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Next Architecture Chat

Alex Henderson — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:01:07 GMT

Hi All,

Just a quick update re: the next Architecture Chat.

Last weeks chat didn't go ahead because I was overseas on leave, and unfortunately on my way home I picked up a dose of some mega flu which is knocking me around something fierce - apparently it's not of the swine variety, but I'm starting to wonder...

At any rate, rather then unleash it upon everyone else I'll hold off setting up another chat until I've recovered - so I suspect that'll mean Thursday next week, 16th July.

If you have any topic suggestions for next week, just leave a comment on this post, flick me an email or message me on twitter. Look forward to seeing you all then.

Architecture Chat #50

Alex Henderson — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:37:49 GMT

Sorry for the delays, here's the write-up for the last architecture chat.

Discussed equivalent Java WAR Files, and options/alternatives (or lack there of) for .Net - including Sharepoint's WSP files, and the Microsoft web platform installer.
Internationalisation - discussions around the lack of good, free tools for i18n'ingapplications and user interfaces easily.
Crunchpad device, and a brief side-conversation about Mike Arringtons antics in the geek media lately.
Build Providers, and their uses.
Refactoring legacy code as a skill and discussions around painting inwards from many corners and other apporaches to dividing, conquering and controlling legacy code.
Vodafone MM7 gateway on the way.
Outsourcing / Telecommuting, and general factors such as Time zones, synchronizing streams of works, the productivity bonuses and personality challenges of working away from your team.
Ipod touch as a handheld device to target for business app development.
Conditional defines, modularity and the roll on effects for continuous integration and support.
Mono's difficulties/bad PR on Linux as people get confused/concerned about licensing.
Memory mapped files in .Net 4.0 (easier to use that you'd expect).
Was ruby the right choice - discussing thoughtworks experiences with ruby, the velocity at which new tools are developed/adopted/dropped for the ruby platform, and what paralells and differences exist between it and .Net.

We also had a new comer, who's just moved back to Auckland from overseas, Josh Robb. Always glad to see new faces!

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:47:23 GMT

Hi All, It’s that time again – time for another Auckland Architecture chat.

Some possible topics I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks:

Get rid of those pesky programmers – why are these business types so eager to get rid of us programmers?
Was Ruby the right choice – the meta programming usage graph interesting…
Memory mapped files in .Net 4.
Creative Commons stack overflow data on BitTorrent.
Revision control as part of the language… sparked off by this Lambda the Ultimate post about Erlang.
Windows 7 RC Training Kit for Developers.
Newly revised MGraph Object Model document.
The Wellington Code Camp was last weekend (wish I could’ve made it!) – presenters are starting to post stuff… just keep an eye on there blogs.

Andrew Tokeley – Building Solutions Using Microsoft Products.
JD Trask – Object Relational Mapping (blog1, blog2).
James Story (blog?).
Owen Evans – blog.
Ben Arps – Maintainable Code: one step further.
Kirk Jackson – blog.
James Newton-King - .Net 4.0 Code Contracts.
Matthew Hintzen – blog.
Ivan Towlson – blog.
Sky Sigal – blog.
James Hippolite – Microsoft Sync Framework.
John Rusk (blog1, blog2).

Also I believe Owen is working through some code camp video footage which might find it’s way online at some point, married up to slides etc. –good for those of us who couldn’t make it down to wellington last weekend.
Mono in Visual Studio 2010.
Mono is getting a bit of a hard time (follow up here and here) in the Linux world, because of unclear licensing. Microsoft want silverlight anywhere/everywhere - but there seems confusion around Mono on OpenSuse vs. other distros.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 18th June 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture Chat #49

Alex Henderson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:54:38 GMT

Here’s what we talked about at last weeks weeks Architecture chat…

Black fibre (sparked off by this story in the US)
Unmarked helicopters.
Open XML SDK 2.0 April Refresh.
Need for XML Tidy / Reformatting / Code clean of word xml before parsing/processing it with automated tools to simplify/combine runs etc.
Writing your own mini-DNS server, and approaches to programmatically balancing load and geographic distribution via DNS.
Legacy codebases, and the true cost of “small updates” to legacy apps.
Outsourcing horror stories.
Encrypted stored procedures.
Wolfram Alpha, Google squared and Google wave and the joys of tabular data.
Data centre location/latency issues (especially for parts of Europe and the pacific/Oceania regions).
Project Natal for XBox 360

Next meeting is Thursday, 18th June 2009 – see you all there!

Architecture Chat #46, #47 & #48

Alex Henderson — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:47:38 GMT

Apologies for not posting these sooner – here are the write-ups for the last month and half of Architecture Chats.

Word & Excel document generation - testing approaches, the problems with verifying document structure without styling, interop performance bottlenecks etc.
Metadata, n-triples & semantic web.
Supporting micro formats, formats that aren’t formats etc.
Symantec SVS.
Software Engineering degrees vs. Comp Sci degrees, comparing volumes of practical experience, projects etc.
NDA's & Student projects and the risks involved with offering projects to students vs. protecting IP / perceived business advantages.
NUnit 2.5 details.
Winforms to WPF - talking about why such a thing exists, the obvious risks and potential messes such a tool can create if not taken as just a learning tool.
Longevity of purpose built languages vs. general purpose languages.
ExtJS - I've talked about this JavaScript library a few times, but I don't think I've ever linked to it - so go check out the samples if you haven't. Great fit for MVC based RIA's.
Making code changes on site - advantages, disadvantages - and the relationship/perceptions it creates with customers (customers are either impressed, or begin to feel you can fix anything given a couple of hours).
Observing customers on site using your software, difficulties in doing this without being onsite, ways to automate this etc.
Entity Framework - ESQL.
NHibernate HQL AST
Visualising Linq queries, current options, what’s missing etc.
Flagging builds which are released to customers vs. builds which are released internally, and different approaches to versioning etc.
Domainz hacked, msn redirected.
Sql injection attacks still working far too often.
Nokia 1100 - huge demand, changing numbers, banking scams.
Scaling and implementing document & distributed/persistent hash tables… including talking about CouchDB, MyISAM and Esent (Extensible Storage Engine).
Lucene.Net - using/abusing it for storing your data along with search documents, and performance implications (i.e. the observation that it's still quick).

