Reasonable turnout at the last Architecture Chat - appologies about the late write-up!

So we talked about a few things last week - on a recurring them of IL generation and weaving we discussed verifying generated assemblies with PEVerify - and how to ensure IL you generate is not invalid and Garreth mentioned some issues with ILDASM crashes when using Mono.Cecil.

We talked about the process for wrapping and abstracting functionality and services, and I gave a brief mention to this blog post which provides a slightly more formalized description to this process - Wafagy.

The discussion moved onto file/XML persistence and substituting traditional relational databases with alternative persistence mechanisms, especially in the cloud.

Static analysis tools were discussed, and thoughts about what (if any) alternatives exist to tools such as NDepend.

We talked about the use of "toolkit" style projects such as the Umbrella project or Rhino Commons and the compromise often felt between plucking out only the bits you want (to control the surface area of your project) verses the wish to easily integrate updates and unit tests from the library into your project as they undergo continual improvement.

I also talked about hostile templating/transformation languages (such as the template language in Enterprise Architect which I've been using for a recent project) and what features make a domain or templating language "hostile" to being part of your daily process i.e. lack of debugging, lack of comment syntax, poorly identified or completely missed syntax errors, left to right expression evaluation, lack of operator presidence rules etc.

I then gave a quick run through how I've been using the MDA and MDG to model a PIM (platform independent model) of the domain, including OCL constraints, and how it's automatically transformed into a platform specific model (Castle ActiveRecord with validation attributes in this case) which is then used to generate code from - and the issues I've encountered so far with the tool.

Details of previous chats can be found here on the wiki.

The next Architecture chat is this Thursday, all are welcome.