not so trivial .net

Leveling Up & Leveling Out: Assessing Your Team's Skills

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:04:00 -0600

Building strong teams has always been important to me. Over the years I’ve had successes and failures and spent a lot of time reflecting on the ins and outs of attracting, motivating, and growing talented developers. Major influences in my thinking have come from Joel Spolsky (Smart and Gets Things Done) and George Leonard (Mastery), Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All The Rules), and most recently Andy Hunt (Pragmatic Thinking & Learning).

In Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, Andy Hunt provides an overview of the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. The Dreyfus model is a cross disciplinary study of technical people and their skill levels. The results of the study call out specific skill levels and identify the characteristics of people at each level. I’ve listed some highlights below and bolded the characteristic that I think best exemplifies someone at a particular level:

Novice – “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

rigid adherence to rules
no discretional judgment
does not feel or accept responsibility for outcomes

Advanced Beginner – “I’m ready for my next task.”

lacks perception of big picture or larger context is seen as irrelevant,
all situations are treated with equal priority.
still does not feel responsible for outcomes
rules can be applied situationally

Competent – “I’ll have it done by the end of the day.”

still follows rules but begins to encounter and cope with crowding and conflicts (multiple activities, information, rules)
begins to explore the reasoning behind rules
sees actions as part of larger, long term goals
forms deliberate, organized plans
feeling of responsibility begins to arise from active decision making

According to the Dreyfus study, most people don’t get beyond Competent at most skills. There’s just no need or not enough challenge in a particular activity once our goals are met. To go beyond this level requires dedication and concerted effort to get better. In other words, it’s time to go pro!

Proficient - “The XYZ pattern can solve that problem perfectly.”

can distinguish important elements of a situation and ignore irrelevant details
can learn from the experience of others (e.g. case studies)
uses pattern recognition and past experience to identify a problem and maxims (as opposed to rules) to solve them
intuition begins to take over for rules

Expert (aka Master or Wizard) - “Did you need anything else?”

no longer reliant upon rules, pattern recognition and maxims are baked-in
can formulate possible outcomes and future visions of what is possible
can very quickly establish an intuitive grasp the situation and solve problems seemingly without effort

I’ve quickly come to love this model for its clarity. It cleanly describes the increasing scope of awareness and how experience gets baked into our consciousness. It provides a discrete set of criteria upon which to assess the current skill set of our teams and more importantly, it’s actionable. We can plot the next steps to our team improve and grow.

If you’re involved in decisions related to team management it behooves you to take a moment to asses your team members and build a quick skill level inventory based on the criteria above. Based on that inventory you can begin taking action. Stay tuned for part 2 where I will share some thoughts on optimizing the team lineup.

St. Louis Day of .NET 2009 open for registration!

Clint Edmonson — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:16:00 -0600

The organizers have announced that registration is officially open for this year’s highly anticipated St. Louis Day of .NET conference and there’s a special surprise – it’s two days! That’s right - two full days of technical content. The the highlights are listed below and you can get all the details and sign up here: http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/.

Please join us for this awesome event and pass the word along to your friends and coworkers as well.

Architect Bookshelf: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:51:00 -0600

Architecting Applications for the Enterprise by Dino Esposito & Andrea Saltarello

If you’re an .NET developer looking to get a better understanding of software architecture you’re in luck. This book offers a superb hands-on introduction to all the aspects of application architecture you’ll need. You’ll get an introduction to software architecture as a discipline as well as an overview of UML and a review of commonly accepted industry design principles. From there Dino and Andrea dive right into the heart of application architecture – designing your data, business, service, and presentation layers.

There’s a TON of guidance on the options available for each of your layers and when to choose which. The greatest strength of this book - it's all proven out in a real world working example that you can download and try out. I can’t underscore how important this book is to the working developer. I applaud this book for it’s greatness and curse Dino and Andrea for writing the book I wanted to write. Highly recommended!

Check out my Architect Bookshelf compilation for more recommendations for software architects.