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:01:35 GMT

Apologies for the last minute notice, been a crazy week!

Tomorrow is the Auckland Architecture Chat, some quick thoughts as to topics:

Google wave – worth watching the video if you haven’t.
SilverUnit – unit testing for silverlight controls.
Automapper – fluently configured object-to-object mapper, this Dimecast provides a quick overview.
Linq2Sql changes for .Net 4.0.
NHibernate – Executable DML, no criteria support but pretty handy none the less, especially when targeting multiple databases.
Simone’s .net ajax survey, some of the comments re: update panel etc. are interesting reading too. It’s not too late to take the survey here either.
Video for everyone, nice fallback approach to embedding video for all browsers.
Microsoft bing, “Decision engine” ?
Displaying eager load graphs in lightspeed designer – cool feature.
The Azure™ Services Platform Developer Challenge.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 4th June 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:48:36 GMT

Hi All, Architecture Chat Tomorrow!

Below are a few topics that have caught my eye lately:

Ivan Porto Carrero is working on a mocking framework for IronRuby called Caricature.
TypeMock Racer goes 1.0 – another great tool for the toolbox.
Mutable Linq Expressions – interesting hack from Ayende.
Commercial Suicide – Integration at the Database & Service Level.
Moonlight 2 Preview 2.
The fallacy of the always-valid entity.
OpenRasta – I’ve been playing with this a bit lately, after watching the presentation @ E-VAN.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 20th May 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:42:27 GMT

Hi All, Architecture Chat Tomorrow… here are some possible topics of discussion.

2009 NZ Imagine Cup Winners
Castle Windsor 2.0 released (finally!)
Windows 7 RC Available
More Microsoft layoff notices
Pesky Utility & common libraries
.Net support in Jade 6.3
Video on Entity Frameworks Model First in .Net
Vista SP2 and Windows 2008 SP2 Available
Mike Shapiro has an interesting piece on purpose built languages.
NUnit 2.5 and TestDriven.Net support for NUnit 2.5.
To MVC or to WebForms?
WinForms To Wpf?

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 7th May 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:17:44 GMT

Hi All, Architecture Chat Tomorrow… some quick topics that have caught my eye over the last couple of days:

Oracle Buying Sun – what do we think?
Code Sample Taxonomy – code quality verse. clarity/brevity for examples?
Repository is the new singleton
Open source experience – I know I personally look for this, but is it good advice for getting a “general” development position in NZ?
Eagle - Tcl language for the CLR.
NServiceBus 1.9 RTM Released.
Cucumber – Interesting BDD framework for Ruby, check out the examples on the front page.
Using M & Oslo SDK to build a WPF Animation DSL.
Continuations etc. in Mono (interesting blog post and comments).

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 23rd April 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture Chat #45

Alex Henderson — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:15:48 GMT

Smallish turnout - but it was right before the start of a 4 day weekend here in NZ, so hardly surprising.

Topics discussed...

Architecture group structure / communication channels / website etc.

Building a better website for the Architecture Chat (Wiki etc.).
Taxonomy / themes our discussions often take (i.e. Business, Education/Training, Local/Central Government, ORM's & Domain Driven Design, WPF/Silverlight etc.)
Distributing the workload of "write-ups" - by having each discussion topic as a page on the wiki, with each discussion extending that topic - and the ability to continue the discussions outside of the fortnightly meetings.
Possibility of somebody donating some design time to set up the structure for the site.
Group library
Swag / prizes (not sure how this would work just yet).

Beer & Bytes - Peter went along, and noticed how few people had even tried a "hello world" in WPF or Silverlight, and the difficulty of succinctly defining just what WPF is / it's value proposition in a few short sentences (perhaps this is a good question for stack overflow?).
The generally false opinion (with some anecdotal evidence from Peter) of thinking it's easier to quickly throw a prototype/small UI for an app together in Windows Forms vs. WPF when you're in a hurry, or trying to avoid the additional issues of deploying the 3.5 sp1 framework along with your application.
Commercial controls for WPF vs. Rolling your own, and the general decline the number of commercial controls you need to build an application.

After that the conversation veered off into boatin stories for the remainder of the meeting - so we decided to call it quits and head to lunch.

I look forward to seeing the rest of our regulars back in a fortnight, and hope everyone is having a good Easter break!

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:12:04 GMT

Architecture chat tomorrow, pretty topic-light this week.. some quick things that have taken my interest recently:

ALT.Net Podcast featuring Jeremy Miller – An interesting follow-up after the Scott Bellware discussion last week, and probably more inline with how I see ALT.Net.
Loads of azure info coming out over the last few weeks.. I think this OakLeaf Systems post sums it up best.
Mauricio Scheffer has an interesting blow-by-blow post on using Castle Windsor’s fluent interface with F# - and the fact that it’s… not so fluent. Definitely something to give thought to when crafting fluent interfaces – are there going to be F# or other language clients, and just what is their experience going to be like?
Interesting ncommon library – a generic framework for Unit of work, generic Repository<T>, validation and business rules etc. Supports NHibernate, Linq2Sql & EF. See the Steve Gentile post for more details. Though obviously a Repository<T> isn’t to everyone’s tastes or necessarily a fit with repositories being a business concern.
Alex James has been posting a bunch of EF tips (11 so far).
Got a couple of books from O’Reilly for review / the group library – Let me know if anyone at the chat would like to read them / review them – they are: 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and Beautiful Architecture. Or if there any books they’d like the group to get to read/review.

