Yesterday afternoon I  presented a quick 20 minute presentation to the Enterprise Architect
user group - it was an interesting opportunity to talk with both an Enterprise Architect lead developer and analysts/BA's etc. who are using Enterprise Architect on a daily basis - there's nothing quite like doing something and then even more so presenting on what you've done to really firm up some conclusions / ideas around it (and as is often the case with me, spark 20 ideas for new products I could build to make it better/smarter).

For anyone who's interested here's the slide deck I presented - and also some links to things that were discussed:

• Enterprise Architect
• MDG Integration for Visual Studio .Net
• OCL (object constraint language) - we also discussed OCL tutorials,
  of which I've found this site to be useful in the past.

Thanks to catch for hosting the group and providing the video conferencing facilities to link
Auckland / Wellington (small tip, if you are presenting to two groups be sure to sit at the end of the table looking towards the camera, or your spend your whole time ping-ponging your head towards one group and the other ;) - and also thanks to everyone who came along and listened.

Also of interest was the discussion after the presentation around providing a number of example/sample MDA transformations through Sparx Systems New Zealand site - which should mean that before the end of the year you will be seeing both guidance and examples on developing MDA transformations targeting NHibernate, NHibernate search, ActiveRecord, Monorail and RhinoSecurity starting to emerge (what I tend to loosely call the "Castle stack" for want of a better term.) - which I'll post about it as it starts to happen.

There's a few things going on in Auckland over the next month or so, just to summarize if you haven't been paying attention :)

• Architecture Chat - 7^th August 2008 (Tomorrow at 11:30am).
• Ellerslie .Net User Group - Building line of business applications with Silverlight - 7^th August 2008 (Tomorrow Evening at 6pm) - sign up here.
• Enterprise Architect User Group - Model Driven Development with EA (presented by Myself) - hosted in Auckland and Wellington simultaneous via Video conference - 4pm to 5:30pm 14^th August 2008.
• Auckland Connected Systems User Group meeting - AS2 and EDI support in BizTalk - 14^th August 2008 6:30pm - sign up here.
• Architecture Chat - 21^st August 2008.
• Auckland Code Camp - Sunday 31^st August 2008 - sign up here - be quick, filling
  up fast and don't forget to sign up for the campfire dinner as well.
• Teched 2008 - 1^st to 3^rd September 2008.

So plenty of things going on!

I would suggest signing up for the code camp sooner rather then later if you don't want to miss out - also if you know of any other events that I've left off this list, drop me a comment and I'll add them to it.

Architecture chat tomorrow at 11:30am... I'm going to leave it fairly open for topics so all come along with something interesting to say ;o) ... or leave a comment on this post if you'd like to give me or anyone else a heads up on what you'd like to talk about.

Some things I'd personally be interested:

• Auckland recruitment environment.
• Must read books for both new and seasoned developers alike.
• Implementing code that can explain itself - for example security mechanisms able to explain (in English) why you do or do not have access, DSL's that give meaningful reasons for the decisions made, and how to flow those messages through the context of operations etc.

All are welcome - drop me an email if you're a new comer and we'll keep an eye out for you!

Information regarding the location and previous chat write-ups can be found here.

This is a writeup for the last 2 architecture chats - both were pretty free-form, with little of the topics mentioned in the posts getting much discussion as we all had own things to talk about!

As a brief summary:

Plenty of talk about Lightweight code-gen and run-time vs. post-compile IL weaving, debugging integration etc. Hard to cover all the little facets that were explorer - but it's been interesting - it seems like more developers are starting to dabble with IL.

We talked about approaches for introducing cross-cutting behavior such as versioning and history to your data access and approaches for flowing metadata from your domain model up to the UI (including searching, validation etc.) and ways to index, query and flow the information across boundaries in the application.

As a tangent to this I've been talking about how I've been using MDA/MDG to drive the domain model generation (including things like validation, search annotations etc.).

We talked about the recent S3 outages and approaches for placing resources on both European and US data centers simultaneously, and possible ways to mitigate the double-upload bandwidth costs.

Discussions (sparked originally from a email discussion on the NZ dotnet user group) around hiding the implementation details of your ORM from the rest of your application - and the practicalities of how deep this needs to go, using linq through boundaries etc.

Discussions around injecting logic into generated source code, both in asp.net/winforms generated code as well as possible ways to intercept custom tool generation so you could manipulate the output.

Spartan programming got a mention - Peter felt it aligned with alot of his current coding style.

Embedding NHaml as a view engine in non-MVC applications, and the general experience with different view engines including  Brail, ASP.NET MVC's default ASPX View engine etc.  (Including the error reporting and debugging experience) - We also talked briefly about the
Spark view engine, which looks to be like it could be quite palatable to non developers while still offering a useful syntax for developers.

If anyone has any topic suggestions for next weeks chat just leave a comment on this post or flick me an email.

So I see more people rewriting my container tutorials lately...

First we have the  unity tutorials - as covered by Michael McGuire... which I mentioned a while back.

Now we have the binsor tutorials which have sprung up lately - from ruprict covering the same concepts, but with Binsor syntax - which is quite handy for those that are boo-inclined!

I also believe a set of Ninject tutorials are being written by Simone Chiaretta (codeclimber) in his spare time as well (and who is not jealous of Ninject's website! ;o)

It's encouraging to see interest still growing in IoC on the .Net Framework.