That's right, it's time for another Architecture chat
Tomorrow

So as I mentioned last week - The Architecture
chat is being held this thursday, 11:30am at Sylvia Park in
Auckland (at
Garrisons), all are welcome and encouraged to come along and
share your views.

Some topics / announcements that have taken my eye over the last
3 weeks which might make good discussion fodder:

• VS 2008 RTM released to MSDN Subscribers.
  
• Visual
  Studio 2008 SDK with the new isolated/integrated
  shell support (offers some interesting opportunities for
  start-ups and unique product ideas)
  
• Parallel
  FX CTP released (with the associated details on the
  Parallel Computing Developer Center on MSDN)
  
• Microsoft MVC preview release slated for later
  this week.  The routing engine is nice.
  
• The Silverlight version shift from 1.1 to 2.0 - all sorts of good stuff announced
  (extensible control framework, 2 way data binding, and more
  than one layout container for starts - Microsoft people must've
  been eavesdropping on the previous architecture chats!)
  
• The Oslo
  initiative from Microsoft... Not so much an announcement as a
  hint/warning of things to come ;o)
  
  
• The Empower
  enrollment site is finally back up after being down for a
  month (for any of you budding start-ups out there).
  
  

And some conversational topics related to what I've been working
on lately...

• Agile model driven development and
  just how can you combine model driven architecture (MDA) with
  test driven development and code-level refactoring.
  
• Writing parsers using F#,
  leveraging pattern matching & Active Patterns - and integrating with other languages like
  C#.
  
• Visual DSL's - the good and the bad, and at what point does it become
  justifiable to roll your own for specific business needs?
  

If anyone has any topic suggestions either leave a comment or
email/IM me (IM details are on the left, in the "Who am I?"
section).



See you all tomorrow!



Edit: and as a late edition, I've also had a play/look into the
very recently released Volta if anyone is interested -
if you've got the time before xmas, I'd definitely suggest doing
their quick start
tutorial - interesting.