development
There are 59 entries for the tag development
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...
A little while back I posted a question on Channel 9 wanting to know more about SQL Server ‘Madison’ project. Well Charles Torre being the extremely nice bloke that he is (Thanks Charles I owe you another beer, perhaps not London Pride next time!) got on a plane from Redmond down to Orange County and went to pay the Madison development team and in particular Christian Kleinerman for is the Product Unit Manager for the Madison development, a visit The video is a good introduction into Madison, it...
Codeplex is a wonderful site. However not just for the .Net coder but the SQL Server guy/gal can find plenty of goodies there as well. One such goody is the FineBuild utility that does as the name suggest helps create a ‘Fine Build’ of your SQL Server install. All to often installing SQL Server can turn into a day long process with the various additional service packs, CU’s, tools and utility to install. Well FineBuild can automate all of that so all you need to do is run the start script, go off...
To Microsoft’s credit their Architecture resources are much improving. The excellent free Architecture Journal and the MSDN Architecture Centre have been going for sometime but I noticed recently that there is a new UK centric Architecture Portal written by the UK DPE Architect Team with the new free monthly Arc Magazine. The first editions of the Arc Magazine tackle the highly logical new buzz ‘Software + Services’ with links to the Microsoft Strategy Software + Services Home Page. I will talk about...
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...
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...
Does your software or database run like a dog? Running out of space? Or doesn't recover well in a disaster? ... then your storage configuration may be one of the reasons. This is a short little post just to give you a heads-up on the basics. You may know bits of it already, hence why I have broken it up into a Q&A format so you can skip what you already now. The Hard-Disk Well we've all seen a hard-disk but the likelihood is that it was in a desktop and you're the only person that uses it at...
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...
John Wu is a good guy. Out of respect for Fenix Theuerkorn and his work on Lightweight Enterprise Architecture, John has decided to rename his EA Methodology from LiteEA To Coherent EA. Coherent EA is a actually a better, more descriptive name for John’s work IMHO and as a regular contributor to the ITToolbox conversations his methodology has the benefit of faster development from genuine experience than most of the others I could mention. I certainly have benefited from Coherent EA in the past and...
EnterpriseArchitecture.co.uk is my new blog for taking deeper dives into the practice of Enterprise Architecture. Don't worry I will still be posting on GWB but this is an effort to reach out to a new audience who are also Enterprise Architects, this will also be a place for them to get involved and interact as this space will not just be my blog but will grow into complete reference resource. Once I have work it out, I will be starting a forum and letting other bloggers co-habit this cool URL with...
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...
Many of us did it, made one New Year Resolutions to many at the Millennium and didn’t managed to succeed in any of them. I tried to give up smoking, losing a bit of weight, drinking less beer, save up to buy a house and learning to drive. A lot of change there, to much infact, so unsurprisingly I failed. A common story. 8 years later, all those things on the list are (more or less) achieved and how I did that was by concentrating on fixing one thing at a time. Again unsurprisingly, psychologists...
I have been subscribing to TechTarget emails for sometime because of the low signal to noise ratio covering a broad technology spectrum that is important to me as I'm keen to hear from more than just a few vendors so it comes as no surprise that IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE) was recently voted one of the 10 Great Media Web Sites. ITKE is on of those dead-handy site that I keep in the 'Favourites' when I want to find an answer. It's not so good for Microsoft .Net Development questions, better off going...
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...
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...
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...
Oslo is the codename for technical thinking aimed specifically at simplifying designing, building, managing and scaling of service-oriented and composite applications that can span from the enterprise to the Internet. It is thought the first version of Oslo will be delivered through the next versions of our application platform products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 10, Microsoft System Center 5, BizTalk Server 6, BizTalk Services 1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4. So, we are talking a 18 months...
I first started coding at the age of 10 on a Commodore Vic 20. Last week I finally un-installed Visual Studio 2003 on my laptop because I need the space and I never touch it. It was sad admitting that I don't code and my role does not require me to. If I did find myself coding then I probably shouldn't because there is so much else to do and we have more than a few guys and girls that will happily do the job and only a couple doing EA. Yep, I get the argument that a good architect should have more...