We Care Ministries: A Coders 4 Charities Post-Mortem

Clint Edmonson — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:23:00 -0600

Last weekend after participating as a volunteer in the Coders 4 Charities event, I tweeted the following: “+1 to Sitefinity from Telerik - made it extremely easy to build our site this weekend at #C4C. Combines the best from Rails and SharePoint.” Several people have contacted me to elaborate on this statement so I thought I’d write up a quick post-mortem of the project I worked on and provide some reasons behind my statement.

We Care Ministries is a charity dedicated to providing spiritual, emotional and other needs to the elderly, the handicapped, and the needy. Their founders, Reverend Gary Barnes and his wife Carol Barnes, RN, petitioned the Coders 4 Charities committee to have their web site redone. Their original site was already online but had never completed. The donation button was broken and there was no systematic way for volunteers to offer their time and services. Our goal was to give the site a face lift so it would look more modern and appealing and address the broken or missing features. Shown below are before and after pictures of the site.

What Went Right

Great teams do great work. I definitely want to call out my teammates: Chandra Yarlagadda, Cody Inman, and James Peckham, Ross Fuhlman. Everyone on the team showed up ready and eager to work and got along great. Each person brought great ideas to the table, took ownership of their tasks, and drove them to completion without any setbacks. Special mention for Cody - he was definitely the Chuck Norris of design and CSS styling.

Good customer and expectation management. Cody had met with our charity founders prior to the C4C weekend kickoff and had come up with a list of requirements. After initial review and discussion internally, we found that we needed clarification on quite a few points. When we met with Gary and Carol for the first time, we discovered that what makes them a great team were their different perspectives on their charity mission. This was confusing at first because we were having a tough time getting a coherent set of marching orders that we could execute on. It took us several rounds of discussion to determine how they’ve partitioned their responsibilities and put together a site design that met both their needs. After a couple of design iterations we arrived at a wireframe design of the new site that they were happy with. However, knew there was a high probability of change after the event was over so we wanted to make sure that we provided them with a solution that was flexible enough to change and grow with their charity. This leads me to the next item…

Picked the right tool for the right job. Having attended last year’s C4C event, I knew that teams would struggle to complete their projects under a 48 hour deadline. Successful teams had leveraged an existing platform rather than writing their application from scratch. Coming into the event, I knew this would be an early decision point in our project and I had two solutions in mind: SharePoint and BlogEngine.NET. Both were readily available and very customizable. SharePoint offered a great option for a content heavy site and BlogEngine.NET offered a good starting point for a site that might require some custom coded workflow and data storage. It turned out that we needed a solution that offered both: end-user content management and custom coding to accept volunteers electronically. Cody Inman suggested Telerik’s Sitefinity, a product he had used in the past with success so we all decided to check it out. We immediately encountered a small hiccup - not a single one if us could get the developer trial installed successfully using the packaged installer. We ended up downloading a zip file containing a blank Sitefinity starter web site, loaded it directly into Visual Studio 2008, and were off and running. After that we all gave Sitefinity the thumbs up and began digging into our tasks.

Sitefinity turned out to be a great accelerator for us. It’s drag & drop content management features allowed us to build out the structure of the site very quickly and provided the flexibility for our customer to change any and all of the content after delivery. With regard to custom development, all we needed to do was create asp.net usercontrols and drop them into the site. Sitefinity detected them automatically and added them to its screen layout toolbox palette. For our project we created just one user control that hosted a form to allow volunteers to submit their contact information. We dropped it onto the Volunteer page using Sitefinity’s content management tools. It couldn’t have been any easier. Sitefinity also includes a simple database driven list engine which we leveraged to store volunteer information. The list engine is primitive in that it stores just one big string for each item but that was enough for our needs. If we had needed more complex data storage, we could’ve just added our own tables in the Sitefinity database (SQL Server Express, btw) and written our own database handling code. Sitefinity was a pleasant surprise and met our needs perfectly. So there you have it: we got SharePoint like content management and database driven list management and a very simple, easy to learn programming model much like a framework such as Rails. (Note: I don’t want to mislead anyone. Sitefinity does NOT provide the same programming capabilities as Rails, just a straight forward development paradigm that you can learn in less than one day). If you build custom sites I suggest you check out Sitefinity. It just might help you accelerate development on your projects as well.

