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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 heard a lot of feedback back when I started my new personal blog and before when I started a new home portal on Office Live, that I should consolidate my web properties back around samgentile.com. To this point. it has been rather difficult because of the way we set up it was convoluted. An old version of DNN was interwined with a very old version of Scott W's original .Text engine for the old blog. Attempts to upgrade DNN 4.1 were unsuccessfull. Well, after a week of working with webhost4life and having my whole SQL database blown away, facing horrors of losing my valuable first 4 years of blogging, I have gotten samgentile.com outfitted with DNN 4.1. However, they were not able to directly upgrade because of the intertwining and we can't just redirect to the subdirectory we used because that would screw up the http://samgentile.com/blog so the net is that http://dnn4.samgentile.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.as px and http://samgentile.com will have a link to it. The new DNN4.1 is nice and I am experimenting with skins. The one I have right now is quite nice and professional but looks great only in IE and overlaps on Firefox. I am still working on it. Sorry for all the mess. I will be moving back everything from the Office Live Essentials site over the next few days. The Personal Blog remains on WordPress for now. Summary: CB Blog: http://codebetter.com/blogs/sam.gentile/ Home: http://dnn4.samgentile.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx Personal Blog: http://sgentile.wordpress.com/ Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Cross-Posted from my Personal Blog The Alienware laptop came today, 10 days ahead of schedule! The Green Cyborg color is wicked! Windows Vista Ultimate was pre-installed by request. The Windows Experience Index went from 2.1 on my Desktop to 4.1 here! The Aero Graphics are at a mind-blowing 5.9 and the 3D gaming at 5.5!! I am suprised that the CPU is the 4.1. Anyhow, I am quite impressed with both the professionalism of the company and the thoroughness of the complete package. Technorati Tags: PC , Alienware , Developer Tools , Windows Vista Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! 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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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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The Summit didn't end on the greatest note for me. I was supposed to fly out at midnight tonight. I have been battling a sinus issue all week at the Summit and yesterday it got pretty serious that I had to get an anti-biotic and medical attention. So one issue is that my ears are so bad they could pop if I fly. The other is that there is a big storm back home so my flight would probably be canceled anyway. But there is nothing available on any airline for any time tommorow as airlines are rescheduling people until Monday! So my flight is not until Sunday night and I'm stuck in Seattle until then (: I am going to try to venture out of my hotel room for dinner with Tomas as I have not been out in over 24 hours. 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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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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Like Tomas and so many others, I am in seattle this week for the MVP Summit. After seeing Tomas' post, I IM'd him and went down for coffee.I only get to see my good friend once a year in person as Tomas lives in Columbia. That's the greatest thing about the MVP Summit for me, the connections and friendships. After that, we hooked up with Raymond and headed out to Rod Paddock's party where the Code Better contingent (Raymond, myself, Scott Belleware, Rod, Jeff Palermo) made a big showing. I just shaved my head bald like Raymond and Scott, so along with Nick Landry we took a pretty scary picture! Lots of other people there like William Vaugn, Beth Massi, Cathy Gero, Miguel Castro, Nick Landry, and many others. Hour of rest and then we're all over to Party with Palermo where Jeff says he has 250+ people coming! BTW, if you want to hook up here and especially if you are here in the Westin, leave me a note here! Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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May 6, 1983 was a night I will never forget. My friend and I were about to see U2's third tour in Boston for their War album. We had already seen them on the first tour in the Paradise club, then in the Orpheum for the October tour. By the War album, everyone was starting to get what we had known for at least 2 years, that these guys were incredible and could blow a lot of bands off the stage. And that Boston was their "home crowd." You see, back then U2 was not this soft band like now, with political world peace bullshit, jetting all over the world and having their now mediorce music being secondary. They were just a very tight intense raw youthful punk band. And this night, which you can now listen for yourself, by subscribing to Wolfgang's Vault. This concert will show you what I am talking about. Out of 500+ concerts I have seen, this and the Clash's 2nd American tour stand above as the most intense shows I have ever seen. There is a story to this night as well. My friend and I were locked out of tickets for the first time for our band. We bought tickets from some scalper in the Boston Common. All of a sudden, my friend hisses to me, "walk away quickly!!" I didn't know what he was talking about. Well, the scalper had sold us 3 tickets instead of two. We recovered our money by selling the 3rd. But the story gets better. We hand the tickets to a lady in the Orpheum and she starts walking us in. She walks, she keeps walking, until she reaches the 1st row, then turns right and said "there's your seats!!" 30 seconds later the lights go down and we are about 20 feet from the Edge as they launch into "Out of Control." As youll hear on the broadcast. Bono says, "Ok Boston, you can leave your seats now! This is Out of Control!" Every song in this show has raw punkish energy and listen to the version of "Two Hearts Beat As One" which is about 5X the speed of the album one. This was the end. After 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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