Also wouldn’t mind discussing the Architecture group itself – i.e. Possibility of North shore meet-ups, setting up a dedicated website, what the name of the group should be, handing out swag etc.

Last of all – would be interested to see if anyone made along to the Beer & Bytes this week (unfortunately I was stuck in a meeting that evening) – looking at Preet’s blog post I suspect a few of you did.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 9th April 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture Chat #44

Alex Henderson — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:51:44 GMT

Average turn out today - with 5 of us showing up, had some interesting discussions though – here’s a list of some of the stuff we talked about:

Field naming… giving up the habit of underscores, then taking them up again to avoid the additional wordiness of this.whatever, and the practice of avoiding adornments for fields etc. in unit tests to improved the readability/scanability of tests.
Method naming, the move towards more readable/unique names vs. less descriptive heavily overloaded methods, i.e. Find vs. FindByName, FindById etc.
Inner classes used to firewall logic inside a class or hold shared context for a set of operations, the inherit difficulty in testing this, and whether it’s a logical refactoring, or a design decision you tend to make up front when writing the outer class.
The survey on how relevant computer science teaching is (i.e. how does the curriculum compare with the real world). Being run by Tony Gorschek, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden & Ewan Tempero, Auckland University, New Zealand.
Approaches to testing applications which depend on a large number of small islands of configuration loaded at run time (i.e. xml etc.) which are interdependent – the challenges of validating individual snippets, and issues with snippets potentially relying on other snippets etc.
Redgate taking over reflector.net, and interesting new debugging product coming out as a result.
Rolling your own licensing frameworks, the mixed reaction of being a target for crackers (someone likes me product, but someone doesn’t want to pay for it), realities of they’ll never pay anyway, common mistakes made when building your own licensing (putting all your license code in a separate assembly, not signing it, not obfuscating) and things like using ILMerge with internals.
Native compilation tools and all-in-one framework bundling tools for .Net (thinstall, remotesoft salamander, Mono etc.).
CouchDB and scalability/query qualities (unfortunately more questions then answer, Peter B & Myself need to have a play with this stuff and report back next time) – interests in insertion costs when you have lots of views, are queries against views really a cheap operation/linear cost.
SEO & Silver light tips and tricks – also discussed hacking browser history in the same was we do with ajax.
Web crawlers pretending to be mobile clients.
Protocol buffer & .net implementations such as protobuf-net which you can use with classes marked up with data contracts.
Groking IoC, what are the lights on moments – the difficulty some have with jumping from the principles of DI/IoC to using a container.
Discussed if there might be some value in presenting on practical use of an IoC container at a local user group, as the DI/IoC conversations we’ve had in Auckland over the last few years tend to stop short of that point, and it’s often hard to make the jump from manually doing DI verses using a container to wire everything up and the advantages/disadvantages of doing so.

Thanks to all who came, see you in two weeks.

Architecture Chats #42 & #43

Alex Henderson — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:30:58 GMT

Architecture Chat #42

Quite a good turn out, fairly rambling – we talked about:

Rolling your own caching, approaches, what’s currently offered by EF and the pitfalls etc. of attempting to substitute database caching with action caching/memoization or partial view caching.
General discussions on financial situation, current challenges for people running development shops etc.
Scaling applications, and affects of coding for a non-relational backing data store.
Continuous integration, Jamie mentioned the interesting Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day.

Architecture Chat #43

Small turn out - 3 people, Peter B & Time Barnet (from Hamilton) & Myself.

Most of the discussion was around the .net community in New Zealand, we talked all things community related in NZ- mailing list (including the hamster), what’s going on in the user groups, what could be done better, wiki’s, collaboration etc. Also contrasted NZ’s community with what’s happening elsewhere in the world, the current decline of regional mailing list interest compared to growth of stackoverflow and other more internationally focused development communities.

Also discussed the recent alt.net conference, some of the outcomes, the challenges of really getting mainstream developers interested and the difficulties developers have in getting productive in the .Net community verses others such as php, python or ROR.

Also briefly discussed the lack of a package management solution for .Net developers to make managing interdependencies etc. easier.

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:03:51 GMT

Apologies for the late posting, there is in fact an Architecture Chat tomorrow, at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park (Thursday 26th March 2009).

Some topics that have interested me lately which we might want to discuss:

Some M debates going on – Ayende has a interesting post “M is to DSL as Drag & Drop is to programming” and there’s also James Clark has an interesting post on Getting involved with M. If nothing else It doesn’t seem like the entire M story has revealed itself yet (but where have we heard that line before?) and we’re plagued with examples that aren’t really solving business problems or demonstrating technical beyond what I could achieve with boo or ANTLR.
There’s a couple of M DSL’s that appeared last week – MUrl, a DSL for restful clients and MService – not great examples in my opinion, but interesting none the less.
Azure Fabric Controller.
IronRuby 0.3 Released.
ASP.Net MVC 1.0 release – has asp.net webforms just become a legacy platform?
Self Tracking Entities in Entity Framework.
Fluent interfaces - are they potentially doing more harm then good, is there a well understood sweet spot between discoverability and efficiency / being concise. What do we think of things like the NUnitEx project?

Also we only had 3 people including myself turn up last time, a new low (a flight of the conchords band meeting basically ;o) – but one of the participants had driven all the way from Hamilton just to attend, so well done there!

