Architecture chat tomorrow (19th November 2008) 11:30am at Garrisons, Sylvia Park.

Topic light this week (mostly because I've been too busy to keep my eye on blogs/sites all that much).

Some quick thoughts for topics:

• The System.* vs Microsoft.* Namespaces discussion.
• BizSpark offering from Microsoft.
• The fallacy of IRepository...
• A field report of the Microsoft focus group I'm attending later today.
• The rinse-repeat loop of DI/IOC learning.
• The emerging market of personal data storage in the cloud with value-adds.

There are still a few things we never got round to talking about from the last couple of chats as well.

If anyone else has any suggestions feel free to leave a comment or message/email it to me directly, otherwise I'll see you all there tomorrow.

Links to write-ups for previous chats, and information on the location etc. can be found on the wiki.

Oh, and I'll write up the last chat later this evening as well.

Cibrax (Pablo M Cibrano) - has supplied an example WCF Provider sample, including a generic Request Interceptor suitable for OAuth enabling your own RESTful WCF services.

The code is available in these two new projects (as part of the DevDefined.OAuth library).

• DevDefined.OAuth.Wcf
• ExampleOAuthChanel

The implementation has been covered on his blog here in a couple of posts:

• OAuth Channel for WCF Restful Services.
• Using the WCF OAuth Channel with ADO.Net service.

Thanks for the contribution Cibrax - much appreciated!

Take a look at the devdefined-tools site for more details on this library, and for those who are curious this code is all released under the MIT license.

Just a quick reminder, as I had a brief call with Paul Lo (from Microsoft) this morning and they haven't really got enough attendees in Auckland (come on Auckland, when will we shake off our developer apathy from the last couple of years?!)

More details here

There is swag too (but that's not a good reason to attend of course).

I'm going to be at Session 6 (11:00am onwards) so hopefully I'll see some of you there.

Architecture chat tomorrow folks (6^th November) 11:30am at Garrisons in Sylvia Park.

Here's some possible suggestions for topics (if we run out of anything else to talk about) that have caught my eye over the last week or so:

• PDC Has been and gone - plenty to talk about there!
• Crack.Net - interesting tool for taking a look at the internals of an executing Winforms or WPF application (and allowing you to make on the fly changes with IronPython...).
• Chess - Ability to reproduce heisenbugs in concurrent programs - Also
  got a mention on hanselminutes #136.
• New DevLabs site/portal for projects like Pex, Chess and no doubt some more soon.
• The new .Net logo - what do we think?
• Windows 7 - First look at the UI...
• Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 - First CTP is available.
• More info on VSTS 2010 features came out at PDC.  A good overview is here.
• Windows Azure - microsoft cloud computing platform.
• MS Surface SDK now open (well sort of, if you weren't at the PDC session you'll need to spend around $13,500 US to get a development table, which gives you 5 seats for the SDK).
  • Tables are now available to everyone though.
  • .Net Rocks show #389 also had a good talk on Surface development in general.
  
  
  
  
• "Geneva" Claims Based Accesss Platform. Interesting logical next steps after Cardspace and in light of the other Authentication / Authorization standards out there.
• The Castle project is splitting into more of an umbrella foundation (ah la Apache foundation).  You complained about no V1, now your going to get 20 V1's ;o) - One of the positive outputs of this is that some of the smaller projects will now have leaders and a clear roadmap, rather than just organically growing with patches and immediate needs of the committers.
• Visual State Manager for WPF (well an early peek at least).
• NHibernate Profiler - something every NHibernate developer needs at some point (and developed by Ayende).
• Linq to Sql possibly slated for retirement? JD also has a write-up.
• Mozilla Prism (formally known as WebRunner) - let's you run your web app as an "application" (i.e. similar experience to Air, but without proprietry technologies) - this could provide some interesting opportunities when developing an ajax-only application (i.e. nothing between the  tags).
• Interesting href="http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2008/10/23/our-opinions-on-the-asp-net-mvc-introducing-the-thunderdome-principle.aspx%20">Opinionated ASP.Net MVC post from Jeremy Miller - I think what's worth taking from this is that MVC is something you need to spend a little time on to "make your own" rather then just using what's in the box.

If anyone else has any suggestions feel free to leave a comment or message/email it to me directly, otherwise I'll see you all there tomorrow.

Links to write-ups for previous chats, and information on the location etc. can be found on the wiki.

Talked about Venture Capital including Incubators like the Ice House & E-Centre ... organisations such as AintoG (and a brief comment on how small Auckland is, because everyone at the table had bumped into at least one of the guys from AintoG at some point), the Ice House pitch competition and VC climate in NZ and around the world with the current financial situation.

We talked a bit about WPF composability and run time decoration/behaviour extensions (also applies to Web as well) i.e. how do you not only replace or introduce new parts to your application but allow plugin/module/extension developers to adorn and extend existing components of your application (and in such a way to multiple extensions/decorations can be applied to a single component at the same time)... AOP for UI?

Ajax-only applications and the issues involved with unit testing them compared to traditional applications - the pain of regressions when you don't have enough coverage at the integration level and where bugs tend to crop up when you have nothing between your
tags, plus a little disucssion around using 3rd party JS control libraries such as extjs.

The lack of transparency for initiatives like Oslo compared to the other MS projects like MVC, DLR that feel a lot more open.  A number of guys were interested in seeing just what "D" looks/smells like though.

How to learn WPF, and useful resources including using Safari Books online (which I'm going to sign up to this month to give it a try, Keith raves about it :)

A brief whine about DevExpress components (bad documentation, poor performance of controls such as their winforms tree component etc.) - and how with the advent of WPF it's often easier to develop your own WPF controls in-house rather then purchase the equivalent online, and the discussion around how building complex controls would never have been attempted with WinForms in house due to complexity.

The trend of ASP.Net MVC to look a little more like Monorail with every release.

Routing woes (in both Monorail and ASP.Net MVC) and lack of Area support in ASP.Net MVC.

Preliminary builds i.e. check in, say to a private branch, it's merged with trunk, private branch builds on build server, if it passes then the merged changes are applied to trunk (to avoid developers breaking trunk, and allowing for more frequent check-ins) and various approaches that could be used to prevent or lessen the chance of breaking the trunk build (also known as gated check in in TFS 2010).

SVN vs. GIT - the noticeable increase in GIT take-up and mindshare, the lack of mature gui tools, and how/if you could move BA's and designers over to using a tool like GIT and some thoughts around shelving.