PayPal integration was a breeze. The two most important requirements were accepting volunteers and donations. Luckily, We Care Ministries already had a PayPal account and we were able use PayPal’s tools to set up a donation link with no coding whatsoever. We simply needed to embed a URL link containing the their appropriate account information into the site. Couldn’t have been any easier.

What Went Wrong

No source control or build management. We knew we would need to produce a single deployable site by the end of the weekend and discussed source control and configuration management early on Friday evening. Due to the lack of resources we were reluctant to set up a source repository and perform a full software engineering build cycle. As a result, we struggled throughout the weekend trying to integrate and redistribute all our changes. We had at least one occasion were some work was overwritten while copying between machines and had to be redone. Our final solution was to just integrate everything onto a USB memory stick and run the final “build” directly from it. Less than ideal but we were pressed for time. The proper approach would have been to set up a dedicated stand alone “build” machine and have each team member integrate their work onto it and then copy back the entire project back to their local machine before beginning the next task.

Not enough time. Let’s face it – 48 hours to build a fully functioning web site is just not enough time. We iterated through several site designs through Saturday afternoon before settling on a winner. We were able to complete all the interactive elements and programming but getting the site’s look and feel flushed out and the CSS built was too time consuming. Hats off to Cody Inman for putting in a herculean effort. He carried the bulk of our design load and was working right up until the bell to try to get the site completed. The final result demo’d well but there were still some kinks to work out.

We didn’t go live. The weekend would have been a home run for us if we had been able to go live with the site by Sunday evening. Alas, the old site was hosted on Lunix servers and with all the development work we had to do, we simply did not have enough time to find an alternate hosting provider running windows servers and get DNS name resolution rerouted. Major bummer for us and hopefully better pre-event planning will help us get there next year.

All in all, both the Coders 4 Charities weekend our project were a success. The new and improved should be going live within the next week or so at www.wecareministries.org. I hope this short post-mortem provides a glimpse into what it was like to participate at C4C and will serve as a record of lessons learned that we can apply next year to make the event even better.

Coders 4 Charities 2009 - Event Report

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:18:00 -0600

Back to back events this month and I’ve got another great report for you.

The Kansas City .NET User Group held its 2^nd annual Coders 4 Charities event this past weekend. The volunteer driven event paired teams of web developers, designers and analysts with representatives from local charities to receive "extreme makeovers" of web sites or full online applications for their use in just 48 hours. In total there were 8 local Kansas City charities seeking assistance and 35 volunteers from the KC metropolitan area who participated. The charities involved spanned a wide range of concerns from church ministries to crime prevention to job clubs.

The event kicked off on Friday, April 24^th with a dinner and introductions between the charities and volunteers. The first evening was spent reviewing existing applications and requirements and choosing strategies and technologies for the makeovers with the doors closing at 10:30 pm. The doors opened again on Saturday at 7:00 am and teams eagerly attacked their charity projects until well into the night with the doors closing once more at 10:30 pm. Sunday was crunch time with all the teams hammering out their final features as the 5:00 pm deadline approached. At the conclusion, each team was given 15 minutes to present their solution to the group and receive their well deserved applause for their efforts.

Highlights

Incredible teamwork and cooperation. Teams came together very quickly and delivered under pressure. The level of professionalism and dedication to the projects was inspiring. There was a Rock Band room set up for blowing off steam but, by and large, it was quiet most of the weekend. There simply wasn’t time to relax when the stakes were so high for the charities. I was extremely proud of everyone who participated. It was an event like no other I’ve attended this year.

Great 2^nd year effort. With 8 charities and 35 volunteers, there was excellent growth from the inaugural event last year (5 charities, 25 volunteers). It’s expected that at least 7 of the 8 projects will go live within the next few weeks.

More designers added to the mix. Last year’s teams struggled due to the lack of design skills so this year there was a concerted effort to recruit more designers. This helped balance the workload among teams and the end results were substantially more usable and complete than last year. Developer art is NEVER pretty and CSS does not come naturally to most C# and VB developers.

Fantastic facilities. Centriq Training Center of Kansas City provided first class facilities. Each team was given their own training room complete with whiteboards and plenty of room to spread out and get to work. Sponsors came through big time with fully catered meals and there was ample food for everyone throughout the weekend.

