June 2008 Entries
A short post this time on a better known framework feature in .Net 2.0 +. A funny thing happened on the way to the demo today. I was preparing to demo some code to a group of developers and needed a function I had written back in the 10 .net days. This was a thin wrapper that allowed one to read configuration information out of the web or app config or a database. Being a careful programmer instead of just including the class and moving on to the demo even though I knew the code worked I thought...
A friend of mine Denny Boynton and I were talking at TechEd last week about green computing and it started me thinking. He mentioned that he and some other architects were discussing green computing platforms (server vitalization, cloud computing,etc...). That started me talking about: What is the responsibility of the software developer in this emerging green computing grid? Many infrastructure groups over the last few years have been moving to virtual servers and environments initially to save...
I have spent the better part of the last three days in sessions at Microsoft TechEd listening to folks talk about: What is an architect? How do we identify them? Are they born or taught? Are there good architects and bad architects, what differentiates them? Why are architects seen as “a necessary evil” are they just overhead. What do they contribute? I apologize in advance for the lengthiness of this post but this is a core value point to me and I tend to get very wordy when an issue is near and...
An argument for Interface based design and programming For software to survive in the ever-changing jungle of the production environment, it must have three distinct characteristics: reusability, maintainability, and extensibility. Interface-based programming exists outside the world of COM. It is a programming discipline that is based on the separation of the public interface from implementation. It was pioneered in languages such as C++ and Smalltalk by software engineers who discovered that using...
Unit Testing In computer programming, unit testing is a procedure used to validate that individual modules or units of source code are working properly. More technically one should consider that a unit is the smallest testable part of an application. In a Procedural Design a unit may be an individual program, function, procedure, web page, menu etc. But in Object Oriented Design, the smallest unit is always a Class; which may be a base/super class, abstract class or derived/child class. A unit test...
So lately I've been thinking a lot about the next generation of IT. Software + services... While the concepts for Web 2.0 are intriguing many questions come to mind. What is a good candidate for Web 2.0 especially if it’s not maintained inside the corporate infrastructure? The approach is very attractive but introduces many new obstacles, how do we ensure the integrity of transactions, data ownership issues, transparency. As services grow and mature they tend to change significantly over time with...
Today I attended an amazing session presented by Juval Lowy . I have to say in the last 5-8 years it was the most interesting and enjoyable session I have been to 4 Microsoft TechEd's, 3 SAP TechEd's, 2 Microsoft Mix's and 2 VS Live conferences. I enjoyed the historical walk down memory lane of software development. Having been in the industry for 20+ years it was interesting to see the patterns that Juval drew out. A number of interesting thoughts were brought out during the day long conversation....