Architecture Chat #42

Quite a good turn out, fairly rambling – we talked about:

• Rolling your own caching, approaches, what’s currently offered by EF and the pitfalls etc. of attempting to substitute database caching with action caching/memoization or partial view caching.
• General discussions on financial situation, current challenges for people running development shops etc.
• Scaling applications, and affects of coding for a non-relational backing data store.
• Continuous integration, Jamie mentioned the interesting Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day.

Architecture Chat #43

Small turn out - 3 people, Peter B & Time Barnet (from Hamilton) & Myself.

Most of the discussion was around the .net community in New Zealand, we talked all things community related in NZ- mailing list (including the hamster), what’s going on in the user groups, what could be done better, wiki’s, collaboration etc.  Also contrasted NZ’s community with what’s happening elsewhere in the world, the current decline of regional mailing list interest compared to growth of stackoverflow and other more internationally focused development communities.

Also discussed the recent alt.net conference, some of the outcomes, the challenges of really getting mainstream developers interested and the difficulties developers have in getting productive in the .Net community verses others such as php, python or ROR.

Also briefly discussed the lack of a package management solution for .Net developers to make managing interdependencies etc. easier.

Apologies for the late posting, there is in fact an Architecture Chat tomorrow, at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park (Thursday 26th March 2009).

Some topics that have interested me lately which we might want to discuss:

• Some M debates going on – Ayende has a interesting post “M is to DSL as Drag & Drop is to programming” and there’s also James Clark has an interesting post on Getting involved with M.  If nothing else It doesn’t seem like the entire M story has revealed itself yet (but where have we heard that line before?) and we’re plagued with examples that aren’t really solving business problems or demonstrating technical beyond what I could achieve with boo or ANTLR.
• There’s a couple of M DSL’s that appeared last week – MUrl, a DSL for restful clients and MService – not great examples in my opinion, but interesting none the less.
• Azure Fabric Controller.
• IronRuby 0.3 Released.
• ASP.Net MVC 1.0 release – has asp.net webforms just become a legacy platform?
• Self Tracking Entities in Entity Framework.
• Fluent interfaces - are they potentially doing more harm then good, is there a well understood sweet spot between discoverability and efficiency / being concise. What do we think of things like the NUnitEx project?
  

Also we only had 3 people including myself turn up last time, a new low (a flight of the conchords band meeting basically ;o) – but one of the participants had driven all the way from Hamilton just to attend, so well done there!

..which also means I’ll be recycling many of the previous topics we didn’t cover last week as well:

• Relational data features to come to Azure (via TDS no less, so nhibernate/lightspeed/EF etc. on Azure are a reality) and REST to go away. My first thought is will it scale, or do we still need to fall back to an EAV approach when dealing with huge datasets?
• T4 Support in Mono. I’d also be interested in talking about who’s using T4 and for what.
• Moq 3.0 has gone RTM.
• DevHawk has an interesting series of articles on writing an IronPython debugger.
• Ivan Porto Carrero is making good progress on his IronRuby MVC implementation.
• Gem/package/dependency management tools for .Net emerging and existing/dead – ngems, rocks, horn, nmaven, NPanday, Byldan or even just using ruby gems itself…  What’s going on in this space, how it might improve .Net adoption (and some of the thoughts people have blogged about the subject after the alt.net conf).
• Casey Charlton is starting to blog about a sample DDD application, the DDD Parcel Service, which should be an interesting exercise to follow.
• Dr Dobb’s Journal (DDJ) is dead – though I haven’t bought an issue in a few years, and really they were too expensive in NZ currency terms for what little you got, it seems a little sad… are there any print magazines left for the developer?
• Roy Osherove is surveying to see what unit testing / mocking frameworks people are using – hopefully this will get enough responses to be somewhat balanced.
• Recent Alt.net Conference in Seattle … what went on, some interesting thoughts from people like Scott Hanselman, Ayende, Simone and an interview on the alt.net podcast with Scott Bellware.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 26th March 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture chat this Thursday, 26th February, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Auckland.

I’m short on topic ideas, mostly because I’ve been playing catch-up over the last couple of weeks, but I have a few small things that piqued my interest:

• New Zealand copyright blackout - implications for development community. and 92a delayed.
• StyleCop for ReSharper.
• Language-agnostic code contracts (here and here).
• The state of caching in the Entity Framework, and approaches to implementing caching in an ORM / rolling your own 2nd level cache implementation.
• Optional and named parameters in C# 4.0 and some interesting observations on versioning issues with the current implementation.
• Prism 2.0 is now live.
• The bad apple effect - anyone seen this in wild recently?
• MonoDevelop 2.0 – the first beta has been released… Some interesting things like support for the Vala language, new native C# editor implementation and an eagerness to bring monodevelop to windows.
• Quince - Interesting UX Patterns explorer from Infragistics.

I’ll see you all this Thursday, and remember new comers are always welcome – just drop me an email/comment to let us know your coming along so we can track you down.

