developers
There are 47 entries for the tag developers
Recently I attended the Business Analysis Conference in London that I spoke about in my previous post. My reason for being there was I accepted an invite to be a speaker on a panel discussing “The Role Of The BA: What Is Expected And What Is Delivered” Part of the Business Analysts role is to capture, distil and communicate business requirement to Technical staff so it was of great relevance that I played my part as the technical representative on the panel. If technical staff are to understand business...
There really has never been a better time to get into Enterprise Architecture as the global economic downturn means that smart companies will be looking at making efficiency savings through strategic implementations and process streamlining, identification of function duplication and better IT/business alignment. Enterprise Architecture is a hard thing to get off the ground so why try and re-invent the wheel and benefit from the experiences of others in many different organisations. Using a framework...
I, like many others, download Windows 7 Beta build 7000 on the day it hit MSDN after reading about its availability from Bink.nu. It came as an ISO so was easy to build into a virtual machine however on my home laptop I've partitioned my HDD and had XP in one partition and Vista in the other. Vista rarely gets to see the light of day simple because it is always doing something with the hard-disk! Checking! Scanning! Indexing! All driving me nuts as it slows down the performance of my machine. So...
Servers are the backbone of enterprise computing today, most websites for example run on either Apache or IIS and will be running on a server of some description. Perhaps because of servers ubiquity it is easy to become complacent about them especially as they are rarely seen but understanding what a server can offer you and it's limitations will definitely help with software development. Servers on the whole are built more of the practicality side than for the esthetics, there is no need to make...
Hardware and Software are very much the modern day Yin and Yang, one serves little purpose without the other. I have noticed that on the whole many developers know little about the environments that the software they are writing is going to work in falsely believing they are truly abstracted from it . Come 'Go Live' there are blank faces when for some 'inexplicably reason' the software doesn't work and the remark, 'it worked fine in test' is often heard. Another common frustration is software that...
For the next few weeks I'm going to be turning my attentions to Microsoft SQL Server as the new version, 2008 is now with us and even has it's first big patch CU1. I am however not going to focus on coding as plenty of others on GWB have that sufficiently covered. It is fair to say that SQL Server has turned into a monster, it's far more than just a database product these days, it is a complete data management suit of tools. Some of the tools are fully fledged complex products in their own right...
VMLogix LabManager is in same space as VMware Lab Manager what I reviewed recently. However, its key differentiators is around automation – enabling developers, testers and IT Pro staff to entirely automate the process of setting up synchronized multi-machine deployment (including the software stacks in the virtual machines) no matter what virtualisation technology. Yes, VMLogix LabManager is virtualisation platform agnostic! So if you decided on VMware, Hyper-V or Citrix you will still be able to...
Vmware currently is going through the wars. A change of CEO, a plunging share-price and a competitor getting alot of attention with their new product, that being Microsoft with Hyper-V. However, I just don't get it!? ESX Enterprise is still out in front in terms of features and pricing is very competitive. Any organisation performing their own unbiased product comparison evaluations is going to be hard pushed to discount Vmware's flagship product. The killer feature for many is ofcourse Vmotion that...
As I've been helping out with VMware I wanted to consider the old question of whether developers really could work inside virtual environments? As we know virtual environments can help maximise under utilised resources, CPU, RAM, diskspace and save on space, power, HVAC and TCO with centralised support and maintenance. Another main advantage of virtualised environments that is particularly attract to many developers is the ability to remote work which is a requirement that has become far more common...
If you are still writing code using .Net 2.0, why? WCF rocks! I don't usually get excited about development technologies but this one I do! WCF really does save time and large amounts of connectivity code and makes a big difference in SOA projects, this I discovered awhile ago when WCF was code-named Indigo. From a SOA perspective, the most important reason to use .Net 3.5 is the ability to use WF and WCF together. Before hand it wasn't really possible so an upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 is well...
I've turned my hand to a bit of Infrastructure Architecture and lending a hand working out what physical servers would make good candidates for making the transition to virtual. IBM, HP and DELL, to name afew, all offer services to work out what would make good candidates for you. There is also tools that can also help such as the popular PlateSpin's PowerRecon but to be fair these methods only really give potential technical candidates, that’s half the story! What about the business perspective?...
Jeff Schneider over at Momentumsi has stirred up some EA’s with his post Why Enterprise Architecture is a Joke in particular John McGovern with this post which Jeff Schneider replied to with this. In Jeff's post, point 3 hit home the most ... "3. Silo Organizations promote Silo Funding. Many EA's never had a chance. They live in organizations that fund everything according to business silo's. Then, the EA is expected to bridge the silos with nickle and dime funding. Their inability to perform Herculean...
