A review of the Software Architects conference held October 2012 in London.

Recently our business implemented an eCommerce website www.hospitalpjs.com.  The promotional strategy used social media to promote people to the web site.  This generated a significantly higher volume of traffic than initially thought. We ran a load test to see how we performed and the results were shocking. Have a look at the issue's we are faced with, using Dot Net Nuke Content Management system and an online store full of large pictures.

Recent upgrades to out automated software build and deploy process has help streamline our processes, speed it up. We also significantly reduce the size of the support folder containing source code, software installations and support documents. It was well worth re-factoring the processes, to apply what we had learnt over the last year in the software industry.

For the second time our company source control just stopped working with event log errors breaking every code checkin. Productivity declined rapidly and we started to loose patience with the the supplier

We were faced with a tough set of choices

1. stop using source control?
2. migrate to another source control system?
3. or debug the software?

Take some lessons we learnt from this experience.

Lessons learnt when creating an application that uses .net 4, WPF and SSRS local report viewer to generate 2800+ reports in a batch job. Issues faced with reporting the job progress to the users when long running UI components require threads.

A year into using the CodeSmith CSLA templates and those templates are shaping up very nicely. The CSLA framework represents the Jenasys Design's underlying code base for software we produce for our clients.  The quality has increased, the volume of code we managed has decreased and overall stress levels have reduced. We present our favorite features, improvements over previous code and how we used CodeSmith Projects in live business applications.

Lessons learnt after reviewing unit test failures when upgrading from CSLAContrib to CodeSmith code. In this case we have migrated from CSLA 3.0x to 3.8.x and moved from private member backing to the CSLA PropertyInfo backing. Simple Business Rules unit tests failed, reinforcing the value of unit tests. An explanation of the importance of RegisterProperty configuration.

This is the first public blog entry for Jenasys Design. We have been trialing Blogs on our internal Intranet for a few months.  We want to start sharing more of our experiences with the software community to help reduce the industry time and costs. This is good for everyone. We hope you like what we have to say.  It's always interesting to hear from within the software industry, but more importantly its time to hear from our customers.