Last week I was lucky enough to meet Charles Edwards of ProcessWave Limited who introduced me to an Open Source project that he is collaborating on called Agile EA. In a nutshell, Agile EA isn’t another EA methodology but a set of best practices and processes put together from experiences in the field. Agile EA has influences from many EA methodologies but takes its biggest steer from TOGAF 8.1 and is organised and executed in a SCRUM agile development approach. It’s very accessible from the highly...
It comes as no surprise to me but swearing at work is good according to a study by researcher at the University of East Anglia, UK (UAE) "The study found regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships. The results of the study, Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture: when anti-social becomes social and incivility is acceptable, are published in the current issue of...
If the IT industry had a school report it would say ‘Must Try Harder’ and that’s simply because we haven’t worked hard enough to sort out perceptions. Let me give you an example, how often do you hear comments from your help-desk saying “Have you tried switching you PC off and on again?” Isn’t it about time we got this sorted? Even the perception? Now I know that a lot of things can make this sort of thing happen, well for my mind its just laziness why we haven’t sort out all the reasons yet! Another...
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...
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...
Developer Developer Developer Days have been a great success for the UK Microsoft development community, because it is a community event run by the community for the community. But credit where credit is due, this event would not be possible without the support of a generous sponsor. NxtGenUG Fest 07 is an ambitious community event; the aim is to create an event that is the best it can be with a strong theme about looking into the future. To have truly world class speakers and presentations about...
One of the key parts of a SOA’s is the Business Process Logic Layer. One of the key technologies in this layer is Windows Workflow Foundation, one the key things that was missing from WF was support for BPEL so this called into question Microsoft commitment to the XML standard. Anyway, I’m happy to report that BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP is available able from MSDN Download. With this add-on you will be able to import and export BPEL from WF. Remember it is still in CTP so is officially...
This coming Wednesday (March 7th) Benjamin Mitchell who is one of the founders of DDD, will visit us at Oxford NxtGenUG to give us the 101 on the Windows Workflow Foundation and a few demos on how to quickly building workflow enabled applications. Now if you're like me who has a suspicion that 'Dub' F is going to useful but don't have the time to investigate it fully then this is the perfect opportunity to find out ... and eat pizza, meet fellow coders and a change to win swaaaaggggg! I just want...
Ug I have just spend a few infuriating hours playing with Yahoo latest utility, Yahoo Pipes. Tim O’Reilly said this was a milestone in the History of the Internet. (Ug isn’t he the same bloke that coined the phrase ‘Web 2.0'? Ug, what does that mean?) In a nutshell Yahoo Pipes is a utility that lets you build your own custom searches, it allows you to aggregate search-engines searches and RSS into one stream of output. So for example, if I wanted to see all what had been posted about ‘Girl Geek...
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...
Did you know your company can receive significant tax credits if it does R & D, and especially if it’s an SME? The UK Government has run the Research and Development Tax Credit scheme since April 2001 which offers 150% rate of enhanced deduction from SME’s and 125% rate of enhanced deduction for large companies. A large company being in this context one that employs more than 250 people has an annual turnover of €50M or a balance sheet of €43M. There has already been 17,000...
In this post I will be taking a high level look at what a possible SOA implementation architecture scenario and what it might look like giving an indication of what technologies are involved. This example scenario is a SOA implementation for call-centres using Microsoft Technologies, some you may have heard of, and others that are sadly as yet unsung. A few things to note, I haven’t come across a medium to large organisation that doesn’t use Citrix for the UI deployment so this is why...
Speaking of Team System the rumour mill has told me that Microsoft have a few announcements about this at Tech Ed. Now it doesn't take a genius to work out that Team System is about groups that are involved in the development life cycle and not all these groups are catered for in Team System yet. There are a few glaring omission's. Microsoft has made a serious commitment to Team System, the amount of money spent on it is staggering and is clearly a long term investiment. I believe it's goal will...
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...
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,...
