Good turn out at the last Architecture chat, including Guy, who hadn't been to one for over a year, and Murray, a new comer.

• Secunia Corporate Software Scanner - How to identify missing patches etc.
• Discussed the 97 things every software architect should know and Beautiful Architecture books - I'll bring them along next time if anyone wants to borrow them.
• Discussed Facebook's key/value database Cassandra.
• Discussed approaches for publishing and consuming RSS, talked about PubSub Hubbub.
• Discussed selecting technologies for building CRUD Apps, and what are good technologies for learning ORM.
• • Discussed NHibernate being the Swiss army knife, lots of features, interesting place to learn as you will become aware with almost every facet of ORM nomenclature etc.
  • • Discussed Summer of NHibernate series of screen casts / tutorials.
    
    
    
    
  • Discussed Entity Framework, Linq2Sql  and others including Lightspeed.
  • Discussed difference between highly opinionated vs. non-opinionated ORM's.
  
  
  
  
• Software Craftsmanship - sparked off by this article in the Herald - general consensus was we didn't agree at all with the article, and that there is an obvious disconnect between the view points of academia and practicing developers.
• • Discussed the ideas of Science based engineering rigueur
    improving software quality and stopping projects running over
    budget, and it's rather short-sighted view of how software
    defects originate / what contributes to overall "software
    quality".
  • Big discussion was around Software "engineering" - and
    how far removed from other engineering disciplines we are.
  • Discussed fact that most software development focused
    degrees in New Zealand don't qualify you to join IPENZ - and if we could,
    most of us wouldn't want to.
  • Discussed the laughable Idea of forcing developers to
    study something every year to "stay current" - everyone
    agreed if you're not learning something every day as a developer, your
    doing it wrong.
  
  
  
  
• Service Buses & IoC Containers (the conversation got a bit mixed up between these two) - things we discussed were:
• • When to adopt, i.e. how big does a project have to be, what problems should you be facing.
  • Quite a bit of discussion around the misnomer of "how big" being a reason to adopt any technology, rather then how complex, good fit etc.
  • Discussed the dangers of adopting technology and practices prematurely.
  • Examples of .Net service bus:
  • • Mass Transit.
    • NServiceBus.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  
• Discussed the .Net Mailing List - Josh didn't know what it was, which in some way reflects that it's not longer promoted any more, discussed it succumbing to a slow death, how stack overflow affected question traffic etc. - FYI You can still subscribe to the dot.net.nz mailing lists here.
• Expressed annoyance that dot.net.nz no longer works after the "upgrade" to sharepoint, need the www. prefix.
• Wordpress twitter-like themes/plugins, such as the prologue / P2 theme.
• Pomodoro timers, including tomatoes, footballs, iphone apps and even *gasp horror* on-screen timers.

Some Possible Topics:

• HawkCodeBox - interesting DLR syntax highlighting text box.
• Sustainability verses Maintainability?
• Oslo team merging with Data Programmability Team.
• Simpler Transactions - which is really part of a larger topic, of "abusing using".  Though something I do on occasion, is it really a good idea? (I link to Phil's post because there's a good discussion on this point in the comments).
• Moonlight 2.0 goes beta.
• Tokyo Cabinet,Tokyo Tyrant and Tokyo Dystopia.  There's a .net implementation of the Tyrant wire protocol here.  Just starting to experiment with these..
• How to get the maximum performance out of your Plinq query.
• Fundamentalist Functional Programming.
• Quantity is not a measure of quality.
• Writing great unit tests - best and worst practices.
• The application and application services in silverlight 3.
• What do you do about inaccurate data?
• Arrays of arrays... or, why language design is never easy.
• Government plans to filter the internet - now in official draft.
• Tips for rich client development.
• How to be a software professional or craftsmen? (From David).

We'll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday  27th August - and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.