Note: Write-ups of previous meetings and additional info i.e. directions to the location, are available on the wiki.

Last architecture chat was a fairly small turnout, and as such we ended up having a fairly focused conversation mostly around NHibernate, here’s what we talked about on the day:

• The rise of interest in NHibernate recently.
• The NHibernate 3rd party tooling market and side projects.
• NHibernate Profiler.
• NHibernate Search, NHibernate Burrow etc. in NHibernate Contrib.
• Fluent NHibernate.
• ActiveWriter.
• Linq for NHibernate and just how complete it is…
• NHibernate Query Generator.
• What tooling / projects for NHibernate could increase developer velocity.
• NHibernate discussion around a number of points:
• Single table / class table inheritance.
• Can you mix both the types of inheritance together.
• Can a discriminator cross multiple columns.
• Discriminator mapping over a range i.e. CreatedDate < 2003, instantiate a GoldCustomer, otherwise if CreatedDate >= 2003 instantiate a premium custom (change in customer structuring post 2003).
• Ability to support stored procedures in NHibernate where parameters are not in the expected order, or if multiple stored proc calls are required to persist an entity and possible work-arounds.
• Custom column types, limitations etc.
• General ORM questions
• Does the ORM with the best tooling with out long-term for .Net?
• Obfuscation and License Products.
• Why is it such a problematic space…
• The issues people have.
• The pain of rolling your own.
• References to the post from Ayende on his problems with XHEO.
• Refund policies of software product companies (especially components/libraries for developers).
• Why companies get stubborn about refunds.
• Just how many refund requests companies get (consensus – not that many).
• The associated cost of bad service with considering reactions being represented in public (blogs, twitter etc.).
• The point at which most companies should offer a refund, and should they offer it before the customer asks ex. if they can not resolve their issues in a timely manor (or at all) before eroding the money earned from the sale in the first place.
• Factor – briefly talked about it before we finished up, I think I’m going to give up trying to get other people interested in it :) postfix notation and stacks just seems to conjure up thoughts of assembler in most developers minds.

Next chat is this Thursday, 26th of February at 11:30am.

Just a quick Architecture Chat update – due to a family bereavement that occurred this week I’m postponing the Architecture Chat till next Thursday (26th February).

I’ll post the write-up for the last chat soon, as well as a follow up post of possible topics for the next chat – sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused, hope to see you all next week!

Architecture chat this Thursday, 5th February, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Auckland.

Some of the topics I raised at the last chat we skipped over.. so I might resurrect them again this week:

• Factor, Forth and stack based languages in general.
• Net negative producing programmers.  NNPP.  Do we need barriers to entry into this profession, or some tools that can be used to persuade people to leave?  And what’s the cost of NNPP?
• Elitism in software development.
• Aspect Inheritance… Aspect inheritance in PostSharp 1.5 CTP 2 and Deeper Into Aspect Inheritance.
• What was good/bad about last year (both in the chat, NZ dev community and development space in general) and predictions for this year.
• Traditional training for developers – do developers still attend training courses in NZ, where, what’s the value etc.

And of course some new topics / things that have piqued my interest over the last few weeks:

• Release Candidate of ASP.Net MVC released – plus a quick refresh
• Microsoft web platform installer 1.0
• Structured data searching – what impacts could this shift have on web development?
• Lightspeed 2.2 Released, with some interesting new features.
• Future queries in NHibernate.
• Abstracting away cloud service platforms (such as in this post on abstracting away azure).

I’ll see you all this Thursday, and remember new comers are always welcome – just drop me an email/comment to let us know your coming along so we can track you down.

Note: Write-ups of previous meetings and additional info i.e. directions to the location, are available on the wiki.

This is the write-up for last weeks Architecture Chat #40 – you may be wondering what happened to #39 from last year – unfortunately the paper I noted all the details down onto mysteriously disappeared during the run up to xmas, we covered a few interesting things in that last session - one conversation I do recall that was focused on monitoring windows services - dealing with falling over (including fail over), ways to engineer windows services so they are both robust and easy to debug/diagnose, and the effect of using MSMQ over say a roll-your-own file or database solution for queued data/messages.  Hopefully at some point I’ll track down the notes so I can post the entire write up with all the details.

In the mean time here is the write up for #40…

For our first meeting of the year we didn’t talk about much that was on the list of topics, as everyone was just catching up on the general state of the industry - we also saw some old faces, including one who hadn’t been to a chat for more then a year!

