2009-10-07 - Architecture Chat Tomorrow

The Auckland Architecture Chat is on tomorrow, at 11:30am,
Garrisons, in Sylvia Park.

We'll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia
Park, Thursday 8th October - 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.

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2009-09-23 - Architecture Chat Tomorrow

The Auckland Architecture Chat is on tomorrow, at 11:30am, Garrisons, in Sylvia Park.


We had a smallish turnout last time that focused on mostly reviewing Visual NHibernate - so most of the topics from the last session are still up for discussion too - you can find them listed here.

We'll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 24th September - and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

Update: Jamie from Slyce software will be demoing the first cut of entity-first modeling support in Visual NHibernate.

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

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Code Camp Talk – Domain Specific Languages

Thanks to all those people who enjoyed endured an hour of me talking about Domain Specific Languages and Boo :)

Slides


Slides can be downloaded from here, and a zip file containing the code is here.

[slideshare id=2027275&doc=dslpresentation-090920153044-phpapp01]

The DSL Book


If you found this topic interesting and want to learn more about writing Domain Specific Languages with Boo, I strongly encourage you to buy Ayende's book "Writing domain specific languages in boo".

rahien_cover150 It's very thorough (350 odd pages) - and includes a lot of guidance around not only writing a domain specific language with Boo, but the far larger topic of incorporating a business DSL into real world applications, versioning concerns, batch compilation etc. that must be considered when ever you write a domain specific language to be used in a production system.

Do yourself a favour and buy it today - it's currently in Mannings EAP (early access program) - but is complete and just undergoing the final editing stages before going to print.

Boo & Boo DSL Resources


Boo Logo

Syntax highlighting Editors


I had a few questions via email / skype about the WPF syntax highlighting component I used in my demos - it was AvalonEdit, part of the SharpDevelop 4.0 project - you can grab the code via subversion from here:

svn://svnmirror.sharpdevelop.net/sharpdevelop/trunk/SharpDevelop/src/Libraries/AvalonEdit

Ayende's book also covers building a simple script editor using the SharpDevelop windows forms editor control (know as ICSharpCode.TextEditor)... there is an article on codeplex here which describes how to use that library.

Thanks! and Next Architecture Chat


Thanks all for coming to code camp - and for those that are interested, we have an upcoming Architecture Chat this Thursday 24th September at 11:30am - hopefully we might see a few new faces there this week!
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2009-09-09 - Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Some possible topics:

Edit: Some Late Editions from David
(who gives his appologies, and wont be able to make it
tomorrow).

There is also the code camp this Sunday in Auckland, at which
I'll be presenting on Domain Specific Languages, with a
side-order of writing Domain Specific Languages in Boo. 
I'll post about that tomorrow, and maybe include a little more
detail about what I hope to cover.

We'll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia
Park, Thursday 10th September - 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.

Read More

Architecture Chat #54

Good turn out at the last Architecture chat, including Guy, who hadn't been to one for over a year, and Murray, a new comer.

  • Secunia Corporate Software Scanner - How to identify missing patches etc.
  • Discussed the 97 things every software architect should know and Beautiful Architecture books - I'll bring them along next time if anyone wants to borrow them.
  • Discussed Facebook's key/value database Cassandra.
  • Discussed approaches for publishing and consuming RSS, talked about PubSub Hubbub.
  • Discussed selecting technologies for building CRUD Apps, and what are good technologies for learning ORM.
    • Discussed NHibernate being the Swiss army knife, lots of features, interesting place to learn as you will become aware with almost every facet of ORM nomenclature etc.

    • Discussed Entity Framework, Linq2Sql  and others including Lightspeed.
    • Discussed difference between highly opinionated vs. non-opinionated ORM's.


  • Software Craftsmanship - sparked off by this article in the Herald - general consensus was we didn't agree at all with the article, and that there is an obvious disconnect between the view points of academia and practicing developers.
    • Discussed the ideas of Science based engineering rigueur
      improving software quality and stopping projects running over
      budget, and it's rather short-sighted view of how software
      defects originate / what contributes to overall "software
      quality".
    • Big discussion was around Software "engineering" - and
      how far removed from other engineering disciplines we are.
    • Discussed fact that most software development focused
      degrees in New Zealand don't qualify you to join IPENZ - and if we could,
      most of us wouldn't want to.
    • Discussed the laughable Idea of forcing developers to
      study something every year to "stay current" - everyone
      agreed if you're not learning something every day as a developer, your
      doing it wrong.


  • Service Buses & IoC Containers (the conversation got a bit mixed up between these two) - things we discussed were:
    • When to adopt, i.e. how big does a project have to be, what problems should you be facing.
    • Quite a bit of discussion around the misnomer of "how big" being a reason to adopt any technology, rather then how complex, good fit etc.
    • Discussed the dangers of adopting technology and practices prematurely.
    • Examples of .Net service bus:



  • Discussed the .Net Mailing List - Josh didn't know what it was, which in some way reflects that it's not longer promoted any more, discussed it succumbing to a slow death, how stack overflow affected question traffic etc. - FYI You can still subscribe to the dot.net.nz mailing lists here.
  • Expressed annoyance that dot.net.nz no longer works after the "upgrade" to sharepoint, need the www. prefix.
  • Wordpress twitter-like themes/plugins, such as the prologue / P2 theme.
  • Pomodoro timers, including tomatoes, footballs, iphone apps and even *gasp horror* on-screen timers.

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