The BBC's Bill Thompson in his recent blog post about the state of IT development in the UK has hit the nail on the head "Universities have seen applications for computer science degrees fall off, schools do not encourage students to do computing at GCSE and A Level and primary school children are trained as users not as programmers." Recent reports from the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) and CEBR (Centre for Economics and Business Research) indicate that skilled migration workers, specifically...
My Wife is a Girl Geek and so are my cool friends Eileen and Sarah. So, it is with some interest that the BBC chose today to pick up on survey results out today from Tesco’s which concludes ‘Girl’s more skilled on computers’. I don’t wish to dispute the findings or the conclusion. Infact I think the evidence points to the very crux of the problem why any human, no matter age or gender, can find computing difficult. Skill has little to do with it in my opinion, the main problem is confidence. Children...
Recently I've squirreled myself away working on a project that had an utterly predictable answer leaving me feeling, why on earth did I bother!? What am I talking about? Migrating from Microsoft Office to an alternative product like Google, Lotus Symphony, Zoho, OpenOffice or Ability. Microsoft Office has long been a mighty cash-cow in the Microsoft farm-yard for many a year now but it has a singular big weakness, the chink in the armour and that is the licensing cost. On face value it's price is...
Selling the theory for SOA is pretty easy, the execution is harder because technically it isn't actually a very simple thing to do, let alone the changing of the structure of your IT organisation to house-keep. The book SOA Approach to Integration is aimed fairly and squarely at the Architect and Senior Developer who has the job of designing and implementing SOA technical level. The book is very resolute in keeping a strong focus on the technology and pleasantly realises that successful integration...
Rich Seeley recently interviewed John Michelsen, chief scientist at iTKO Inc who said ... "the service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing and governance provider, believes developers do not have to chose between Web-oriented architecture (WOA) based on a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) approach and SOA following the WS-* standards. "It's not an either/or question," he says in the following interview from Integration World 2007 this week in Orlando, Florida. However, he does argue that...
The post is a cautionary tail of the latest episode of common sense versus cool. AJAX is a great technology that allows webpages to have much richer content. Google Maps was the turning point for this technology as it brought the technology to the attention of the Technorati that has enjoyed a superficial level of hype ever since because it is encompassed as the lynch-pin of Web 2.0. The key part of AJAX is Javascript which is a language that all mainstream browsers, no matter what operating system,...
One of the announcements that came out of this years TechEd which I'm particularly excited about is the announcement of the next version of SQL Server. SQL Server 2008 improvements are based on 4 pillars. 1) Mission Critical Using the new Database Mirroring feature to seamlessly increase the reliability of applications. Simplifies the recovery of applications from storage failures along with providing the ability to add system resources like CPU and memory without affecting applications. 2) Not Just...
Yesterday, Steve Job as part of his keynote at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) announced a version of the Apple Safari Browser for Windows. Job’s was honest and admitted that 4.9% of the market is currently Safari and he would like to increase that amount. So it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the Mac has a larger share of the PC market than 4.9% so many Mac users must be using something other than Safari and to hazard a guess I bet it’s Firefox. So I see the release of the...
DDD is held in Reading and it is a great event but it does have a capacity and is sadly oversubscribed. One possible answer is to have regional DDD's this way more developers have more of an opportunity to experience the delights of DDD. I'm all in favor of this and more than happy to show my support as I can see this as a great way for Microsoft UK development community action to continue to grow. Join the debate here on fellow Geekswithblogs member David Chistiansen and here on Channel 9...
This is pretty shocking and I will let the introduction on the article speak for itself. "Despite being positioned by vendors at standards for service-oriented architecture, Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Java Business Integration (JBI) will have little or nothing to add to SOA development, argues Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. In this Q&A, he explains the ZapThink view that SCA and JBI are mostly about vendor politics and hype and can pretty much be ignored by architects...
What makes me quite annoyed is grand statements such as the title to this post. It is true that REST is getting more exposure these days and it being primarily a connectivity technology i.e. a web service it's not unlikely that SOA and REST will inevitable get linked together. The Burton group has stuck it's neck out and said that yes REST is the future of SOA. Funnily enough today at work I was talking with some colleagues about REST and one raised a good point, where are the working examples? So...