This was an incredibly successful event by all measures and I want to especially call out Doug Butscher, Lee Brandt, and Jeff Julian for organizing and leading this great effort.

More Photos

More photos can be seen on the C4C flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/groups/coders4charities/

St. Louis MOSS Camp 2009 - Event Report

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:48:00 -0600

The St. Louis SharePoint User Group held its 2^nd annual MOSS Camp this past Saturday, April 18th from 8 am – 5 pm at the New Horizons Computer Learning Center in St. Louis. The free event provided 20 sessions along 3 tracks: Development, Infrastructure, and Governance/Business. The goal of the event was to support the local St. Louis SharePoint ecosystem by providing free community driven training and raising awareness of local partners that offer SharePoint services. The emphasis was on working examples, process, and demonstration of real world solutions.

Tweets were flying throughout the event. The speakers, organizers, and attendees did a great job keeping the energy and excitement level high all day and the experience was extended out to participants as far away as Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia. At last count, there were over 520 tweets tagged with #stlmosscamp during the event. Having competition with a sister event in Atlanta running on the same day was a great motivator for everyone involved. A capture of the tweets from both the events as they ran simultaneously can be found here:

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/2009-04-18-DoubleFeed.php

Highlights

Top notch speakers. We had great speakers travel in from as far as Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota. Our speakers included INETA speakers and leaders, MPVs, and book authors. You can find out more about them here.

Standing room only. With 12 sponsors, 20 sessions, 18 speakers, and over 80 attendees there was noticeable growth over last year’s event. Sessions were packed and we had to grab every chair we could find throughout the building. More growth is expected for next year and planning for more space is already under way.

Competition creates buzz. The Atlanta MOSS Camp was being run on the same day. This created a great sense of excitement and competition as the leaders and speakers at each event attempted to out-do each other for buzz via social media channels. Virtual highlights of each session were tweeted as they happened in both cities. The energy level was WAY up and the tweets were flying!

I want to be sure to call out the organizers for putting together a great event: Kurt Rolland, Matt Bremer, Todd Kitta, J.D. Wade, Daniel Gallant, and Joe Rhodes. A special thanks to T.C. Slater for hosting us at their excellent facilities.

More Photos

More photos of this awesome event can be found on my flickr stream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintedmonson/sets/72157617090603494/

ArcReady - Architecting for the Client Tier

Clint Edmonson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:08:00 -0600

Please join us for this quarter's ArcReady, where we will explore client development in anticipation of the upcoming releases of two exciting new client-side technologies: Windows 7 and Silverlight 3.

Architecting for the Client Tier

The client (or presentation) tier of our applications is taking on an increasingly important role. Users are expecting more compelling user interfaces, but they also want more functionality from their applications. In this ArcReady we examine how to design and deliver well architected client applications that will be easy to maintain and extend.

Session 1: Trends and Patterns on the Client Tier

In our first session we will take a vendor and platform neutral look at some of the trends and emerging technologies that can be used on the client tier. We will look at techniques like Mashups, technologies like Natural User Interfaces (NUI) and the increasing importance of the mobile platform. We will also look at some common patterns that can be used in the architecture of the client tier.

Session 2: Applying Microsoft Technology on the Client Tier

In our second session we will take some look at how we can use Microsoft technologies to create well architected and compelling client applications. We will look at technologies like Silverlight and WPF that can be used to create compelling clients. We will also look at technologies that can be used to make your applications more extensible for future development. We will also examine some architectural guidance developed by the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group.

Join me for this FREE event:

April 30, 2009 – Bloomington, MN – Register

May 14, 2009 – Overland Park, KS – Register

May 21, 2009 – St. Louis, MO - Register

Architect Bookshelf: Good to Great

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:12:00 -0600

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

This book cuts straight to the heart of good leadership within an organization. Collins takes a look at a dozen companies that have managed to build large scale sustainable businesses and provides insight into their executive strategies and cultures. The big lesson: hire smart, motivated people, explain the goals, and then reward behaviors that contribute to long term success. Sounds simple but there are many counter-intuitive findings and there are many bad attitudes and behaviors that need to be unlearned.