..which also means I’ll be recycling many of the previous topics we didn’t cover last week as well:

Relational data features to come to Azure (via TDS no less, so nhibernate/lightspeed/EF etc. on Azure are a reality) and REST to go away. My first thought is will it scale, or do we still need to fall back to an EAV approach when dealing with huge datasets?
T4 Support in Mono. I’d also be interested in talking about who’s using T4 and for what.
Moq 3.0 has gone RTM.
DevHawk has an interesting series of articles on writing an IronPython debugger.
Ivan Porto Carrero is making good progress on his IronRuby MVC implementation.
Gem/package/dependency management tools for .Net emerging and existing/dead – ngems, rocks, horn, nmaven, NPanday, Byldan or even just using ruby gems itself… What’s going on in this space, how it might improve .Net adoption (and some of the thoughts people have blogged about the subject after the alt.net conf).
Casey Charlton is starting to blog about a sample DDD application, the DDD Parcel Service, which should be an interesting exercise to follow.
Dr Dobb’s Journal (DDJ) is dead – though I haven’t bought an issue in a few years, and really they were too expensive in NZ currency terms for what little you got, it seems a little sad… are there any print magazines left for the developer?
Roy Osherove is surveying to see what unit testing / mocking frameworks people are using – hopefully this will get enough responses to be somewhat balanced.
Recent Alt.net Conference in Seattle … what went on, some interesting thoughts from people like Scott Hanselman, Ayende, Simone and an interview on the alt.net podcast with Scott Bellware.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 26th March 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

Architecture Chat This Thursday

Alex Henderson — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:32:52 GMT

Architecture chat this Thursday, 26th February, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Auckland.

I’m short on topic ideas, mostly because I’ve been playing catch-up over the last couple of weeks, but I have a few small things that piqued my interest:

New Zealand copyright blackout - implications for development community. and 92a delayed.
StyleCop for ReSharper.
Language-agnostic code contracts (here and here).
The state of caching in the Entity Framework, and approaches to implementing caching in an ORM / rolling your own 2nd level cache implementation.
Optional and named parameters in C# 4.0 and some interesting observations on versioning issues with the current implementation.
Prism 2.0 is now live.
The bad apple effect - anyone seen this in wild recently?
MonoDevelop 2.0 – the first beta has been released… Some interesting things like support for the Vala language, new native C# editor implementation and an eagerness to bring monodevelop to windows.
Quince - Interesting UX Patterns explorer from Infragistics.

I’ll see you all this Thursday, and remember new comers are always welcome – just drop me an email/comment to let us know your coming along so we can track you down.

Note: Write-ups of previous meetings and additional info i.e. directions to the location, are available on the wiki.

Architecture Chat #41

Alex Henderson — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:48:39 GMT

Last architecture chat was a fairly small turnout, and as such we ended up having a fairly focused conversation mostly around NHibernate, here’s what we talked about on the day:

The rise of interest in NHibernate recently.
The NHibernate 3rd party tooling market and side projects.

NHibernate Profiler.
NHibernate Search, NHibernate Burrow etc. in NHibernate Contrib.
Fluent NHibernate.
ActiveWriter.
Linq for NHibernate and just how complete it is…
NHibernate Query Generator.

What tooling / projects for NHibernate could increase developer velocity.
NHibernate discussion around a number of points:

Single table / class table inheritance.
Can you mix both the types of inheritance together.
Can a discriminator cross multiple columns.
Discriminator mapping over a range i.e. CreatedDate < 2003, instantiate a GoldCustomer, otherwise if CreatedDate >= 2003 instantiate a premium custom (change in customer structuring post 2003).
Ability to support stored procedures in NHibernate where parameters are not in the expected order, or if multiple stored proc calls are required to persist an entity and possible work-arounds.
Custom column types, limitations etc.

General ORM questions

Does the ORM with the best tooling with out long-term for .Net?

Obfuscation and License Products.

Why is it such a problematic space…
The issues people have.
The pain of rolling your own.
References to the post from Ayende on his problems with XHEO.

Refund policies of software product companies (especially components/libraries for developers).

Why companies get stubborn about refunds.
Just how many refund requests companies get (consensus – not that many).
The associated cost of bad service with considering reactions being represented in public (blogs, twitter etc.).
The point at which most companies should offer a refund, and should they offer it before the customer asks ex. if they can not resolve their issues in a timely manor (or at all) before eroding the money earned from the sale in the first place.

Factor – briefly talked about it before we finished up, I think I’m going to give up trying to get other people interested in it :) postfix notation and stacks just seems to conjure up thoughts of assembler in most developers minds.

Next chat is this Thursday, 26th of February at 11:30am.

Architecture Chat Postponed Till Next Week

Alex Henderson — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:39:13 GMT

Just a quick Architecture Chat update – due to a family bereavement that occurred this week I’m postponing the Architecture Chat till next Thursday (26th February).

I’ll post the write-up for the last chat soon, as well as a follow up post of possible topics for the next chat – sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused, hope to see you all next week!

Architecture Chat This Thursday

Alex Henderson — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:22:36 GMT

Architecture chat this Thursday, 5th February, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Auckland.

Some of the topics I raised at the last chat we skipped over.. so I might resurrect them again this week:

Factor, 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 the cost of NNPP?
Elitism in software development.
Aspect Inheritance… Aspect inheritance in PostSharp 1.5 CTP 2 and Deeper Into Aspect Inheritance.
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.

And of course some new topics / things that have piqued my interest over the last few weeks:

Release Candidate of ASP.Net MVC released – plus a quick refresh
Microsoft web platform installer 1.0
Structured data searching – what impacts could this shift have on web development?
Lightspeed 2.2 Released, with some interesting new features.
Future queries in NHibernate.
Abstracting away cloud service platforms (such as in this post on abstracting away azure).

