services and their out-of-box implementations. Managing Windows Workflow Events on a Web Server and More Managing Avalon/WPF An updated version of the Expression Design December CTP is now available that no longer expires at the beginning of 2007. You can download the updated CTP here: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-design/free-trial.mspx Walt tells us the good news that the latest version of Reflector can disassemble BAML to XAML Mike Swanson returns with WPF Wizards, a Free DataGrid (!?), Improved Illustrator Export, and WPF/E Training WinForms Andrew points to some great articles on MVP in the context of WinForms: Dan Bunea Jeremy Miller Michael Feathers SOA/Architecture Harry points to his teammate Dale who is blogging about Proper SOA. He lays out 6 Proper SOA principles , and then drills into the first three: meets business needs , requires governance and responds to changing business drivers . Just Released! Enterprise Library 3.0 January 2007 CTP [via Mike ] ASP.NET/Web Scott Guthrie has announced the release of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (formally known by the codename Atlas) Share this post: Email it! | bookmark Read More...
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I was a bit delayed as I was in Belgium but thanks to the reminders from my fellow Code Better bloggers, I am now booked into the Westin from Monday-Saturday, and probably crashing with Scott (or Palermo ) on Sunday night as the Westin is sold out the first night. Sunday, I am doing Rod's party and then Party with Palermo (finally!). I also plan on catching up with all my good friends like all the CB guys, Beth , Cathy , Robert , Tomas , DonXML , Sahil , and dozens of others plus all the Architects but leave messages here on where you'll be all of you and lets try to hook up!! I'd like to meet as many of you MVPs as possible! Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! 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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I haven't talked a lot about what we do . We do work in the Financial and especially Banking sectors as our product is sold into at least 64 of the world's largest banks. As I develop more into my role here as a division/Enterprise Architect, I meet more and more with key CTOs and others at large instutions like Credit Suisse, I wanted to start playing a larger role in theese sectors themselves and advancing standards like we're doing with our SOA and the movement from CSV files to XML schema based definitions. As such I have started this Financial and Banking Vertical Category on my blog and will start to blog in this area. I found a couple of very good Microsoft resources in this area that I would like to list: MSDN Financial Services Industry Center The Banking Integration Factory looks extremely promising. Anyone know what state this is in? When bits? MSDN Banking Industry Center Mike Walker's Blog 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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Family morning at the Gentiles means the whole family watching Radiohead from 1994 while waiting for the Starbucks to come... Software Development Ayende points to this great list Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money and asks what excites you as a developer? As I said in a Retrospective last night, its not about money for me or just a job (expressed as "Build Something That Matters"). If I can't have the passion for my project, my career as a Software Architect, taking the responsibility for my own career, than I need to find something else to do because this is far from the least stressful job out there. You had better be in it because you love it and love to create and ship stuff that delights customers. Otherwise I can go weave baskets out in New Mexico... Data/OR/M/Software Architecture Jeff Palermo notes that we'll see Microsoft's OR/M soon and I can't help thinking BFD and its about time. After years of misleading developers that Stored Procs and database-driven architectures and apps were the only way , is too late? Many of us who have been doing this for a while and come out of other environments are already way ahead using Wilson OR/M, NHibernate, LBLgen and others. And everyone gushes "oh, ah, LINQ is so cool!...... I really like my friend Peter's piece Specifications are Like Object-Oriented Messages . A must-read! Avaon/WPF XamlPadX Updated! Vista Tim Sneath has Windows Vista Secret #10: Open an Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes Technorati Tags: Software Development , Data , OR/M , LINQ , Avalon , Windows Presentation Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , CLR , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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