Now in order to appreciate the irony here you have to look at the WEI of my host system

The guest has a higher WEI than my host system! That’s pretty amazing actually, I could probably play a DirectX 9 game inside that virtual machine. Probably not Crysis but still, Half Life 2 or Team Fortress 2 would probably work.

Now you know why I don’t mind working inside a virtual machine.

The topics included:

• The Security Development Lifecycle
• Developer Productivity
• Code Quality
• Mocking frameworks
• ASP.NET MVC in a SharePoint context
• How to create a 64 bits developer environment in our environment
• TFS and/or Visual Studio in the cloud
• How do you convince DBA to allow generated SQL instead of stored procedures
• Creating WCAG 2.0 accessible sites with SharePoint and Silverlight
• Silverlight on mobile devices

None of the answers provided turn key solutions but most were either interesting insights or angles we had not yes considered.

If you get a chance to sit down with Scott then I suggest you take it. It will almost certainly be an interesting experience!

It was a nice ceremony. The woman officiating the ceremony had been to our house in order to prepare and she had turned all the information she had gotten into a moving story. After that we both said ‘I do‘ and exchanged our rings. So that officially makes us husband and wife!

Today we received a very nice and very large bouquet of flours from my co-workers. Thanks everybody!

• ADO.NET Core
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Sync Services
• LINQ2SQL

So how do you choose?

An architect typically defines (or borrows) principles and lets them guide him.  So lets give that a try.

From the ivory tower…

In our global reference architecture there is a principle that can get us started:

Apply a technology only for its intended use!

The Application Architecture Guide can help us here as it defines various application archetypes and maps technologies to those archetypes. We can use these archetypes to classify the applications we build and maintain and then select (or reject) technologies based on those archetypes. As it turns out the applications we build mostly use these three archetypes:

• Web Application Archetype
• Service Application Archetype
• SharePoint LOB Application Archetype

That immediately eliminates ADO.NET Data Services and ADO.NET Sync Services since those technologies are primarily aimed at Rich Clients.

From the store…

Another principle that applies in this case is coming from our database administrators:

You must use stored procedures!

Since LINQ2SQL is not working well with stored procedures as well as its being superseded by ADO.NET Entity Framework. This means LINQ2SQL also has to go.

From the boss…

Now we’re left with ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Core. Both are good technologies to use for data access so which do we prefer? That brings us to the final principle for this case:

Use as little custom code as possible!

This makes us favor ADO.NET Entity Framework but with one caveat. If there is a performance bottle neck in the data access layer which makes it impossible to meet the performance requirements then the development team can use ADO.NET Core together with the EntLib data access block to get that extra bit of performance.

All for you

When you have a lot to choose from and a hard time choosing, try borrowing or defining some guiding principles. These can help you reduce the problem and simplify the decision process and as long as you apply them consistently they will make your work a little bit easier.

After having the problem explained to us, we tried to reduce costs on the proposed solution. It was going to be a completely custom-built solution involving some services, queues and a database. It was not looking too complicated but after trying to approach it from a couple of different angles we concluded that it was going to be hard to achieve significant savings on this design.

I started to reexamine the original business requirements and noticed that the problem could be approached from a totally different angle. What the customer wanted was to have  information gathered from various systems, transform that information in a particular manner en store the result in a file. That actually looks a lot like an ETL problem!

We consulted an ETL specialist and concluded:

• we could bring down the development costs from over 2,000 hours to well below 1,000 hours,
• a lot of the risks went away,
• there was going to be a lot less design and testing involved,
• the TCO also went down because this solutions requires a lot less server components.

All in all this new approach was going to save the customer literally tons of money while minimizing risks!

So next time somebody complains about a tender, take a long, hard look to see if you have the right tool for the job!

The Hollywood Walk of Fame

With our brains on different time zones we woke up early and decided to ‘carpe diem’. We started by going to Hollywood and have a look at the walk marathon of fame. This really surprised me but the starred sidewalk actually goes on for several miles…

We had breakfast in a small coffee shop and after that left for Griffith park. This is a huge park that contains the hill that has the Hollywood sign, the LA zoo and the Griffith observatory (amongst others). At the observatory you have can overlook most of LA (depending on the amount of smog).

After this we had a quick look at rodeo drive and passed on to have lunch. With our bellies full we decided to go to Venice beach. This proved to be quite an experience. There is a mile long boulevard that has lots of funny, interesting and strange things too look at. We watched a local basketball game and were entertained by some street artists.

We’re both wondering what this PDC will be about. Will there be revolutionary new announcements like last year or will it be ‘more of the same’? We both expect this year will not be as spectacular as last year was but we would love to be surprised.