Lots of buzz came out of Mix 07 about Silverlight which was undoubtedly the star of the show but one of the other announcements caught the attention of my colleague Big Al on an experimental web data service technology grandly codenamed "Astoria". Now I am a fan of WS-I Web Services, I think that any technology that can gain that kind of ubiquitous acceptance across the whole industry, including all the major players is some achievement, however I can understand the argument that accuses the WS-I...
No I haven't been in hiding but as the proverb says 'there is no rest for the wicked', so I must have been very bad. Anyway, I have a new house which has meant tarting up the old one and work has been ultra hectic but our websites for a well known travel brand are going live one at a time. Anyway, I hoping from a nice summer to get stuck into some good tech. Microsoft has also been busy, it is becoming crystal clears days where Redmond is heading with Service Oriented Architecture. For example John...
I've just come back from a brilliant evening with the Oxford chapter of NxtGenUG. So why do I think it was brilliant/fantastic? These phrases are banded around so loosely these days, well I quantify my statement. Take Biztalk for example, not many developers out there get really what Biztalk does and there aren't enough hours in the day to learn. Unless a developer has a specific reason they aren't really going to look it up. But when you do start looking into Biztalk all to quickly you find yourself...
For sometime now I have been working on a few papers on the subject of SOA. This is the first, my definitive definition of what is SOA Governance. 'SOA Governance' is perhaps the hotest of topics in the SOA world currently but it seems that almost everyone with an opinion has a different definition of what it is and how to do it. I have attempted with this post to distill these definitions into one document which you can take away and use as part of a policy statement to help you with your SOA's...
Biztalk is a fantastic piece of software but many I.T. professionals haven't had an opportunity to see it and understand what it can do. Our next session at NxtGenUG is going to one of our best yet as it will be topical with a nugget by Tim Leung about Microsoft latest operating system, Vista, and the main presentation will be Ben Goeltz, 'The Business of Biztalk' which went down extremely well at the Birmingham chapter in November. I can also report that we are now completely and utter SWWWWAAAGGGEDDDD...
Back to Earth after my Channel 9 video. In this post I want to discuss some of my recent experiences implementing SOA. It’s important to take everyone with you. SOA is a Sea-Change in the way programs are developed and implemented in an organisation. The concept of an ‘Application’ is very much redefined. It’s so important that the reason why are communicated not only to key stake-holder in business, but everyone in the I.T department, specially those that are at the coal...
As we all know the development cycle at many a code shop is floored and there has been a number of methodologies and initiatives to help us get over some of the core problems. The simple fact is that I believe that a great deal of the problems in the development cycle or more uncomfortably closer to home. I alluded to this in a previous post ‘Software design and why developers suck at it !’ but to but it bluntly, it’s our attitude towards our work and the other people (other than...
I’ve been on holiday recently and my sun-lounger reading of choice amongst all the usual best-seller guff was Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum which came highly recommended from a good friend of mine. To be perfectly honest, the book has altered my world view of the development cycle and our issues. So what I want to discuss here is one of the issues that came out of the book and that issue is us, the developers! In short, if you haven’t read the book (and I highly...
For all those supporters of the Waterfall methodology here is the conference just for you!http://www.waterfall200... Register for Waterfall 2006 We're sorry but registration is not yet ready. Our software developers have a really wonderful design. They're almost done entering it into it a UML tool. They've told us not to worry and that finishing it will be "trivial" because "all that's left is the coding." We're not sure what features will be on the registration pages because the developers haven't...
IBM recently introduced a free version of its DB2 database called DB2 Express-C, a move designed to win software developers over to its products. The database is essentially the same as there commercial product but is limited to a single dual core processor and a memory limit of 4GB. IBM's decision to add a free database to its lineup is really keeping up with the Jones follows moves by its largest rivals in the database business, Oracle and Microsoft. With the release of SQL Server 2005 in November...
Microsoft UK's new developer security education website's main character 'Developer Dave' is not modelled on me, honest guv'nor! The site can be found here. The message is actually very clear that it is easy to ignore security in your developments. It's not just developers that produce website that face the Internet that are ay risk, but as many recent surveys have pointed out the largest risk of security breeches comes from inside in organisation. I'm not saying you can't trust your fellow workers,...
This is an entertaining account of a C# fan boys first encounters with Java. It pretty much does demonstrate why there aren't many developers going in that direction and what Java has to do to get it's house in order. I personally loved Java until Microsoft caught up and took over, specially now VB.Net has got it's cool back with VS2005...