Here’s what we talked about:

• Fruit packing machines, and the differences between rapid prototyping of machines (i.e. multiple months) verse rapid prototyping of software (a couple of weeks or less).  Also talked about the cost/current state of rapid prototyping machines and devices that can build themselves.
• Talked about the current financial state – if anyone is seeing a slowdown (the answer in short – yes) but most people were having a busy January, with little idea of what would happen six months from now.
• Talked about the 1400 (though it’s eventually going to be something like 5000, according to the press) Microsoft Staff lay-off's that happened last Thursday and/or were about to take place the following day – and did some musing around what departments were being laid off, why, and if any of our NZ exports into Microsoft would be affected (The Entity Framework and SharePoint teams seemed fairly unscathed).
• Talked briefly about increased intensity in recruiters cold calling – and the interesting phenomenon of them making explicit enquiries into how business is going, if you think it’s going to get worse over the coming months etc.  It seems like recruiters have less idea what’s going on then developers in the NZ IT Industry.
• Talked about the interesting observation that a number of BA’s and PM’s are rejoining the industry after diverging into other careers such as real estate – and the obvious warnings about checking their recent employment histories, as they are inevitably out of touch with the world of technology.
• Briefly discussed thoughts on Probative programming, and the fact it seems more of a pipe dream then something that could be a reality… being force to write tests before code can compile seems a sure fire way to encourage the wrong kind of testing practices, and certainly would result in tests being written “just for the sake of coverage”.
• Discussed Lean – most of us agreed strongly with the ideas of reducing wastage, delaying to the last responsible moment to commit to specific design/implementation etc..  But we did wonder if identifying the last responsible moment is the kind of thing that’s only identifiable once you’ve passed it without prior experience.  I think as our understanding of lean grows and we start dabbling in implementing it ourselves a more well-informed follow-up conversation or two will follow.
• Talked about form-letter document generation, and issues of current tools/solutions – this also branched off into general word/pdf/rich document generation…some points around this were:
  • Current products are clunky or just too expensive (product opportunities exist for smart people).
  • Using the Word COM API vs. directly manipulating the XML in the DOCX package (which is of course just a zip file).
  • Use of 3rd part libraries for document generation (such as Aspose.Words).
  • Replacing content in PDF’s, different between text and binary PDF’s.
  • The interesting note that for generating rich documents (like product catalogues) the automation API for PowerPoint is a lot easier to use then that of Word (for client apps).

The next chat will be on the 5th of February – Which is the day before Waitangi day – so if anyone can’t make it drop me an email and I’ll look at rescheduling it to another day that suits everyone.

Catch Limited (A NZ based consultancy) are currently performing an Industry wide survey on Enterprise Architecture (not to be mistaken with Application Architecture), which includes questions on tools, frameworks and competencies of organisations throughout New Zealand and the World.

The survey itself can be found here (and has been localized for Chinese, German, Japanese and Spanish speaking participants as well) – and by participating in the survey you will receive a summary report of the survey results, once they’ve collected all the results.

Of particular interest (to me at least) will be seeing what the uptake of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks are around the world, and just what frameworks organisations are selecting, such as TOGAF or Zachman. Additionally I’m keen to see what tools companies are using in both NZ and the world, and what features of those tools are being employed (useful information to those of us who like building niche products or plug-ins for existing modelling tools and frameworks, but aren’t necessarily sure of market size etc.).

The survey takes about 10 or so minutes to complete (I did it this morning) – and would be particularly relevant/interesting to companies that employ an Enterprise Architecture Framework already (or are thinking about employing one) - though there are still plenty of questions relevant to organisations which do not employ a framework at all, such as my own company!

The Architecture Chat is starting up again for 2009, with the first one planned for this Thursday, January 22nd 2009, 11:30 am, Garrisons @ Sylvia Park.

I’m still building a list of topics – here are some initial thoughts and things that have taken my interest lately - and of course you can leave a comment on my blog or send me an email/IM with any topic suggestions you might have:

• Probative Programming.
• Lean Software development growing in support, and the Agile community black lash.
• Factor, Forth and stack based languages in general.
• Net negative producing programmers.  NNPP.  Do we need barriers to entry into this profession, or some tools that can be used to persuade people to leave?  And what’s the cost of NNPP?
• Elitism in software development.
• Aspect Inheritance… Aspect inheritance in PostSharp 1.5 CTP 2 and Deeper Into Aspect Inheritance.
• Windows 7 Beta First Impressions (I’ve been using it on my laptop for a few days now… Herding code just did a podcast on this as well).
• What was good/bad about last year (both in the chat, NZ dev community and development space in general) and predictions for this year.
• Traditional training for developers – do developers still attend training courses in NZ, where, what’s the value etc.

See you all this Thursday!

BTW - Write-ups of previous meetings, and directions etc. can be found on the Architecture Chat wiki.

Auckland Architecture chat tomorrow (Thursday 4^th December 2008, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park).

Pretty topic light - mostly because I haven't been doing a lot of blog reading lately... but I have a few minor sugestions:

• Iterative & Incremental
• Moonlight 1.0 Beta now available
• Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP2 Availability
• Property Grid 2.0 Released by Mindscape
• Processing goes 1.0

And of course write-ups of previous meetings and more details can be found on the Architecture Chat wiki.

The setup.exe event is also on Tomorrow in Auckland from 1pm onwards for those who are interested (not really my cup of tea so I wont be there).