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:

• 
  target="_blank">Probative Programming.
  
• 
  target="_blank">Lean Software development growing in
  support, and the Agile community black lash.
  
• 
  target="_blank">Factor,
  target="_blank">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
  target="_blank">the cost of NNPP?
  
• Elitism in software development.
  
• Aspect Inheritance...
  target="_blank">Aspect inheritance in PostSharp 1.5 CTP 2
  and
  target="_blank">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 suggestions:

• 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).

Apologies for not having written up the last couple of Architecture
chats - because I'm short for time I'm just going to publish some
links for the various things we talked about in both chats.



Code Analysis Toolks (Chat #38)

• NStatic
  - and some of the other stuff Wesner Moise gets up to.
  
• PREfast
  Analysis tool and some it's history.
  
• The demise of FxCop
  and some discussion about why it doesn't seem to be up to play
  with the 3.5 Framework and also some discussion around it's
  Integration with VS.Net.
  
• Gendarme
  from the Mono Project.
  
• Smokey - which I
  think is integrated into mono develop now along with Gendarme.
  
• VS2010 Code Analysis & Code Metrics support.
  
• NDepend and the challenge
  of interpreting results.
  

Domain driven design examples (Chat #38) - we had a brief
lunchtime discussion around what's out there and the difficulties
in finding more holistic examples - the Shipping
sample is a good resource, but is for Java - there was a
proposal a while back on the ALT.Net list to port this over to .Net
& NHibernate (with a first cut of the domain model done with

Naked Objects) but haven't heard much since.



Discussed that Microsoft etc. are still searching for more industry
mentors in Auckland to participate in the Imagine Cup 2009 - incidentally this
year the topic is a lot more forgiving (it came under some critcism
last year with it's environmental focus).



Other topics for Chat #38 Also include BizSpark, and the good parts
(great from a cashflow perspective) and bad parts (generally forces
you into a forming a seperate company if you've already been
established for a while or making the move from bespoke to product)
- we also had a discussion/report of the Microsoft Focus group that
Garreth & myself attended. 



Also discussed was the OODB -> ORM Idea and the issues around
the performance profile issues you may only discover once you swap
to an ORM i.e. SELECT N + 1 etc, as a brief talk about the
implications of writing LOB applications in Silverlight, hosted
within a winforms app.  I argued against the OODB because most
of the benefits can be realised as long as your ORM is capable of
generating a schema, such as NHibernate and many others can.



Chat #37 Covered a lot of PDC details, Windows 7, MS Surface SDK
availability, NHibernate profiler, Mozilla Prism, Linq to Sql being
put on the back-burner, C# 4 features, The M grammar language and
some discussion around things we're not entirely clear on yet i.e.
how does M handle migrations and scheme changes as the
understanding of a domain/model evolves.  There was a lot more
besides that, but my memory fails me.



The next chat is this Thursday 4th December - it may or may not be
the last one for the year - we shall see!

Architecture chat tomorrow (19th November 2008) 11:30am at Garrisons, Sylvia Park.

Topic light this week (mostly because I've been too busy to keep my eye on blogs/sites all that much).

Some quick thoughts for topics:

• The System.* vs Microsoft.* Namespaces discussion.
• BizSpark offering from Microsoft.
• The fallacy of IRepository...
• A field report of the Microsoft focus group I'm attending later today.
• The rinse-repeat loop of DI/IOC learning.
• The emerging market of personal data storage in the cloud with value-adds.

There are still a few things we never got round to talking about from the last couple of chats as well.

If anyone else has any suggestions feel free to leave a comment or message/email it to me directly, otherwise I'll see you all there tomorrow.

Links to write-ups for previous chats, and information on the location etc. can be found on the wiki.

Oh, and I'll write up the last chat later this evening as well.