Last 2 architecture chat writeup's

This is a writeup for the last 2 architecture chats - both were pretty free-form, with little of the topics mentioned in the posts getting much discussion as we all had own things to talk about!

As a brief summary:

Plenty of talk about Lightweight code-gen and run-time vs. post-compile IL weaving, debugging integration etc. Hard to cover all the little facets that were explorer - but it's been interesting - it seems like more developers are starting to dabble with IL.

We talked about approaches for introducing cross-cutting behavior such as versioning and history to your data access and approaches for flowing metadata from your domain model up to the UI (including searching, validation etc.) and ways to index, query and flow the information across boundaries in the application.

As a tangent to this I've been talking about how I've been using MDA/MDG to drive the domain model generation (including things like validation, search annotations etc.).

We talked about the recent S3 outages and approaches for placing resources on both European and US data centers simultaneously, and possible ways to mitigate the double-upload bandwidth costs.

Discussions (sparked originally from a email discussion on the NZ dotnet user group) around hiding the implementation details of your ORM from the rest of your application - and the practicalities of how deep this needs to go, using linq through boundaries etc.

Discussions around injecting logic into generated source code, both in asp.net/winforms generated code as well as possible ways to intercept custom tool generation so you could manipulate the output.


Spartan programming
got a mention - Peter felt it aligned with alot of his current coding style.

Embedding NHaml as a view engine in non-MVC applications, and the general experience with different view engines including  Brail, ASP.NET MVC's default ASPX View engine etc.  (Including the error reporting and debugging experience) - We also talked briefly about the
Spark view engine, which looks to be like it could be quite palatable to non developers while still offering a useful syntax for developers.

If anyone has any topic suggestions for next weeks chat just leave a comment on this post or flick me an email.

Written on July 28, 2008