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  • New and Notable 131

    I am SO busy with INETA trips and tons to do at work. Here is what I have stored up for the last week or so. WCF/SOA/Workflow/WF Tomas blogs about something I face every day in WCF with WCF ServiceHost Failures and IDisposable with "The "don't call Close()/Dispose() if faulted" behavior that ServiceHost requires does not work well with IDisposable; it demands a behavior different from the standard IDisposable pattern." We're having a lot of issues with dealing with failures and what to do with them but Tomas definetly states a fundamental problem. Tomas has also WCF, WF and BizTalk Sample Posted with some interesting stuff!! MTOM Interoperability between Oracle Application Server and Windows Communication Foundation Part1: From WCF to Oracle Jesus Rodriguez as well, " I am happy to see this progress: " The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced the publication of three new Working Group Drafts : the Basic Profile 1.2, Basic Security Profile 1.1 and the Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 Usage Scenarios. Advancement of these documents to Working Group Draft status is an invitation to the Web services community to provide technical feedback." I could just list every single post that Mike Taulty writes on WF; they are all that good! In particular, WF and Versioning , MetaStorm and the Workflow Designer , Little Workflow Foundation Sample I could and have done the same with "Nicholas Allen's" posts on Indigo: ListenUriBindingElement , Creating Faults Part 1, and Part 2 CLR How to avoid assembly loads , and Getting the list of loaded assemblies from Richard Lander James Higgs talks about Garbage Collection and the IDisposable interface WPF/Avalon Karsten has an awesome Avalon demo - "The Woodgrove Finance Application is a great demo of how WPF can be used to create better data visualization, in this case for financial data. I've posted the source code -- there are some good nuggets in here worth exploring." Introducing the XML Assembly Generator Data V1 of Data Read More...
  • Agile Project Use of CAB

    In comments to my post about our Agile project entering ship mode, a reader asked for more information about our use of CAB. While I intend to write more about OB and performance, here is a bunch of posts about CAB and our use of it during the last 14 months: Occasionally Connected Service Oriented Smart Clients New and Notable 93 New and Notable 94 Pair Programming at 33,000 Feet CAB Smart Clients in an Agile World Part 1 CAB Smart Clients in an Agile World Part 2 CAB, SCBAT and GAT New Drop of SCBAT Truckin' Along with Iteration 19 and Indigo/Contract First with Services BAT MSDN Architecture Webcast: Extending Microsoft patterns & practices ObjectBuilder Outlook Bar Workspace for CAB! How To: STS/Windows Authentication with ADAM/AD, Roles in AzMan with WCF Connecting up AzMan Roles with WCF Behaviors and CAB CTP and Diagnosing WCF, CAB and other Exceptions New and Notable 110 New and Notable 116 The Cabana Project and CAB Our Agile Project Goes into Ship/Performance Mode Technorati Tags: Software Development , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , Extreme Programming , Smart Clients , CAB , SCBAT , OCC , MVP , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
  • A Beasty COM Interop Problem

    This is one reason why Scott Hanselman calls me an "Interop Beast" -)). We had a thorny COM Interop issue that was causing a crash in certain machine types. Every single pair on the team had worked on it for many hours this week in our Ship Cycle without success. It should have been solved since I was feeding them all the usual Marshal.ReleaseComObject crap again but it refused to be cleaned up. If you remember back from my posts in 2002 , while working with 10 million+ plus lines of COM to interoperate with while I was at Groove, I had run into many thorny lifetime issues. As a review, (for more information read my MSDN articles here and here ), the Runtime Callable Wrapper is a "bridge" between the two very different worlds of managed CLR code and unmanaged code. Its job is to hide all that ugly COM crap from the goodness that is the CLR and feel, smell and taste like any other CLR object. To do this it must perform a tough job as the COM world is completly deterministic and the CLR is completly not as the GC runs when it feels like it. The RCW (usually) has one and only one unmanaged COM reference to the underlying COM object. The problem comes that when you are done using the RCW on the CLR side, you are marking the RCW class for GC but when that GC runs is complelty non-determinstic and probably not going to happen that split second. The issue is that COM wants references cleaned up right away (ref counts-- until 0) and killing off that object or bad things happen, like crashes. So, the RCW is still holding on to that reference while waiting for GC and the underlying reference is still being held. BOOM, comes the crash in many cases, like we faced. In the case, we were trying to interoperate with some old VB6 COM objects from an old legacy previous version of our product that was being driven by a command line script. The first thing is that IDisposale was not completly implemented and so I did this: public void Dispose() { Dispose(true); GC.SuppressFinalize(this); Read More...
  • Our Agile Project Goes into Ship/Performance Mode

