Architecture Chat

So we had a reasonable turnout today, with 9 people.

First up for discussion was the move from Microsoft to assist with the development of Moonlight - which is making silver light an even more compelling proposition then it was before...

There was a brief talk about WPF component suites ... some of the more win forms focused of the group are looking for an easier migration path from Winforms to WPF lead by a full featured control suite...  A few of us observed that Telerik are planning to release a WPF suite of controls later on this year, and of course they already have RadControls
for Silverlight available now.  DevExpress are also planning to release WPF controls "some time" this year, though not much information is available on just what makes up a "control suite" for WPF, considering the power provided just through the great data binding experience, simple controls like lists and the native 3D support.

Following that we had a rather rambling conversation sparked off by Alex J buying an iMac for his mum, and my desire for an entirely modal windows experience for my grandmother - or at least something that stopped windows from being able to completely occlude each other (which can cause all sorts of confusion when people associate a window "disappearing" with an action having taken place, like an email being sent).

Peter mentioned a project (which I didn't quite catch the name of) which creates a "modal" almost terminal-like experience for windows, which sounds like it could be interesting... I'm thinking perhaps I need to write myself a entirely modal shell for windows... maybe a task for a full-screen WPF app ;o)

That lead on to a conversation about undo and document change tracking, concluding in a few thoughts - we covered a random assortment of topics including MOSS 2007, WebDav and the poor uptake/usage of shadow copy some of the "thoughts" included:

• New versions of documents shouldn't be able to overwrite old documents, period, bake in at the OS level.
• There needs to be a change to the usability of undo/redo so that you can move backwards and forwards through change history using a slider or some kind of similar time line experience.
• Previous text can be copied and then the slider dragged back to the "current state" to paste (With no way of interacting with the previous state, to avoid accidentally loosing the current state).

After that we branched out into talking about Load balancing, Amazon E2 i.e. the Elastic cloud, Peter hadn't heard about  Grasshopper but seemed pretty excited by the thought of converting .Net applications to run on J2EE (and as such, commodity hardware) - though Gareth mentioned it wasn't all that cheap, so you probably need to avoid having to pay a few windows server licenses to balance to books.

Data Layer Componentization and the concept of a DataServer also got a mention, a long with some discussion around the lack of an off the shelf product which solves some of the "tough" problems with implementing highly scalable and distributed data platforms ah la things like BigTable and similar map-reduce style data storage concepts.  I wonder if Pile can offer us anything in this space as well?

Last of all Alex J briefly asked about mixed-mode authentication for IIS - as it happens Ayende recently posted about this, with the gritty details of getting it to work.

And I think that's about enough from me... also don't forgot we have 2 user groups next week (Tuesday in Ellerslie, Wednesday in Auckland Central), details are below.

Next Week : User Group Meetings

Ellerslie

A lap around Visual Studio 2008 & A lap around C# 3.0

11/09/2007 (Tuesday) Gathering at 5:45, starting at 6:00

A lap around Visual Studio 2008
Presented by Darryl Burling
Explore all the new Visual Studio 2008 features, from language enhancements; improved designers; Web and smart-client development tools; to Visual Studio Team System, a suite of software life cycle management tools poised to transform how you deliver software for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web.

A lap around C# 3.0
Presented by Alex James Explore quickly the new features of C# 3.0, including things like LINQ, Lambda Expressions, Anonymous Types etc.

Catering: Pizza & Drinks
Door Charge: Free
Parking: Free, just park in Olympic Software's car park.

Venue

Olympic Software
10 Cawley St
Ellerslie,
Auckland

Map To Venue

Auckland CBD

A lap around Visual Studio 2008

12/09/2007 (Wednesday) Gathering at 5:45, starting at 6:00

A lap around Visual Studio 2008
Presented by Darryl Burling
Explore all the new Visual Studio 2008 features, from language enhancements; improved designers; Web and smart-client development tools; to Visual Studio Team System, a suite of software life cycle management tools poised to transform how you deliver software for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web.

Catering: Pizza & Drinks
Door Charge: Free

Venue

Microsoft
Level 5,
22 Viaduct Harbour Avenue,
Auckland

Map To Venue