• Discussed the Pomodoro technique, David's been doing it from the start of the year (And finding it working well), Jamie started a couple of months ago, Josh started a couple of weeks ago.   Here's the book, and here's a whitepaper.
• New Zealand most peaceful country.
• Study identified software developers as generally being healthier then people working in other industries.
• Mylyn Eclipse Plugin.
• Discussed Pipe Networks cable, and there was some debate that it had been both started or stalled...  Some older Articles mentioning arriving at Austrlia, but not NZ.   There's also a wikipedia page for PIPE Networks.
• Discussed Distributed source control, including..
• • Git & Git Hub
  • Mecurial
  • GitSharp (and it's current status)
  • SVK - Josh is using it, but hardly anyone else knew of it's existence.  Here's the wikipedia article for it.
  
  
  
  
• Peter and Josh put out the call to arms - if you haven't tried a DVCS, now is the time!
• Java in legacy lockdown - we discussed the rate of change / addition of new features in Java vs. C# as flagship languages for their associated JVM & CLR.
• • Also discussed the current trend (At least on blogs / podcasts) to identify a Java v.Next, such as Scala.
  • Are java's days really numbered when being considered for developing green-fields apps (as a language, obviously not as a platform).
  
  
  
  
• Automapper - Updated group of experiences after using it in a recent project, generally nothing but good news to report.  Did discuss configuring mappings when using an IoC container or plugin model.
• Discussed Firefox weave.
• WPF Event Manager - we discussed why events in WPF are potentially quite slow.
• • Discussed the contrast between the winforms event model and WPF.
  • Also discussed how the windows forms event model was generally inefficient, and sometimes like sucking on a fire hose, relying on efficient handling to avoid issues.
  • Discussed how the Reactive / Rx Framework might help to simplify some of the problems we face today.
  • Discussed the Drop of the Rx (Linq To Events) In Silverlight 3 - see here for a great write up.
  
  
  
  
• Discussed the interesting timing of Lightspeeds announcement of SQL Function support and EF 4.0's ;o)
• Discussed open source projects
• • The statement "if I don't know about your project, that's your problem" - Amen, open source is not just about throwing code up on a public accessible repository.
  • Discussed community.
  • Discussed educational materials, having up to date examples etc.
  • Discussed the interesting mix of the hugely greatful and downright rude people you interact when running an open source project.
  • Distinguishing the scratch an itch i.e. casual open source project (normally written by just one person) verses the more organised attempts to create lasting pieces of software and community.
  
  
  
  
• Discussed Google Pub Sub.
• Peter raised the question of writing services that render directly to the client i.e. using RDP or VNC protocols - talked around if this was a good idea, the feeling that it was a little like x-windows 15+ years ago and that there are some devices or applications that might already be doing this using the VNC protocol (?).
• Discussed Internationalization & user customisation, including:
• • Implementing the functionality to allow users to create custom "languages" for products so they can change labels, terminology etc.
  • The costs of doing this at the start of a project vs. after shipping.
  • The impacts of certain languages on layout.
  • Why are our web dev frameworks not built with a degree of customisation out of the box i.e. moving the order of fields on screen, changing widths etc.
  
  
  
  
• Big vs2008 patch? (Not sure what this was, think Peter mentioned it being rolled out about a month ago).
• Entity Framework 4.0 features etc.
• Talked about the problem of too much content being delivered as video, including:
• • Not having the time to actually sit down and watch it - we need more transcripts and audio-only podcasts/content!
  • Main culprit was identified as Microsoft with Channel 9 & Mix, love the content - but there need's to be more pure Audio and transcripts.  Round the table most people had hours and hours of videos on their "must watch list" with more and more piling up every day.
  • Peter raised the question "what are you missing out on by not watching them" - none of use could really answer, gut feeling was probably not much if you keep an eye on twitter and blogs anyway.  Also it seems "big picture" stuff is often easy to grok when in video format (or at least more engaging), but video is too slow for anything else.
  