I’ll see you all this Thursday, and remember new comers are always welcome – just drop me an email/comment to let us know your coming along so we can track you down.

Note: Write-ups of previous meetings and additional info i.e. directions to the location, are available on the wiki.

Architecture Chat #40

Alex Henderson — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:02:09 GMT

This is the write-up for last weeks Architecture Chat #40 – you may be wondering what happened to #39 from last year – unfortunately the paper I noted all the details down onto mysteriously disappeared during the run up to xmas, we covered a few interesting things in that last session - one conversation I do recall that was focused on monitoring windows services - dealing with falling over (including fail over), ways to engineer windows services so they are both robust and easy to debug/diagnose, and the effect of using MSMQ over say a roll-your-own file or database solution for queued data/messages. Hopefully at some point I’ll track down the notes so I can post the entire write up with all the details.

In the mean time here is the write up for #40…

For our first meeting of the year we didn’t talk about much that was on the list of topics, as everyone was just catching up on the general state of the industry - we also saw some old faces, including one who hadn’t been to a chat for more then a year!

Here’s what we talked about:

Fruit packing machines, and the differences between rapid prototyping of machines (i.e. multiple months) verse rapid prototyping of software (a couple of weeks or less). Also talked about the cost/current state of rapid prototyping machines and devices that can build themselves.
Talked about the current financial state – if anyone is seeing a slowdown (the answer in short – yes) but most people were having a busy January, with little idea of what would happen six months from now.
Talked about the 1400 (though it’s eventually going to be something like 5000, according to the press) Microsoft Staff lay-off's that happened last Thursday and/or were about to take place the following day – and did some musing around what departments were being laid off, why, and if any of our NZ exports into Microsoft would be affected (The Entity Framework and SharePoint teams seemed fairly unscathed).
Talked briefly about increased intensity in recruiters cold calling – and the interesting phenomenon of them making explicit enquiries into how business is going, if you think it’s going to get worse over the coming months etc. It seems like recruiters have less idea what’s going on then developers in the NZ IT Industry.
Talked about the interesting observation that a number of BA’s and PM’s are rejoining the industry after diverging into other careers such as real estate – and the obvious warnings about checking their recent employment histories, as they are inevitably out of touch with the world of technology.
Briefly discussed thoughts on Probative programming, and the fact it seems more of a pipe dream then something that could be a reality… being force to write tests before code can compile seems a sure fire way to encourage the wrong kind of testing practices, and certainly would result in tests being written “just for the sake of coverage”.
Discussed Lean – most of us agreed strongly with the ideas of reducing wastage, delaying to the last responsible moment to commit to specific design/implementation etc.. But we did wonder if identifying the last responsible moment is the kind of thing that’s only identifiable once you’ve passed it without prior experience. I think as our understanding of lean grows and we start dabbling in implementing it ourselves a more well-informed follow-up conversation or two will follow.
Talked about form-letter document generation, and issues of current tools/solutions – this also branched off into general word/pdf/rich document generation…some points around this were:
- Current products are clunky or just too expensive (product opportunities exist for smart people).
- Using the Word COM API vs. directly manipulating the XML in the DOCX package (which is of course just a zip file).
- Use of 3rd part libraries for document generation (such as Aspose.Words).
- Replacing content in PDF’s, different between text and binary PDF’s.
- The interesting note that for generating rich documents (like product catalogues) the automation API for PowerPoint is a lot easier to use then that of Word (for client apps).

The next chat will be on the 5th of February – Which is the day before Waitangi day – so if anyone can’t make it drop me an email and I’ll look at rescheduling it to another day that suits everyone.

Architecture Survey

Alex Henderson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:14:31 GMT

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!

Architecture Chat This Thursday

Alex Henderson — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:03:42 GMT

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:

Probative Programming.
Lean Software development growing in support, and the Agile community black lash.
Factor, 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 the cost of NNPP?
Elitism in software development.
Aspect Inheritance… Aspect inheritance in PostSharp 1.5 CTP 2 and 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.

Architecture Chat Tomorrow

Alex Henderson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:36:36 GMT

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 sugestions:

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).

Architecture Chat #37 & #38

Alex Henderson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:26:19 GMT

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 Wesne r 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

Alex Henderson — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:37:37 GMT

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.

WCF OAuth Provider Example

Alex Henderson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:16:14 GMT

Cibrax (Pablo M Cibrano) - has supplied an example WCF Provider sample, including a generic Request Interceptor suitable for OAuth enabling your own RESTful WCF services.

The code is available in these two new projects (as part of the DevDefined.OAuth library).

The implementation has been covered on his blog here in a couple of posts:

Thanks for the contribution Cibrax - much appreciated!

Take a look at the devdefined-tools site for more details on this library, and for those who are curious this code is all released under the MIT license.

Have your say...

Alex Henderson — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:31:36 GMT

Just a quick reminder, as I had a brief call with Paul Lo (from Microsoft) this morning and they haven't really got enough attendees in Auckland (come on Auckland, when will we shake off our developer apathy from the last couple of years?!)

More details here

There is swag too (but that's not a good reason to attend of course).

I'm going to be at Session 6 (11:00am onwards) so hopefully I'll see some of you there.

Architecture chat tomorrow (Thursday)

Alex Henderson — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:57:10 GMT

Architecture chat tomorrow folks (6^th November) 11:30am at Garrisons in Sylvia Park.

