Apologies for the late posting, there is in fact an Architecture Chat tomorrow, at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park (Thursday 26th March 2009).

Some topics that have interested me lately which we might want to discuss:

• Some M debates going on - Ayende has a interesting post "M is to DSL as Drag & Drop is to programming" and there's also James Clark has an interesting post on Getting involved with M.  If nothing else It doesn't seem like the entire M story has revealed itself yet (but where have we heard that line before?) and we're plagued with examples that aren't really solving business problems or demonstrating technical beyond what I could achieve with boo or ANTLR.
• There's a couple of M DSL's that appeared last week - MUrl, a DSL for restful clients and MService - not great examples in my opinion, but interesting none the less.
• Azure Fabric Controller.
• IronRuby 0.3 Released.
• ASP.Net MVC 1.0 release - has asp.net webforms just become a legacy platform?
• Self Tracking Entities in Entity Framework.
• Fluent interfaces - are they potentially doing more harm then good, is there a well understood sweet spot between discoverability and efficiency / being concise. What do we think of things like the NUnitEx project?

Also we only had 3 people including myself turn up last time, a new low (a flight of the
conchords band meeting basically ;o) - but one of the participants had driven all the way from Hamilton just to attend, so well done there!

..which also means I'll be recycling many of the previous topics we didn't cover last week as well:

• Relational data features to come to Azure (via TDS no less, so nhibernate/lightspeed/EF etc. on Azure are a reality) and REST to go away. My first thought is will it scale, or do we still need to fall back to an EAV approach when dealing with huge datasets?
• T4 Support in Mono. I'd also be interested in talking about who's using T4 and for what.
• Moq 3.0 has gone RTM.
• DevHawk has an interesting series of articles on writing an IronPython debugger.
• Ivan Porto Carrero is making good progress on his IronRuby MVC implementation.
• Gem/package/dependency management tools for .Net emerging and existing/dead - ngems, rocks, horn, nmaven, NPanday, Byldan or even just using ruby gems itself...  What's going on in this space, how it might improve .Net adoption (and some of the thoughts people have blogged about the subject after the alt.net conf).
• Casey Charlton is starting to blog about a sample DDD application, the DDD Parcel Service, which should be an interesting exercise to follow.
• Dr Dobb's Journal (DDJ) is dead - though I haven't bought an issue in a few years, and really they were too expensive in NZ currency terms for what little you got, it seems a little sad... are there any print magazines left for the developer?
• Roy Osherove is surveying to see what unit testing / mocking frameworks people are using - hopefully this will get enough responses to be somewhat
  balanced.
• Recent Alt.net Conference in Seattle ... what went on, some interesting thoughts from people like Scott Hanselman, Ayende, Simone and an interview on the alt.net podcast with Scott Bellware.

We'll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 26th March 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.

Architecture chat this Thursday, 26th February, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Auckland.

I'm short on topic ideas, mostly because I've been playing catch-up over the last couple of weeks, but I have a few small things that piqued my interest:

• New Zealand copyright blackout - implications for development community. and 92a delayed.
• StyleCop for ReSharper.
• Language-agnostic code contracts (here and here).
• The state of caching in the Entity Framework, and approaches to implementing caching in an ORM / rolling your own 2nd level cache implementation.
• Optional and named parameters in C# 4.0 and some interesting observations on versioning issues with the current implementation.
• Prism 2.0 is now live.
• The bad apple effect - anyone seen this in wild recently?
• MonoDevelop 2.0 - the first beta has been released... Some interesting things like support for the Vala language, new native C# editor implementation and an eagerness to bring monodevelop to windows.
• Quince - Interesting UX Patterns explorer from Infragistics.

I'll see you all this Thursday, and remember new comers are always welcome - just drop me an email/comment to let us know your coming along so we can track you down.

Note: Write-ups of previous meetings and additional info i.e. directions to the location, are available on the wiki.

Last architecture chat was a fairly small turnout, and as such we ended up having a fairly focused conversation mostly around NHibernate, here's what we talked about on the day:

• The rise of interest in NHibernate recently.
• The NHibernate 3rd party tooling market and side projects.
• • NHibernate Profiler.
  • NHibernate Search, NHibernate Burrow etc. in NHibernate Contrib.
  • Fluent NHibernate.
  • ActiveWriter.
  • Linq for NHibernate and just how complete it is...
  • NHibernate Query Generator.
  
  
  
  
• What tooling / projects for NHibernate could increase developer velocity.
• NHibernate discussion around a number of points:
• • Single table / class table inheritance.
  • Can you mix both the types of inheritance together.
  • Can a discriminator cross multiple columns.
  • Discriminator mapping over a range i.e. CreatedDate < 2003, instantiate="" a="" goldcustomer,="" otherwise="" if="" createddate ="">= 2003 instantiate a premium custom (change in customer structuring post 2003).
  • Ability to support stored procedures in NHibernate where parameters are not in the expected order, or if multiple stored proc calls are required to persist an entity and possible work-arounds.
  • Custom column types, limitations etc.
  
  
  
  
• General ORM questions
• • Does the ORM with the best tooling with out long-term for .Net?
  
  
  
  
• Obfuscation and License Products.
• • Why is it such a problematic space...
  • The issues people have.
  • The pain of rolling your own.
  • References to the post from Ayende on his problems with XHEO.
  
  
  
  
• Refund policies of software product companies (especially components/libraries for developers).
• • Why companies get stubborn about refunds.
  • Just how many refund requests companies get (consensus - not that many).
  • The associated cost of bad service with considering reactions being represented in public (blogs, twitter etc.).
  • The point at which most companies should offer a refund, and should they offer it before the customer asks ex. if they can not resolve their issues in a timely manor (or at all) before eroding the money earned from the sale in the first place.
  
  
  
  
• Factor - briefly talked about it before we finished up, I think I'm going to give up trying to get other people interested in it :) postfix notation and stacks just seems to conjure up thoughts of assembler in most developers minds.

Next chat is this Thursday, 26th of February at 11:30am.

Just a quick Architecture Chat update - due to a family bereavement that occurred this week I'm postponing the Architecture Chat till next Thursday (26th February).

I'll post the write-up for the last chat soon, as well as a follow up post of possible topics for the next chat - sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused, hope to see you all next week!

Architecture chat this Thursday, 5th February, 11:30am, Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Auckland.

Some of the topics I raised at the last chat we skipped over.. so I might resurrect them again this week:

• Factor, Forth and stack based languages in general.
• Net negative producing programmers.  NNPP.  Do we need barriers to entry into this
  profession, or some tools that can be used to persuade people to
  leave?  And what's the cost of NNPP?
• Elitism in software development.
• Aspect Inheritance... Aspect inheritance in PostSharp 1.5 CTP 2 and Deeper Into Aspect Inheritance.
• What was good/bad about last year (both in the chat, NZ dev community and development space in general) and predictions for this year.
• Traditional training for developers - do developers still attend training courses in NZ, where, what's the value etc.

And of course some new topics / things that have piqued my interest over the last few weeks:

• Release Candidate of ASP.Net MVC released - plus a quick refresh
• Microsoft web platform installer 1.0
• Structured data searching - what impacts could this shift have on web development?
• Lightspeed 2.2 Released, with some interesting new features.
• Future queries in NHibernate.
• Abstracting away cloud service platforms (such as in this post on abstracting away azure).

I'll see you all this Thursday, and remember new comers are always welcome - just drop me an email/comment to let us know your coming along so we can track you down.

Note: Write-ups of previous meetings and additional info i.e. directions to the location, are available on the wiki.