  
  
  
• Talked about Fibre round NZ - the ongoing "suck" that is Auckland's internet situation, and discussed what's involved what would be involved in setting up a wifi network for smaller NZ towns, to provide high speed access to fibre.
• Talked about NHibernate's codebase, why it is the way it is, and the advantages it brings i.e. ability to incorporate associated projects like shards, search etc.
• Microsoft futures video - discussed the video, it's "vision" of the future, and contrasted it to videos of the future from 10 years ago, how much was right, how much wasn't etc.
• Discussed the Hudson CI Server, and why a few of us like it More the CC.Net and Teamcity.
• GWT .. also mentioned some of the interesting bits in GWT 2.
• Discussed Eclipse vs. Mono Develop.  Was interesting how divided it was, some people really don't like Eclipse, others quite like it.  Also discussed the FUD around Eclipse vs. Mono Develop features.  Quite a few of us are using Eclipse for something i.e. PHP or Java development.
• We asked the question of "why?" Teleriks ASP.Net MVC Controls even exist.
• Discussed learning Groovy / Grails, and my dabbling with Groovy as a replacement for Jelly script in a project I was working on (though I think I mistakenly called it Jettyscript at the time - what a java noob I am! ;o)
• Discussed Suse Studio and Matt Richards Mass customisation etc. concepts - and how this could be applied to delivering custom applications.
• Polyphonic C# was discussed - including the concept of Chords - there was some debate around whether this project became part of c-omega as well (according to the web page, it did).
• Discussed Parallelization, PLinq etc.
• We discussed Rob Howard's "legacy" of the provider model, how it came about, community server, and why for many of us the provider model was either an underwhelming or unsuitable set of extension points.
• We talked about Horn, Josh mentioned my "Love letter to Horn" ;o) - and I talked a little about why I think this is important
• David started a discussion around Peer to Peer Banking, including this interesting article from Jason Kolb.
• Discussed if Shards exists for NHibernate.  Yes and no from the looks of it, it's in Contrib, but appears to be incomplete / non-functional.
• Discussed Caliburn WPF framework, and it's yield goodness.
• Discussed codeplex making their Wiki engine available.
• Talked about writing DSL's - including Boo, Oslo's M, and Jetbrains MPS.
  Contrasted differences, and why Boo can be quite appealing to developers compared to developing complex grammars for External DSL's.

There were lots more discussions, but I'm finding the conversations too interesting lately so I'm not taking as many notes as I should - If anyone recalls any other discussions / topics, just leave a comment on this post and I'll update it with the relevant details.

See you all next week!

So I decided to take the Horn project for a test drive after repaving a number of machines to Windows 7 RTM and waiting for things to install.

After Horn’s initial announcement this year I was excited, but it didn’t really do anything at that stage (and I didn’t have enough time to assist with the dev work / patches)... so I put it on the back burner.  But I found myself need to rebuild Rhino Tools, Castle and NHibernate today from trunk and thought I would give it a try.

At any rate, this is a post covering my “noob” observations as I walk through building horn, and then using horn to build Rhino Tools.

Background

As a little background, Horn was started by the Scotland ALT.Net group, it was kicked off on the scotaltdotnet google code project, and later moved to the hornget project, also on google code. The projects Initial mission statement is to “take control of building a common set of open source packages that are probably similar to many in the ALT.NET space” which I think it’s coming close to realising, but they also have a grander vision of “providing a standard mechanism for easy installation of .Net Packages” – something I definitely think .Net needs, and that dynamic languages lord over us currently with their gem’s and egg’s (and incidentally it is a much trickier problem to solve when you need to produce compiled assemblies, think signing vs. unsigned, ability to specify x86/x64/any platform flags and the way in which assembly versioning in .Net works).