Whilst on the development subjects today, have a read of this! Yep, it's a set of practical development standards that, I've found, agreeable and often entertaining to read, perhaps the best way to get information like this across by not treating us as all as stupid and being a light-hearted along the way a nice way to digest it all and perhaps I'll remember most of it. Hmmm, perhaps this is the point...
Microsoft today have announces a new set of development qualifications. There are three levels of qualifications starting from Specialist level, to Professional with the third and highest level being Architect. Now it’s nice and simple to understand and I much prefer this to some meaningless acronym which I couldn’t equate to a job title or more importantly pay scale. More information can be found here. Now the qualification to become an Architect is pretty darn tough but perhaps rightly...
After reading a recent post by Grady Booch’s blog post titled Best Practices I followed the link to the paper on Key Principles of Business Driven Development written by Per Kroll and Walker Royce of IBM Rational. Wearing my Architect hat it’s a very good paper and is a must read specially for all those people that use RUP (Rational Unified Process) and/or use IBM Rational software or even an interest it is clear that this is the new direction the people at he helm of IBM Rational are...
What were you doing on Saturday? Traipsing around the shops looking for new socks? Spending hours in the Supermarket? Getting the car sorted out? That badly need haircut perhaps? It’s sometimes a bit of a rubbish day-off. But last Saturday it was another fantastic Developer Day 2 @ Microsoft in Reading followed by a Geek Dinner! Ahh my Geek Heart almost exploded with excitement. Now I didn’t go there for the freebies! Who does that? Please! I did however go to socialise which is one of...
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...
The Excel Development team I have started blogging here. I’m not a great fan of Excel, it overstepped its bounds of being a spreadsheet program many moons ago and now it’s an uncontrollable monster. Of course users love it and best analogy for the reason they do is that Excel could be compared to a top of the range Swiss-army knife, with so many blades and bits and bobs you couldn’t possible get around to using them all. It’s great! So you have this great tool you can take...
"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...
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,...
IBM is concentrating very hard on SOA right with links right from the http://www.ibm.com front-page, which is more than Microsoft. They are investing $1 billion a year into SOA based technologies. They also claim to have over 1000 "SOA customer engagements all over the world". Now to earth with a bump, did IBM spend a lot of money on development of SOA or marketing because this website has been over done by marketing and really has very little content, there is nothing new here that I can't find...
Performance is a key factor in deciding the architecture of a system. With distributed applications performance becomes even more key as data is passed between the different layers. Microsoft has seemingly completing technologies in this space so it is very much a mystery on which will be the best technology for a given scenario. A new article on MSDN called Performance of ASP.NET Web Services, Enterprise Services, and .NET Remoting by Ingo Rammer of Thinktecture and Richard Turner of Microsoft examines...
In this post we will introduce the concept of SOA anti-patterns. Like any architecture there is a right and a wrong way to do it. SOA is no exception. Silo ServicesService Orientation is more than just a distributed technology it is a decentralised technology. Enterprises are complex and in terms of IT are not often controllable from a central point, much less through a single technical architecture. As such the tendency for business units to develop services in line with local demands should be...
This is the question posed by Damen Carr. His initial post is here. In this post I would like to respond to this question. Agile development in my view is not prescriptive and many organisations have embraced their own style to fit with their culture which has been an evolving process that is in itself improving with every project as more is learnt. For instance many organisations find some Agile Development techniques such as pair development contentious and therefore are not adopted, whilst many...
So who’s totally happy with the way software is designed right now? Not many I bet. UML IMHO is just a tool-kit, nothing more. It’s a tool-kit that currently doesn’t get close enough to allow the developer to code from it. Developers are creative and boy do they need to be with the amount of questions they have to answer, no wonder they get cheesed off with Architects and Analyst! Aren’t they supposed to answer all theses darns questions before it gets to the developer? Yes...
Have you built a mobile solution for you company from scratch? Yes, I’ve tried it too. Don’t get me wrong Visual Studio is a very powerful tool and the emulators are a great step forward but for my mind most of the pieces of the solution just aren’t there and you have to end up building most of that yourself. The risk is the components parts are not built to best practice and often aren’t as productive as they could be. In this space you are still very much on your own. Often...
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...