To be continued…

• The mainline in version control has to done at all times
• Work has to be checked in before leaving the office

The second requirement conflicts with the first one which can cause a mainline to be broken for days or even weeks on end. Since we have to be able to deliver from the mainline it has to be functional, stable and optimized at all times.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using branches to isolate the development of features for a while now. The reason for this is pretty simple: It prevents features that are not yet done from entering the mainline. Thus minimizing risk of getting a broken mainline.

After reading a couple of articles from a series on Branch-Per-Feature Source Control by Derick Bailey (and I hope he continuous that series) I decided to take the plunge. One the systems I architect for had to do some serious refactoring in order to improve performance. Using branches to isolate those changes from the work being done on the mainline would minimize the risk of missing our deadline.

Recently Martin Fowler also wrote a piece about feature branches. He makes the point that when using feature branches you either get a dangerous merge at some point because somebody has to integrate a lot of changes or various branches start integrating without using the mainline (which he calls Promiscuous Integration). His preferred solution is putting more thought into the design in order to Branch By Abstraction. I agree that this is a good idea, I don’t think it solves my original problem.

What is your your opinion and/or experience on this topic?

Last year we were audited for CMMI level 3 and we received the certificate for that level. At the time I didn’t particularly care since I had other things to do but this morning I found two great articles by Tyner Blain on CMMI.

The first one (CMMI Levels explained) covers the basics and explains that having a CMMI level only means you have a some sort of process and depending on the level: are doing it (1), have written it down (2), have standardized it (3), are gathering statistics from it (4) or are improving upon it (5).

In second one (What CMMI Level should we use?) he illustrates that having a high CMMI level does not mean you can make a great product. It not even shows that you have a good process. It just shows that you have a process and how rigorously you are following it.

So should you care about CMMI? It depends on what you want to achieve. Do you want to measure the maturity of you current process? Then CMMI is just the thing. However if you want to improve on the existing one then you might want to look at RUP, SCRUM or Lean.

Whatever you do, don’t forget that the goal is not following the process but building great software.

At this point we think its a simple ACL problem so we add the NETWORK SERVICE account, the internet guest account (IUSR_<Host>) and the Launch IIS Process Account (IWAM_<Host>) thinking this will solve the problem. It did not.

After some hard thinking and serious googling we found KB896861 which describes this problem. With service pack 1 for Server 2003 (and SP2 for XP) a security feature was introduced that protects against attacks on your loopback device. Luckily for us the knowledge base article also lists two solutions. The first one is creating an exception for each host header you use and the second one disables the feature altogether. We opted for the former and the problem went away.

Including making a backup and uninstalling some programs that the installer did not like (Daemon Tools, VMWare, Virtual PC and the ATI display driver) the entire process took about three hours. Two of those were for the actual upgrade.

So after that long wait I wanted to see what I got so I rand the Windows Experience Index. With Vista I got a total of 5.9 with all the components being 5.9 and in Vista this was the absolute maximum. With Windows 7 the bar was raised to 7.9 so I was kind of curious what the bottleneck would be. Looks like the hard disk is the weakest link but I can live with that.

So far I’m pretty pleased with Windows 7. The user experience is pretty smooth and polished. Every program I’ve tried just works as it should. Currently I have only one real problem with Windows 7 and that is the way that Libraries work.

Libraries are meant to abstract away from the fact that files can be in several locations. You can add more locations with the library to expose all music for instance in one place.

The only problem with that is that the location has to be indexed.

This is a problem for me (and a host of other people) because all my media are on a NAS and cannot be indexed. Luckily I did find a way around that but that is kind of a hack. In my personal opinion Microsoft did not think this one all the way through and I’m hoping we’ll see some kind of patch for this in the future.

But like I said, this is my only problem with Win7 thus far. It is fast, smooth, polished and (mostly) a joy to work with.

Hasta la vista: Vista!

Project Kobe is a getting started resource kit for planning, architecting, and implementing Web 2.0 applications and services using the Microsoft Platform. This resource kit is targeted toward technology decision makers, hands-on solution architects, development managers, and developers in the aspiring web startups community and in enterprises and businesses looking to invest in new Web 2.0 application/service development projects.

I don’t know about you but to me this spells guidance and reference application. I therefore expect to find a high quality sample which will teach me the best way to architect, design and build a Web 2.0 application. It appears that is not the case since there is a lot of writing going on about the quality of Kobe.

This spiked my interest but when i tried to download it myself I found out that it got pulled because of ‘community feedback’.