Now here is a real treat! Bill Gibson one of the key Architects on the Whitehorse team has started blogging and his posts so far have been insightful as more background about Whitehorse has started to immerge. Bill’s blog can be found here. So what is Whitehorse? Whitehorse is the Distributed System Designers in Visual Studio 2005, available in the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects. More info can be found here. Whitehorse, the Distributed System Designer are not new ideas but...
Tata Consultancy Services (or TCS) are setting up a new research in emerging technologies such Grid, SOA and Collaborative Software Development. Their press announcement can be found here. I have the good fortune to work with TCS on projects within my organisation. Have no doubt that the Indian consultancies are here and are fully aware and equipped to take on today’s and tomorrows challenges. They have passion and the correct attitude. Yes it is true that not all of their developers have made...
"Companies developing plans to better serve customers running JBoss Enterprise Middleware System on Microsoft Windows Server. ATLANTA and REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 27, 2005 — JBoss® Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced plans to explore enhanced interoperability between their respective JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS™) and Microsoft® Windows Server™ products and deepen JBoss support for the Windows Server operating system. While the two companies will continue...
As with so many of these debates we never seem to draw conclusions. I would like to take this opportunity to do that as this is an old debate and one that really needs finally putting to rest.I started this debate here on Channel 9 because this old issue hasn't really been resolved as VB does encounter a lot of FUD.A good example is that many UK companies will hire a C# developer for approx £5000 more than a VB.NET developer, this is because the HR guys have been steered by us, we have created...
Just read a paper by Herb Sutter called 'The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software' and I found myself realising that this is a big issue that I felt I wanted to highlight here and how it effects development over the next few years. In a nutshell the next generation of processor are going to continue to become more powerful. The bad news is that, at least in the short term, the growth will come mostly in directions that do not take most current applications along for...
More interesting information to come out of this weeks PDC include more information on Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF which was formerly known as Avalon. The WPF development tool will use cross-platform standards, so you can use them to write normal apps that will run on different platforms or even Web-based apps with multiple browser support. Even as it steers developers toward the forthcoming edition of Windows, Microsoft is building tools to write applications for Mac OS X and the Web,...
News coming out of the PDC about an exciting new a set of standard query operators for use in working with data regardless of the data source! In essence they are a set of .net libraries that will extend C# and Visual Basic, from the examples on Microsoft site there is a strong impression that this is a sort of SQL type addition to the languages, that still happily works in a OO fashion. For example extracted from the Microsoft website. Where - Simple 1 This sample prints each element of an input...
Marcus Perryman (UK Microsoft Mobility Guru) has posted this on his blog. "Microsoft Mobile Embedded Developers User Group UK. This will be a free User Group that MS will support now and again with the use of their London Offices for meetings. During these meetings we (the organizers) would hopefully have organized technical presentations from both software companies and hardware companies alike. As a software developerof Windows Mobile solutions you might also like to join this community and participate...
It seems that all is not well out there in VS2005 Beta 2 land. Clint Stotesbery has called for a vote on the MSDN Product Feedback Center for a Beta 3. In his problem statement he has written “There are still way too many bugs and performance issues. Too many issues get resolved as Postponed. A lot of changes are happenning in the CTPs. I'm guessing not many people are using the CTPs compared to beta 2. Most developers don't have time to play around with a CTP that doesn't have a Go Live license....
I still very much enjoy dabbling around with PC hardware. I like to think that my PC at home is no slouch and built by my own fair hand, so a dare say I know a thing or two that I’ve picked up on a long the way. The duel-core processors from AMD and Intel are an exciting new concept to hit the mainstream. Software that can take advantage of duel-core processors will be a little thin on the ground initally, but using the AMD 64 as an example this hasn’t stopped many people from purchasing...
The next big event in my tech calendar is the quarterly UK Architect Forum. This time the event will be held at the Cavendish Conference Centre. You may be too late to register, but here is the link. My organisation is no different from any other large organisation in having integration issues. So I am fighting for us to take the first tentative steps into SOA so of course I am more than a little intrigued by one of the main topics and I quote. “How to do SOA SOA has been around for a while...
Yesterday, I attended DeveloperDays at what Microsoft Campus in Reading, UK. A good days was had by all and I sure as hell learnt allot, but I did feel very much overwhelmed when I got home last-night, so I hit the sack with one hell of a head-ache, hence writing about it today. The session I enjoyed the most where … Craig Murphy's introduction to Scrum. Now I must say that I’m very much an advocate of Agile development, so learning about Scrum and learning how you could project manager...