May 2007 - Posts

• The new SOA

  This is going to be confusing for me.. There's a new SOA in town: Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (or SoA). Let's just hope they'll continue to use the abbreviation LOTRO instead.. Posted May 30 2007, 10:15 AM by anders with no comments Filed under: Fun, Gaming

• Online course from 2xSundblad

  I've just looked through a part of the preview of the coming online course from 2xSundblad called Architecting Service Oriented Systems – Overview. It's Flash-based with a mix of video, audio and slides. Looks very promising and it will be available for a very reasonable $399 (if you register your interest early you'll even get a 25% discount). I guess you'll have to get used to the Swedish accent of Sten and Per, but knowing them I can promise you it'll be worth it! Three other courses will be available within the next year or so: The Infrastructure of Shareable Information Pattern – Planning, Architecting, Designing, and Implementing. The Entity Services and User Application Pattern – Planning, Architecting, Designing, and Implementing. The Business Process and Use Case Services Pattern – Planning, Architecting, Designing, and Implementing.  I'll post a link to the free preview once I get an OK from Sten or Per to do so! Update Here's the link to the preview of 2xSundblad's new online course. Posted May 30 2007, 09:58 AM by anders with no comments Filed under: SOA, Architecture

• The Agile pyramid

  One of my favorite developer sites, Worse Than Failure (used to be called The Daily WTF), just published an article about Agile methodologies and why they suck. While I don't agree with Alex it's always fun when an analogy is turned upside down... The problem here is that the Pyramid analogy is flawed in the first place since an extremely important part of agile methodologies, Refactoring, is missing. Instead, building a pyramid using agile methodologies would rather be done this way: Get some initial input from the Pharaoh. It will be something like "I'd like it to look like all the other pyramids, only bigger and better". Start building something that may or may not look much like a pyramid. Find some flaws in your design. Show the Pharaoh and ask him what he thinks of it so far. Tear down everything you or the Pharaoh don't like. Add some more components to the pyramid. Realize that the foundation of the pyramid isn't solid enough. Rebuild the foundation Repeat steps 3, 4 and maybe 5 and 6 until you and the Pharaoh are happy with the result. And this is why agile methodologies are better suited for software development than for construction work...   Posted May 25 2007, 09:25 AM by anders with no comments Filed under: Architecture

• Code beauty

  It's pretty clear that there are two basic kinds of developers; those that write code only to get the job done, and those that write code which in addition to getting the job done also looks good. I'm definitely part of the latter group and I have to say that sometimes I get frustrated when working with developers of the former conviction. I was just reviewing some code written in a project I haven't been involved in much, and found a set of very commonly used classes that lie in a namespace that is misspelled. I realize this doesn't matter. I mean, the code does exactly what it's supposed to do and the misspelling is so simple that everyone understands what it was meant to be called. But c'mon! Correcting the mistake would take about 2 minutes thanks to the refactoring functionality in Visual Studio. Now to the difficult question... Should I mention it in my review? Posted May 16 2007, 04:03 PM by anders with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Architecture

• Enterprise Library 3.0 available

  Can't believe I almost missed this completely! Turns out the P&P team released Enterprise Library 3.0 the other day. For me, the two most interesting new features have to be Environmental overrides and the new Validation Application Block. I'm also very happy to see a rolling trace file listener included in the Logging Application Block - I checked our production servers the other day, and some of the logfiles where a couple of gigabytes each.. not good.. not good at all.. Posted May 08 2007, 10:20 AM by anders with no comments Filed under: .NET, Enterprise Library