Of particular interest is a chapter entitled Technology Accelerators, in which he reveals the role technology (should) play in long-term business strategy. I found the chapter to be very relevant to software architecture. I encounter situations everyday where the lessons from this book can be applied. It’s a fast read with lots of great leadership stories.

Check out my Architect Bookshelf compilation for more recommendations for software architects.

MIX 09 Goodie Bag

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:50:16 -0600

I'm still catching my breath from being on the road the past few weeks. Hence the lack of new postings. In an effort to catch back up, I thought I'd highlight a few exciting announcements from last week’s MIX 09 conference:

Silverlight 3 Beta

Tons and tons of new stuff but the big story here is the ability for Silverlight applications to run outside the browser. By setting an attribute on your Silverlight object tag in the hosting page, users will be able to take a Silverlight 3 application in a page and run it offline from the desktop or start menu (works on PCs and Macs). The applications will literally launch from the temporary internet folder where they were downloaded. There's a new property and event into the application framework to detect if the computer is running on or offline. The Silverlight autoupdate facilities still work normally if the computer is online. They are tentatively calling these "lightweight data snacking applications". Also of note, there is a new SDK to enable Virtual Earth mapping from within Silveright applications.

Expression Blend 3 Beta

Two big features coming in Expression Blend. The first is an expanded library of prebuilt behaviors for wiring navigation to UI elements. Building the basic navigation pathways in an application will be as easy as clicking an element (tab, button, etc) and choosing the "Navigate to Page" behavior and selecting another page within the project. I predict that this will DRASTICALLY decrease the time to get your UI up and running.

And speaking of mock ups, there's a nifty new feature coming in the next beta of Blend 3 called SketchFlow. This is reminiscent of the ProtoXAML tool that's been floating around the net for a while. It sets the UI theme to what looks like a back-of-the-napkin style hand drawn user interface. The idea is to force your customer to review the application flow and not the pretty pixels. Combined with the new behaviors I mentioned above I expect this to dramatically accelerate the creation of prototypes and mock-ups. In addition to the look and feel, Sketchflow embeds a small utility into your Silverlight or WPF application that let's your end users see the full page/form structure of the application and mark up each screen with annotations that can be sent back to the development team for review.

Internet Explorer 8 RTM

This has been a long time coming and worth the wait I think. I’ve installed it on my machines and so far everything looks and works great. There are tons of new features. Web slices and accelerators are the head liners. Web slices let you take regions of a web page and host them on the toolbar in small drop down viewers. Convenient for quickly looking at information from a site such as current traffic conditions, weather, stock tickers, etc. Web accelerators let you highlight text on a page with the mouse and get a list of context sensitive actions such as Blog, Email, Search, or Map what you’ve highlighted. So far my favorites are the new find on page bar (ctrl-f) and the color coded tabs to let you know which tabs contain related pages. I do wish inactive tabs could be closed without activating them (ala Firefox).

Azure Services Platform

Two key announcements here: First, Azure will run .NET applications in full trust mode to allow support of native code and non-.NET languages via Fast CGI (PHP anyone?). Second, the recently announced SQL Server Data Services will support full relational database capabilities and will use the TDS wire protocol for speed and to allow developers to connect directly to their cloud databases from within Visual Studio Server Explorer. The first production release of Azure will drop by the end of this year.

Windows Web Application Gallery

This is a new hub that will host the installation bits of the most popular open source and community web applications that run on the Windows platform. Featured apps include DotNetNuke, Umbraco, BlogEngine.NET, WordPress, and Drupal.

ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) 1.0 Released

Yep, that’s right. The MVC framework is FINALLY released. Head on over here to learn more and download it.

Those are my highlights. You can see recordings of all the MIX sessions here. I encourage you to check them out, especially the keynote by Debra Adler on the second day. It’s an incredibly inspirational story of how one person can change the world. In Debra’s case, she rewrote the rules for prescription delivery and convinced a major industry pharmacy to be the instrument of change. Highly recommended viewing!