Building Horn

Assuming you have the Subversion command line tools installed (or tortoise svn) - it’s pretty easy.  First off check out the horn trunk…

svn checkout http://hornget.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ hornget-read-only

Once all the files have been pulled down, you need to then build horn, using the following batch file:

cd hornget-read-onlysrc

hornbuild.bat

hornbuild.bat will execute Nant, and the total build takes about 15 to 20 seconds. It dumps the outputs into a buildnet-3.5debug folder, including horn.exe which is the command line client (Horn package manager).  I would assume as Horn matures we will see an installer / binary release on the horn website, which should hopefully make this even easier.

Running Horn

Now jump into the outputs directory...and run horn for the first time.

cd buildnet-3.5debug

horn

At which point you will be rewarded with the usage screen:

THE HORN PACKAGE MANAGER
http://code.google.com/p/hornget/
Usage : horn -install:

Options :

    -rebuildonly     Do not check for the latest source code.

    -version:        The specific version of a package.

Now it's just a matter of building the project you want.. in this case let's build rhino tools (which in turn will build Nhibernate and some parts of the castle project).  Might pay to go make a coffee at this point, as there's going to be a lot going on while you wait patiently.

horn -install:rhino

Oh, and expect to see a lot of this if your connection to the various project’s SVN repositories is slow..

Reading the current revision for castle

working......

working......

working......

working......

working......

working......

working......

working......

working......

working......

Also, as an aside - there's a cyclic relationship between Castle and NHibernate (i.e. Nhibernate relies on Castle Core & Dynamic Proxy, while Castle relies on NHibernate to build) - it's not truly cyclic as such though, just that if you attempt to build either set of project in it's entirety, you will need the outputs of the other. In Horn things like dynamic proxy are broken out into separate projects ie. "castle.tools" rather then just "castle" (though a castle package exists as well, which does build castle in it’s entirety).

It seems to handle this scenario well, and this was certainly a failing of most home-grown solutions I’ve put together over the years which relied on nant or msbuild files… Right, so after about 5 minutes, you should see the horn executable run to completion, like this:

BUILD SUCCEEDED
Total time: 46.6 seconds.
HORN HAS FINISHED INSTALLING rhino.

Note: The "BUILD SUCCEEDED" message is from rhino tools, which was the last project to be built, rather then telling us how long the process took in total.

Locating Outputs

At this point Horn has finished doing it's job, but... if you do a quick directory search, you probably won't find any output binaries. What gives? Well Horn in fact stores all it's files under a directory against the user's profile. So in the case of windows 7 / Vista, that means I can just change directory to find them:

c:devOtherOpenSourcehornget-read-onlysrcbuildnet-3.5debug>cd %USERPROFILE%.horn
C:Usersalex.horn>_

If we grab a quick directory listing... we can see there's a few folders in there.

C:Usersalex.horn>dir * /A

 Volume in drive C has no label.

 Volume Serial Number is 6AFA-976C
 Directory of C:Usersalex.horn
12/08/2009  09:39 p.m.    
          .

12/08/2009  09:39 p.m.              ..

12/08/2009  09:37 p.m.              .svn

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              buildengines

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              builders

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              esbs

10/08/2009  03:46 p.m.              frameworks

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              ioc

10/08/2009  03:46 p.m.              languages

10/08/2009  03:46 p.m.              loggers

10/08/2009  03:46 p.m.              mappers

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              mocks

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              orm

12/08/2009  09:45 p.m.              result

12/08/2009  09:37 p.m.                15 revision.horn

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              web

10/08/2009  03:47 p.m.              wpf

               1 File(s)             15 bytes

              16 Dir(s)  578,876,366,848 bytes free

Notice the .svn folder, the .horn directory is actually populated from this subversion repository, which stores all the package descriptions etc. (I’m not entirely clear on the terminology here, documentation is fairly sparse on the website – they’re almost more like package build scripts, because they’re a DSL outlining the steps required to build the outputs, required dependencies and so on).

The one folder not under version control is "result" - which is where our outputs are actually stored. So let's take a quick look...

C:Usersalex.horn>cd result
C:Usersalex.hornresult>dir

 Volume in drive C has no label.