Here's some possible suggestions for topics (if we run out of anything else to talk about) that have caught my eye over the last week or so:

PDC Has been and gone - plenty to talk about there!
Crack.Net - interesting tool for taking a look at the internals of an executing Winforms or WPF application (and allowing you to make on the fly changes with IronPython...).
Chess - Ability to reproduce heisenbugs in concurrent programs - Also got a mention on hanselminutes #136.
New DevLabs site/portal for projects like Pex, Chess and no doubt some more soon.
The new .Net logo - what do we think?
Windows 7 - First look at the UI...
Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 - First CTP is available.
More info on VSTS 2010 features came out at PDC. A good overview is here.
Windows Azure - microsoft cloud computing platform.
MS Surface SDK now open (well sort of, if you weren't at the PDC session you'll need to spend around $13,500 US to get a development table, which gives you 5 seats for the SDK). Tables are now available to everyone though. .Net Rocks show #389 also had a good talk on Surface development in general.
"Geneva" Claims Based Accesss Platform. Interesting logical next steps after Cardspace and in light of the other Authentication / Authorization standards out there.
The Castle project is splitting into more of an umbrella foundation (ah la Apache foundation). You complained about no V1, now your going to get 20 V1's ;o) - One of the positive outputs of this is that some of the smaller projects will now have leaders and a clear roadmap, rather than just organically growing with patches and immediate needs of the committers.
Visual State Manager for WPF (well an early peek at least).
NHibernate Profiler - something every NHibernate developer needs at some point (and developed by Ayende).
Linq to Sql possibly slated for retirement? JD also has a write-up.
Mozilla Prism (formally known as WebRunner) - let's you run your web app as an "application" (i.e. similar experience to Air, but without proprietry technologies) - this could provide some interesting opportunities when developing an ajax-only application (i.e. nothing between the <body></body> tags).
Interesting Opinionated ASP.Net MVC post from Jeremy Miller - I think what's worth taking from this is that MVC is something you need to spend a little time on to "make your own" rather then just using what's in the box.

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.

Architecture Chat #36

Alex Henderson — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:18:13 GMT

Talked about Venture Capital including Incubators like the Ice House & E-Centre ... organisations such as AintoG (and a brief comment on how small Auckland is, because everyone at the table had bumped into at least one of the guys from AintoG at some point), the Ice House pitch competition and VC climate in NZ and around the world with the current financial situation.

We talked a bit about WPF composability and run time decoration/behaviour extensions (also applies to Web as well) i.e. how do you not only replace or introduce new parts to your application but allow plugin/module/extension developers to adorn and extend existing components of your application (and in such a way to multiple extensions/decorations can be applied to a single component at the same time)... AOP for UI?

Ajax-only applications and the issues involved with unit testing them compared to traditional applications - the pain of regressions when you don't have enough coverage at the integration level and where bugs tend to crop up when you have nothing between your <body></body> tags, plus a little disucssion around using 3rd party JS control libraries such as extjs.

The lack of transparency for initiatives like Oslo compared to the other MS projects like MVC, DLR that feel a lot more open. A number of guys were interested in seeing just what "D" looks/smells like though.

How to learn WPF, and useful resources including using Safari Books online (which I'm going to sign up to this month to give it a try, Keith raves about it :)

A brief whine about DevExpress components (bad documentation, poor performance of controls such as their winforms tree component etc.) - and how with the advent of WPF it's often easier to develop your own WPF controls in-house rather then purchase the equivalent online, and the discussion around how building complex controls would never have been attempted with WinForms in house due to complexity.

The trend of ASP.Net MVC to look a little more like Monorail with every release.

Routing woes (in both Monorail and ASP.Net MVC) and lack of Area support in ASP.Net MVC.

Preliminary builds i.e. check in, say to a private branch, it's merged with trunk, private branch builds on build server, if it passes then the merged changes are applied to trunk (to avoid developers breaking trunk, and allowing for more frequent check-ins) and various approaches that could be used to prevent or lessen the chance of breaking the trunk build (also known as gated check in in TFS 2010).

SVN vs. GIT - the noticeable increase in GIT take-up and mindshare, the lack of mature gui tools, and how/if you could move BA's and designers over to using a tool like GIT and some thoughts around shelving.

Architecture Chat Tomorrow (Thursday)

Alex Henderson — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:55:44 GMT

The fortnightly Architecture chat is tomorrow (23^rd October) - 11:30am at Garrisons in Sylvia Park.

This week I'm going to leave it very open - some quick thoughts on possible things we could talk about include:

Silverlight 2 RTM released.
ASP.Net MVC Beta Released.
Building design/graphing/modelling tools with WPF and competing technologies.
The current financial situation/outlook and it's effect on Start-ups, SaaS etc. - which ideas have merit, what untapped markets offer revenue potentials and the harsher crtierias being applied to new ideas (ie. ability to provide imediate cost savings).

Moving to HyperV

Alex Henderson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:12:15 GMT

I decided recently to upgrade a couple of commodity hardware staging boxes that were pushed to capacity (and had no viable upgrade path) which I use for hosting Virtual Machines - after a bit of umming and erring on what would be cost effective I ended up opting for 2 x the following kit:

Q9550 Processor (2.83ghz, but they'll probably end up being clocked around 3ghz or a little above, once I'm happy the boxes are stable).
Asus P5Q-EM Motherboard (cheap, on-board graphics, supports 16gig DDR2)
G.SKILL 16gb DDR2 kit.

As drop-in replacements these worked out really cost-effective, with the ram being the most expensive part at just under $800 for the kit.

So for around $3K NZ I end up with 32gig of ram and 8 reasonably fast cores - not bad, plenty of bang for buck compared to picking up an equivalent server-spec hardware - and I can avoid the more expensive FB-DIMM (which would have worked out at least $3K for the RAM alone).