Searching the MSDN site for Kobe also turned up a response from the team:

The sample app is not a "reference application" in the context of code completeness. A "sample app" and a "reference app" are quite different in the context of code completeness, and we do not claim Kobe to be a reference app in this context.

If you are as big as Microsoft is then everything you do is under close scrutiny. Also everything that gets released is looked at for guidance since you’re supposed to lead the field. This means the quality of everything that gets released has to be up to par or even exceptional.

Next time ask the community for feedback before it is released and not just throw it out there because whatever is wrong with it, the community will find it and write about it. The former is smart, cool and very Web 2.0 while the latter is just plain silly.

The software architect is responsible for the quality of a project.

That got me thinking… Am I? Well maybe I am. A lot of the things I talk and worry about on a project are actually quality indicators according to ISO 9126. Does this also mean I get to decide what the quality level should be? Not really. Let me try to clarify that with an analogy.

Compare the ordering of a custom piece of software to buying a car. What brand of car does the client buy? Since cars have implicit quality levels the selection of a brand tells you something about the quality the client is looking for. Does he buy a Fiat or a Ferrari? The answer of course is: It depends.

If the client only needs to get from A to B then any brand will do so he might just as well buy the cheapest. If he needs to do a endurance race like the 24 hours of Le Mans then it is more important what brand he selects because of those implicit quality levels.

So we need to find out about the needs of the client. Does the software only serve some short lived purpose or will it live for decades? Will it be used by a lot of users or just a few? Will it be used every day or sporadically? Is it ok if the software makes mistakes or should these be prevented at all costs? The answers to those questions give an indication to the kind of quality the client is looking for.

If that was it the world would still be simple and possibly quite unsafe. There are also rules for the minimum quality level a car is allowed to have. Those are mostly baked into law by countries. Renault can only sell cars in the Netherlands if these have at least a minimum level of security features and the government wants that certified by a trusted auditing body (NCAP does that for most Europe countries).

In our companies there are also laws to follow. Our DBAs want stored procedures, no triggers and we must not use the systems stored procedures (the stored procedures starting with sp_ in Microsoft SQL server). Our internal hosting provider tells us that our folder structure should look like this, we have log to the servers event log and must not use more than ye megabytes of memory or we will be shut down. To top it all off there are also other projects and existing systems to take into consideration. Somewhere between all those constraints is where we as software architects make the choices that satisfy all parties.

In order to be effective as a software architect you have to know what all the laws in your company are. You have to know what the client wants. You have to know what all the other projects need. And finally you have to tell everybody participating in the project which choices were made and remind them occasionally so they can keep those choices in mind while building.

Does this make the software architect responsible for the quality in a project? We may not always be responsible for all the constraints in place but we sure are responsible for creating a solution that satisfies all of them.

Take for example There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Solution. In it Randy Stafford describes that you as a Software Architects should strive to know the contextual sense in which you work. When you do this, the solutions you pick will be better.

Maybe less obvious are You’re Negotiating More Often Than You Think by Michal Nygard or Chances Are, You Biggest Problem Isn’t Technical by Mark Ramm which both really drive the point home that our industry is as much about people as it is about computers. While the point Udi Dahan makes in Stand Up! just makes you think about your non verbal communication.

This book is a pleasant read with a lot of useful little tidbits. Consider picking it up the next time you’re in the bookstore.

After buying the domain via blogger itself instead of going to my normal provider I was expecting all things to go smoothly but I was wrong. It turns out that there are a lot of things that can go very wrong this way. Researching my way through the detailed and very complete site of The Real Blogger Status I finally found my culprit and now my domain is working.

Thank you guys, you made my day.

My trusted 4Gb thumb drive can do the job but it needs to be bootable which is a breeze if you follow the instructions. Then I unpacked the ISO and copied all the files onto the drive and stuck it into the EEE PC. Booted from the thumb and started the setup.

It takes about 45 to 60 minutes to install while I watch Scott Hanselman do his MIX09 talk on ASP.NET MVC and NerdDinner.com (really worth watching). After this it tries to load for the first time and gives me a black screen. I have read about this before so I know that this is some kind of glitch. I have to press the power button to put the system to sleep and then press it again to wake it back up. Now I can create my account, enter the product key and select my wireless network. At this point the system starts finalizing and logs me in for the first time.

After a couple of minutes I am greeting by the logon sound and see my Windows 7 desktop for the first time. I’m actually pretty amazed to that its running Aero without installing any additional drivers!

After playing with it for a couple of hours I’m pretty pleased with the result. The performance is pretty good considering all the bells and whistles are on. I still need to get the Bluetooth connection with my N95 going but I’ll try that some other time.

How are your experiences with Windows 7?

I hope we will both learn from it.