 Volume Serial Number is 6AFA-976C
 Directory of C:Usersalex.hornresult
12/08/2009  09:45 p.m.    
          .

12/08/2009  09:45 p.m.              ..

10/08/2009  03:56 p.m.             1,997 ABC.hbm.xml

10/08/2009  03:48 p.m.           110,592 adodb.dll

10/08/2009  04:07 p.m.               568 AnotherBus.config

10/08/2009  03:48 p.m.            40,960 anrControls.Markdown.NET.dll

10/08/2009  03:58 p.m.           106,496 antlr.runtime.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.           116,736 Antlr3.Runtime.dll

10/08/2009  03:59 p.m.            40,960 Bamboo.Prevalence.dll

10/08/2009  03:59 p.m.             6,656 Bamboo.Prevalence.Util.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.            40,960 Boo.Lang.CodeDom.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.           753,664 Boo.Lang.Compiler.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.           118,784 Boo.Lang.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.            32,768 Boo.Lang.Extensions.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.            86,016 Boo.Lang.Interpreter.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.           425,984 Boo.Lang.Parser.dll

10/08/2009  03:48 p.m.            28,672 Boo.Lang.PatternMatching.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.            81,920 Boo.Lang.Useful.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.            32,768 Boo.Microsoft.Build.Tasks.dll

10/08/2009  04:01 p.m.            28,672 Boo.NAnt.Tasks.dll

10/08/2009  04:07 p.m.               393 BusOnTransactionalQueue.config

10/08/2009  04:07 p.m.               405 BusWithLogging.config

10/08/2009  03:48 p.m.            45,056 Cassini.dll

12/08/2009  09:43 p.m.           249,856 Castle.ActiveRecord.dll

12/08/2009  09:43 p.m.             6,656 Castle.ActiveRecord.Linq.dll

12/08/2009  09:43 p.m.            17,920 Castle.ActiveRecord.Linq.pdb

12/08/2009  09:43 p.m.             4,736 Castle.ActiveRecord.Linq.xml

12/08/2009  09:43 p.m.           960,000 Castle.ActiveRecord.pdb

10/08/2009  04:02 p.m.           543,085 Castle.ActiveRecord.XML

12/08/2009  09:42 p.m.            49,152 Castle.Components.Binder.dll

12/08/2009  09:42 p.m.           138,752 Castle.Components.Binder.pdb

12/08/2009  09:42 p.m.            17,275 Castle.Components.Binder.xml

                 ... And the list goes ...

             353 File(s)     67,002,734 bytes

               2 Dir(s)  578,875,887,616 bytes free

Not bad for what was effectively just a single command line.

Where to from here

I strongly suggest giving Horn a go – not just because it’s useful, but I think that it fills a real hole in the .Net developer open source space, removing one of the barriers to entry – making it easier for people to develop applications against the trunk, or a specific version, of many popular open source projects, will definitely drive up adoption of these projects.

It’s worth noting that currently “Horn” is considered a “developer-only” release at the moment, though I think it’s current state is useful enough to warrant giving it a try, and providing feedback to the Horn dev team etc. so umm… Check it out, if you haven’t already.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

• Hornget project.
• HORN development google group.
• Horn User FAQ.
• DSL DevCon Presentation on the Horn DSL.
• Craig Nicol’s blog (developer blog).
• Davetheninja.net’s blog (developer blog).
• Paul Cowan’s blog (developer blog).

Some Possible Topics:

• Lightspeed gets experimental support for CLR functions -> database functions in Linq.
• EF 4.0 database function support in Linq.
• Windows 7 RTM.
• Windows 7 upgrade chart madness.
• Cobol's 50th Anniversary.
• Default Templated Views in ASP.Net MVC 2.
• Conditions & Facts.
• C# 4's Dynamic In Mono.
• CSharp Sqlite.
• Open Source is not a Zero-sum game.
• Inside .NET Rx and IObservable/IObserver in the BCL (VS 2010).

We'll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 14th August 2009 - and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.