I decided to go with HyperV on these new machines, replacing my existing VMWare Server setup... It's actually been reasonably painless to port my the various machines across, once I got a handle on a few little gotchas:

So for Windows 2K3 virtual servers I've had to:

Uninstall the VMWare tools (via add/remove programs).
Uninstall the VMWare video driver (from the device manager).
Run the VMWare cleanup utility (I had to do this on a few machines to clean up a "VMWare memory service" that was failing to start after moving the machine to HyperV) - you can grab the tool from the bottom of this KB article for cleaning them, which works on VM's as well as hosts... in one case I also had to do some registry spelunking to remove the errant service.
Install an IDE drive (doesn't matter what size, I just set it to the smallest possible value) in the VMWare server - see here for details - not doing this will result in a BSOD if your VMWare server is using virtual SCSI drives, like mine were.
Shutdown the Virtual machine.
Convert VMDK VMWare hard drives to VHD's using this tool (ignoring the IDE drives I added).
Create a new machine, add the drives back in (as IDE drives) in HyperV.
Boot it up.
Insert the Integration Services Disk (CTRL+I) - let it do it's thing, and reboot when prompted.
All done.

For the few Ubuntu & Debian virtual machines I just:

Uninstalled the VMWare tools, if they were installed (I don't always bother with Linux, most of the machines aren't disk or network intensive, so it never seems to make much difference).
Convert VMDK VMWare hard drives to VHD's using this tool.
Created a new machine, adding the drives back in (as IDE drives).
Removed the integrated network adaptor that's added by default and replaced it with the "Legacy network adaptor".
Boot it up, quickly hit "e" and the edit the grub boot line replacing "root=/dev/sda1" with "root=/dev/hda1".
At this point it should finish booting (otherwise it'll hang trying to boot and eventually dump you into an (initramfs) prompt).
Log in, locate "menu.lst" (normally in /boot/grub/) and change references to /dev/sda1 to /dev/hda1, save and reboot (so the change of hard drive for the root filesystem is persisted).
Optionally install the Linux integration components, though it takes some trial and error to get this working (I'm still fiddling with this a bit when I can be bothered - once working that should allow the virtual machine to stop using the legacy network adaptor and provide improved disk I/O & Network performance).

And for the Windows server 2008 virtual machines I skipped the addition of an extra virtual IDE drive prior to conversion, as it just seemed to work (i.e. no BSOD).

So far it's been reasonably painless process... the best part is I now have a plenty of room for some additional build servers to target my own open source projects, host some examples of RESTful/OAuth services etc.

Edit - Feb 1^st 2008: It should be noted I since moved over to using VMWare server version 2, because I found the performance of HyperV to be diabolical for CPU-intensive tasks i.e. the server would be utilising only about 10% of the available CPU resources when runing continuous integration builds, resulting in builds taking well over 30 minutes instead of the usual 2 or 3 - at the time I found a few other users who suffered from the same problems, but no solution.

At first I thought it might be a result of converting the VMWare machines to HyperV, but freshly paving new build servers didn't make any difference. Moving over to the VMWare server v2 yielded very high CPU utilization, with builds that used to take 3 minutes on my old build server, nowtaking less then a minute on the new host machine :)

My medium-term plan is to migrate over to ESXi, once I've sourced some Intel server gigabit NIC's, using iSCSI on my openfiler box for storage.

Architecture Chat #35

Alex Henderson — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:14:33 GMT

After a general catch-up on what everyone's doing and introductions from a graduate new comer (Nick Irvine) - we launched in talking about robotics including:

Automated Kiwifruit picking robots.
Fruit laser bar coding and it's lack of uptake so far.
The possibility of per-ordered fruit i.e. you identify how you want your fruit, and it's picked at the precise moment when it fits the consumers needs.
The user of heuristic markings for fingerprinting of individual fruit (ie. the Idea that nature, by design, provides unique identifier for each piece of fruit, or that we could mark a fruit for identification that wasn't detectable/displeasing to the human eye.
Smart cars, self navigating cars, convoy or drafting applications for self-navigating cars and how these systems would deal with disconnections or extraordinary circumstances.

As an offshoot of self driving cars peter talked a little bit about Scribe (or livescribe - pens that record what you write and say - in unison - and allow playback or online publishing ) - and the future of pen based capture devices and note taking ie. evernote etc.

We talked around Multi-dimensional separation of concerns, and the idea of having both distinct dimensions (that may not be based on a single physical AOP approach) and modules of concerns, and the challenges/opportunities/solutions these "hypermodules" could provide to every day business problems - this also hi lighted the pitfalls of existing AOP approaches which often let you assemble incompatible/incorrect sets of concerns, which modules could help prevent...

I talked briefly around REST and the concept of a generic RESTful application development platform that I've been prototyping lately (like dream, but a little more resource and query oriented, and of course with OAuth support OOTB) rather then re-purposing an MVC framework or using WCF (which also feels like a bad fit) or ADO.Net Data Services.

Last of all we talked about Mass Transit just as we were breaking up - Jamie noted he'd been working on a similar project (but for java?) while at Auckland Uni. Perhaps I'll have a more in-depth report on it next time as I'm currently experimenting with it at the moment when I get time.

Thanks all for coming - write-up's of the previous chats can be found on the wiki.

Upcoming Architecture Chat

Alex Henderson — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:44:12 GMT

Hi All,

The Architecture Chat is Tomorrow - or probably "today" by the time your read this - Thursday 9^th October, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park.