    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...
  • New and Notable 130

    Lots of great stuff this time. CLR/Interop There has always been a ton of confusion about CLR assembly version numbers since 1999 and a lot of people don't understand all the different version numbers. Luckily, Richard is starting a series on them with the first being the Native File Version which of course has nothing to do with CLR Versioning. Back to Interop - Mike Stall wisely says Marshal Opaque Structs as IntPtr Instead of Byte[] Speaking of Mike, he's got a very good Table of Cool .NET Tools if you work at this level WPF/Avalon Mike Swanson lists More WPF Conversion Tools, Including VB6 to XAML Karsten s ays, "If you are a WPF developer, you must read Optimizing WPF Application Performance " Anthony clarifies the difference between Microsoft Visual Studio codename "Orcas" CTPs and "Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP". WCF/SOA/Workflow Pablo has three Recommendations to Design Message Contracts . I agree with all three. Number 1 about not including business behavior in the message but using simple DTOs across has been the hardest for us to achieve. Nicholas Allan (again!) on Proxy Bypassing Behavior The Sharepoint team blog has been having a series of posts on Workflow in Sharepoint 2007 Choosing the Right Microsoft Integration Technology [via Tomas ] Windows Vista/Office 2007 Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 has their Business Launch today. Here is the official site . Technorati Tags: Software Development , Avalon , Windows Presentation Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , SOA , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
  • New and Notable 126

    I have lots of stuff collected up today. Software Architecture/SOA Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz has made available his wonderful SOA deck which makes a nice complement to mine Nick Mallik makes the point of Iterative..agile..architecture Hanselminutes on Architecture from Barcelona Udi reports on the state of the usual in the Microsoft community with Dataset - O/R Mapping Rumble at TechEd MVP Dinner Ayende Ajax: What the hell is all the buzz about? Rich Veryard on Business Case for SOA 3 BPEL-WS-* Interoperability WCF/Indigo The Indigo team lets loose in a well deserved celebration Three from Nicholas Allan, Modifying the Binding of a Service , Handling Message Encoder Errors , When to Wait for Messages Pablo has a great piece on X.509 Certificates for WSE and WCF - Part 2 Karsten on WCF Calls Hanging without any Debug or Fault Information Agile The newest Carnival of Agilists is up Vista Jeff Sandquist points to a very cool Vista utility: Simon Ferquel has written an Mac OS X like Expose application for Windows Vista. You can download here Technorati Tags: Software Development , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , SOA , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Windows Vista , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
  • New and Notable 123

    A very good day to leave the country and find a new one... WCF/Indigo/SOA/Workflow/.NET Framework 3 Here are the separate download links for the parts of .NET Framework 3 RTM that I blogged about yesterday: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit for Windows Vista™ and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Windows SDK .NET Framework 3.0 Samples - Microsoft Identity and Access Webcast Series [via Craig McMurthy ]. To register for any if these webcasts, including our kickoff webcast: “Identity and Access Vision and Strategy”, visit this link: IDA Webcasts MIIS Identity Integration 2003 SP2 Early-Adopter Access program available . This one would be a real good one for us to jump onto to. Windows SDK: Planning Ahead Mike Taulty on Workflow and ASP.NET Web Services . Nothing to do with Mike's fine article but does anyone else other than Steve and I find that WF doesn't work with another member of WinFX, WCF right out of the box very strange?? I understand the need to support ASMX and I am fine with that but in the last 3 years couldn't they have also integrated WF and WCF before ship for the rest of us?? Data/SQL Server/LINQ/OR/M SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 CTP (November 2006) Support for the upcoming Windows Vista. Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2007, which enables data mining functionality from SSAS to be used directly within Excel 2007 and Visio 2007. SSRS integration with MOSS 2007, which allows integration with the Report Center in SharePoint providing seamless consumption and management of SSRS reports within SharePoint. SSAS improvements for Excel 2007 and Excel Services relating to performance and functionality. Oracle Support in Read More...
  • New and Notable 122