Friday Goodie Bag

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:28:00 -0600

Some cool things I’ve encountered over the past couple of weeks…

Code Contracts for .NET

This is a preview from the visual studio developer labs group that implements Design by Contract (DBC) principles as espoused by Bertrand Meyer in the Eiffel language. Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions. The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and invariant object states. The preview uses a small class framework and some compiler hooks to perform runtime and static compile time DBC rule checking. The preview will work with VS 2008 and the CTP of VS 2010. I’m a huge fan of DBC and from what’s said in the interview, it looks like DBC will be integrated into the 4.0 release of the .NET framework. Wohoo!

Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

Experts from more than 30 US and international cyber security organizations jointly released this consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime. Shockingly, most of these errors are not well understood by programmers; their avoidance is not widely taught by computer science programs; and their presence is frequently not tested by organizations developing software. Every member of your development staff needs to read this bulletin.

UI Design for Developers Video Series

Building an application with a good user experience is about more than pretty pixels and is every bit as important as the business logic in most applications. Here’s a link to some outstanding tutorials on the principles of graphic design produced by the Microsoft Platform & Tools Team. They’re short, very informative and cover the essential elements of graphic design.

Five Step UML: OOAD for Short Attention Spans

I’m a huge fan of UML and I was thrilled when we announced UML support in Visual Studio 2010. If you’d like to get a head start, this book excerpt will wet your appetite. FYI - I’m planning a series of screen casts that show the basics of OOAD using UML in VS 2010 and will highlight the architectures described in the recently updated Application Architecture Guide 2.0 book.

Modular Data Centers

This is just plain wild and for those of you who don’t think cloud computing is coming, think again. Data centers are becoming more and more modular and pluggable as the industry evolves towards a utility computing model (which I think is the right direction) and ALL the major players are banking on it. This article showcases one of the first offerings from HP.

ArcReady - Architecting for the Cloud

Clint Edmonson — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:41:00 -0600

For this quarter's ArcReady, we will explore a topic on everyone’s mind: Cloud computing.

Architecting for the Cloud

Several industry companies have announced cloud computing services. In October 2008 at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the next phase of our Software + Services vision: the Azure Services Platform. The Azure Services Platforms provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on premises environments or the internet.

Session 1: Cloud Services
In our first session we will explore the current state of cloud services. We will then look at how applications should be architected for the cloud and explore a reference application deployed on Windows Azure. We will also look at the services that can be built for on premise application, using .NET Services. We will also address some of the concerns that enterprises have about cloud services, such as regulatory and compliance issues.

Session 2: Mesh and Live Services
In our second session we will take a slightly different look at cloud based services by exploring Live Mesh and Live Services. Live Mesh is a data synchronization client that has a rich API to build applications on. Live services are a collection of APIs that can be used to create rich applications for your customers. Live Services are based on internet standard protocols and data formats.

Join me for this FREE event.

March 5, 2009 - St Louis, MO - Register
March 10, 2009 - Overland Park, KS - Register
March 25, 2009 - Bloomington, MN – Register

Coders 4 Charities 2009 – Register now and make a difference!

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:09:00 -0600

This coming spring, Doug Butscher and friends from the Kansas City .NET User Group will be hosting their second annual Coders 4 Charities event. This wonderful 3-day event, running from April 24th through 26th, pairs charities with local software designers and developers. Charities often do not have the funds to implement a new website or intranet or database solution. Software developers often do not volunteer for charities because their skills do not apply. This event is the perfect marriage of these two needs; software developers accepting the challenge by volunteering their time to help charities, who can better serve their community though the latest technology!

If you would like to be part of this special event, please visit http://coders4charities.org to learn more or email info@coders4charities.org to volunteer right away! Hope to see you there!

Architect Bookshelf: The Design of Sites

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:33:00 -0600

The Design of Sites – Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites by Van Duyne, Landay, and Hong

This book does for web design what the gang of four book did for object-oriented software development. It contains, quite simply, the best catalog of design patterns and paradigms ever published for building web sites with great user experiences. It begins with a survey of the different web site genres on the net and advice on how to design sites around these genres to hit your target audience. What follows are best practices for everything found on modern web sites: branding, navigation, accessibility, personalization/customization, browsing and searching, efficient shopping, and much more. It concludes with advice on how to tune the speed of your sites to ensure that users get a snappy response and want to come back for more. It contains 1000s of full color example screenshots illustrating the knowledge they are sharing. My only caution to you is that you be so inspired by this book, you will want to use ALL the patterns in every new site you build.