Some topics that have caught my eye since last time include:

VS 2010 previews/announcments and it's modelling focus, manual testing, test impact analysis etc. - I wonder what opportunities this opens up for 3rd party visual studio tool developers.
JQuery shipping with Visual Studio .Net (only interesting because of the political implications - at least for those of us doing Monorail development - but a very positive sign none the less).
Mono gets a spot at PDC 2008 -about time I say too, it's good to see Mono getting the respect it deserves :)
NHibernate ProxyGenerators 1.0.0 Beta Released - great for those dealing with medium trust (see the intro for details).
Mass transit - definitely a "watch this space" project - they just hit milestone 0.4.
This post from hammet I found very interesting - Multi-dimensional separation of conerns - not something I've come across before , also check out HyperJ which hammet linked in his post. Food for thought.

If anyone else has some additional topics they'd like to discuss (or raise in absence) then just leave a comment on this post or send me an email.

See you all tomorrow. And remember newcomers are always welcome - see the Wiki for details on location and write-ups from previous sessions.

Moving to Orcon LLU - bumpy ride so far

Alex Henderson — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:27:33 GMT

As some may have noticed, this blog has been up and down like a yo-yo for the last two weeks.

The issues are caused by the fact that I host it off the home office connection - which by and large has been solid as a rock for the last 2 years, considering the amount of traffic the site gets is fairly minimal.

I opted to be one of the first guinea pigs to try the LLU (Local Loop Unbundled) offering from Orcon on the home office - alas it has not been a pain-free experience. I think google analytics tells the story best:

The connection got switched to LLU on around the 21st / 22nd of September - at which point my connection became a bit erratic - then it started working well enough - before going wonky again, and then completely falling over altogether on the following Saturday - at that point there was no sync.

Around Wednesday sync was restored, then Auth as well on thursday (so 5 days without any access) - the connection was looking ok at that point, but then a day or so later I started noticing that it was disconnecting every 5 to 10 minutes, then taking another 20 or so seconds to re-establish the connection, that's still happening as we speak - though they helpdesk has now raised the priority of the ticket to urgent in the hope that it might be resolved soon.

So far I've been a pretty disappointed with the alacrity of Orcons resolution process and the lack of direct contact that can be made with the LLU team. Normally with Orcon issues get logged with the help desk, a ticket is raised, and after a couple of days you end up dealing directly with corporate support (i.e. people who know what's wrong) - this process works well, and seems to filter out those people who actually have problems related to their own hardware or lack of knowledge.

Not so with LLU, you raise a ticket, but the LLU team can't be contacted directly, and as happened with me - I had no connectivity for 5 days, and also nothing done about the issue, it just sat in the queue - and the helpdesk did not seem to know any more about the issue then I did - I end up feeling bad having to pester the helpdesk every day to find out the progress on the issue - and they keep feeding me the same line of "the LLU tech will call you once the issue has started being worked on / resolved, I'm sure they'll do a card reset 1am tomorrow" - So far nobody from Orcon has ever called me (and I'm not actually sure they ever did do a card reset, but I suspect that's probably not the issue either).

Now I'm not blogging this out of Venom - I mean all said 'n done I am guinea pigging the service to some extent and I know if I'd just stuck with my previous telecom/Orcon mix none of this would have happened - and the @Orcon folks on twitter have offered to help push the ticket through quicker which was nice (incidentally ISP available on twitter == good) - but still I just hope the issue resolution process becomes a little more robust, and I thought this might be interesting to anyone else out there considering jumping on the LLU band wagon.

So my peeves so far are:

Orcon don't actually seem to be doing any follow-up - I had to do all the calling (and sitting in the queue) incidentally, 3pm is the perfect time to call their helpdesk, it's never busy.
The LLU team can't be contacted - that bugs me - pestering the help desk is counter-productive for days on end, when the issue is sitting with the LLU team. Being able to check the ticket status (with notes etc.) on-line would be have been nice as well (and saved some phone calls).
The helpdesk doesn't seem to even know when the LLU team will look at an issue. I got the distinct feeling the help desk guys knew as little as I did.
No weekend support - I lost connectivity early Saturday, but the LLU team doesn't work on the weekend (or so the helpdesk told me) - this sucks - telecom have engineers working weekends, especially as Orcon are responsible for phone issues as well, I could end up with no internet or voice for an entire weekend - something I've always found Telecom very quick to respond to. I would hope this only applies to home customers!

Hopefully these (and the technical issues I'm having) are all just teething problems and will go away as the LLU roll out continues - in the mean time forgive this blog for being partially unavailable, and my apathy in not bothering to move the site to dedicated hosting (which I do plan to do sometime this year, probably along with a change in blogging software - but I'm too busy with other things at the moment).

Arhictecture Chat #34

Alex Henderson — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:21:14 GMT

We talked about a couple of announcments, including the Prism V2 Drop 1, and it's multi-targeting support for Silverlight/WPF (Something we've talked about for a while since WPF & WPF/E first emerged) - we did cover some of the other announcments in this post as well.

After that we ended up with quite a general discussion on what makes adopting unit testing (and test driven) practices difficult and how mocking/stubbing/AAA etc. fits in. Interesting side-topics included the idea of teaching test driven development as the very first part of a first-year programming paper at university, behaviour driven development / specs etc.

We had another new comer this week - Guy - who gave us some perspective on how shops still focusing on C/C++ work - as always it's great to have newcomers coming along and contributing to the conversation.

Guy was Albany based, which raised the question again of if we need to have the odd Architecture chat over on the shore - my only concern is that we'd probably loose half of our existing attendees, so unless I got interest for a good 4 or 5 people on the shore It's probably not worth bothering with - and we'd need a location that's not too noisy (we abandoned our original location in Ellerslie for that very reason).

Apologies for the late post - I have been experiencing a lot of issues since moving to Orcons LLU (that'll teach me for hosting this blog and wiki on-site :)

Write-ups of previous Architecture Chats can be found on the wiki here.