    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...
  • New and Notable 121

    Wow, four days in a row, gol darn, I might just be getting predictable and dependable with these posts-). Agile/Extreme Programming The Halloween/Nov Carnival of Agilis ts is up! There is a great section called "What Makes a method Agile" and this which I'll take the liberty of quoting in its entirety, " Robin Dymond questioned the agileness of the MSF for Agile process template by asking Who the hell is Ron Miller and WHY is he redefining Agile for MSF in the Scrumdevelopment Yahoo! Groups discussion. While this is a long discussion, many thought leaders participated including Ken Schwaber, Mike Cohn, David Anderson, Scott Ambler, Ron Jeffries, and others. David Anderson has a follow-up blog post ." Expresso Fueled Agile Development (great name! I'm French Roast Fueled at the moment!) points out that Ideal Day's Aren't... . Martin hits on the head, as usual, with FeatureDevotion , "The key to beating off the waterfall is to realize that, as Dan puts it, agilists value Outcomes over Features. The feature list is a valuable tool, but it's a means not an end. What really matters is the overall outcome, which I think of as value to the customers." CLR/Rotor Richard Lander on Loading by Identity and Assembly Identity Concept Software Architecture/SOA/WCF Part 2 of WCF Oracle Application Server WS-Security Interoprability Part 2: from Oracle to WCF Richard Veryard weighs in on Rocky's post, Semantic Coupling, the Elephant in the SOA Room Technorati Tags: SOA , Service Oriented Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , CLR , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
  • New and Notable 116

    Now that I got my Feed Demon back, I actually have some stuff in the queue that is not so "new" but perhaps still "notable." Architecture/CAB/Smart Client Oldie but goodie: Eugenio has compiled a list of CAB and Smart Client Software Factory Resources You can also see my mini-tutorial combined with an Agile sense with CAB Smart Clients in an Agile World Part 1 , and Part 2 Microsoft Software Factory Architect Jack Greenfield on Ad-Hoc and Systematic Reuse where he differentiates the two and points out that the "i n the software factories book , we explain that systematic reuse is effective, but ad hoc reuse is not." Indigo/WCF/SOA/BPM/BPEL/Workflow More goodness from Tomas with IServiceBehavior, IDispatchMessageInspector, and Endpoints A pair from the master, David Chappell, with Why BEPL is Like Bytecode , and Standardizing the Right Thing: BPMN or BPEL? Avoiding OneWay Deadlocks from Nicholas Allen Data/SQL Server CTP6 of Data Dude (i.e. VSTS for Database Pros) is out . Cameron has the scoop on the new features. Other/Tools IE7 has made it out of beta and is released The very useful CodeSmith is out in a public Beta 4.2 Agile Martin Fowler calls it the ImprovementRavine Pattern: " If you care about what you do, you care about getting better at it. This involves reflecting about how you do things, and trying out new techniques to see if they make you better. Even if other people recommend new techniques, the only way you know if they work for you is by trying them out yourself and seeing if they improve your performance.The trouble is that improvement, particularly with new techniques isn't linear. Often there is a ravine that opens up when you try a new strategy ." Seventeen Tips for Iteration Planning [from Agile Advice ] Technorati Tags: SOA , Service Oriented Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , Software Architecture , BPEL , Data , Agile , Agile Development , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...

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