Check out the complete Architect Bookshelf series for more recommendations for software architects.

Friday Goodie Bag

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:11:35 -0600

I’ve run across a variety of really interesting things since the start of the new year. Enjoy!

Application Architecture Pocket Guides

After releasing the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 , the patterns & practices team delivered on feedback to produce smaller more tactical guides for their agile methodology as well as specific application archetypes described in the book. Here are the initial set of pocket guides:

· Agile Architecture Method Pocket Guide

· Web Application Architecture Pocket Guide

· Mobile Application Architecture Pocket Guide

· RIA Architecture Pocket Guide

· Rich Client Application Architecture Pocket Guide

· Service Architecture Pocket Guide

You can browse the index of Pocket Guides at the Pocket Guide Index page at our Application Architecture KB on CodePlex.

Detect duplicate C# code with Clone Detective for Visual Studio 2008

This is a killer add-in for Visual Studio that detects all that copy & paste coding your coworkers have been doing (‘cause of course you would never do that). Long live the DRY principle!

Windows 7 is GPS location aware

Here’s an example application with source code that shows how to tap into the Windows 7 Location Platform in combination with Virtual Earth to track movement. Very cool.

Windows 7 Secret Tips

A big list of some new hidden gems in Windows 7 that you wouldn’t find on your own. If you haven’t downloaded and tried out the Windows 7 beta on a VPC image at least, I highly recommend you give it a go. It’s getting rave reviews from the media.

Sharp Architecture

An attempt to build a Domain Driven Design architectural framework on top of the ASP.NET MVC framework and NHibernate. I haven’t looked at the code yet, but the idea sounds promising. We need a .NET on Rails framework.

nPlus1.org

A new is a site dedicated to helping Architects, aspiring Architects and Lead Developers learn, connect and contribute. On this site you’ll have access to great first party content written by some of the most skilled and experienced Architects working today. They’re looking for contributors, so if you’ve got something hot you’d like to share head on over and get it posted.

Scott McCloud: Presenting comics in a new (media) world

This video has nothing and everything to do with architecture. Scott highlights some of his brilliant observations about people, learning, and the direction of technology, communication, and comic books in this awesome TED talk.

I absolutely love his philosophy:

Learn from everyone

Follow no one

Watch for patterns

Work like hell

SOA principles, good - SOA products, bad

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:16:00 -0600

Last week, a noted analyst from the Burton Group wrote a blog posting declaring SOA dead. It's a flashy headline and she does have some interesting observations but fails to identify any lessons learned and actionable next steps. It's crucial analysis that I've come to expect from the Burton and Gartner groups but didn't see it there.

When it comes to analyzing technology trends, there are two adoption models that I look to: the technology adoption lifecycle (TAL) and the hype cycle (HC). Most consumable products entered into a market (e.g. walkmans, playstations, ipods) follow the TAL model where a product is introduced, hits a critical mass of consumers, and slowly sunsets to be replaced by a newer, more advanced technology. When it comes to consumables, we devour and move on. Conceptual ideas, trends and behaviors (e.g. word processing, object-oriented programming, social engineering), however, tend to follow the HC model more closely. With higher level concepts, our brains need to noodle on them - learn and improve and iterate, potentially through many TAL cycles if tools can help us. We slow down once we get to the point where we've improved our mental model and have achieved a higher level of understanding that is beneficial to our survival.

To me SOA is following a classic hype cycle. There was a period of intense interest and excitement and the promise of a new world order. Vendors swooped in and built (overly) complex solutions with impressive architectures to solve huge enterprisey IT needs and then wrapped a bunch of MBA technobabble around it and sold it to unspecting CIOs and CTOs. I mean, it DID look good on paper. The brochures had bullet points to cover all of our IT needs and wants. But what followed was a severe period of disappointment as the products failed to live up to their expectation. We learned a tremendous amount about why this happened which is why I believe we are very much into the Slope of Enlightment right now and heading towards a path of productivity and success.

My good friend, Denny Boynton has written a spectacular autopsy report on SOA's demise, what we learned from it, and where we're going from here. I highly recommend you check it out if you are involved in building enterprise software using web services at your company.