Don Smith

If you're building web apps, this will just take 2 minutes

LockSmithDon — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:55:00 GMT

... to fill out this survey about what guidance you think is most needed when it comes to building web apps.

This includes front end design and development (html, css, javascript/jquery, canvas, svg),
Back end dev (asp.net mvc, dependency management, repositories, domain model),
And exposing and consuming services (rest, json).
This also includes application structure,
Unit, acceptance and automated testing

The patterns & practices team is building some guidance around some of the things above and we could use your direction and influence to make sure we build something you'll find useful.

It's only 15 questions and will take less than a couple of minutes (more time is welcome).

Go ahead and get started. You'll be on to the next thing before you know it.

Update: ~~The results aren't immediately available, but I'm happy to share the results.~~ I just made the results of the survey public. Please tweet. Let's get a good turn out. Thanks. #asp #mvc #webdesign #html5 #javascript #jquery #css3 #canvas #svg

Thanks!

Symposium give-aways

LockSmithDon — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 23:30:00 GMT

As someone who has spoken at quite a few events over the past 10 years, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what goes into running a conference. With less than 2 weeks before the start of the Symposium, I can already appreciate how ignorant I was. Fortunately, I've been a speaker and attendee enough times to have a decent understanding at what makes for a high quality event and what can screw it up big time. Obviously, the value per cost is an important consideration and I've tried to organize as much value as possible. Earlier today I was checking on how things are shaping up ... and I think it's looking pretty good.

Free books and ebooks from Pearson and O'Reilly
A month of online training from Pluralsight's OnDemand! Series
The three newest books from patterns & practices (Azure, EntLib and Parallel)
All presentations and demo code on a 2Gb thumbdrive bracelet (it's pretty cool, trust me)
Three evening events (ascending in coolness factor) that include food and open bars
Lots of food (big breakfast, buffet lunches and dinner with snacks in between)
Conference t-shirt that you'll customize for yourself (should be fun)
And 10 attendees will win a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Professional

All of this for only $999 is a steal. Now we're less than 2 weeks out and it has all indications of being a really awesome event. These always tend to be really intimate events and this year we have some really great keynotes, hands-on workshops and interesting talks lined up with loads of time for great conversations in between.

If you haven't already registered, what are you waiting for? Do it now!

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Symposium Agenda RC1

LockSmithDon — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:37:00 GMT

Of course when it comes to conference agendas, they're really released incrementally as the sessions happen, but we think the agenda in place now is pretty darn close.

Click the image to get a better look at it. You can also see it on the Symposium's schedule page.

We're pretty excited Don Box will be joining us on Wednesday to talk about Dallas, OData and whatever else is on his mind. You can always count on walking away from Don's talks with new ideas and perspectives to consider. Also, Chris Tavares has been gracious enough to step in and give us a half hour topic on Command Query Separation. Chris has been applying this pattern to work he's been doing on Azure and this was a topic I really thought we should have. Thanks Chris. We also know more about what we're doing around MVVM on Thursday afternoon with Karl Shifflett and Ward Bell.

We still have around a half a dozen abstracts to post, but we've been posting abstracts and speaker bios regularly so check out these pages if you haven't seen them in a couple of weeks. We only have a month to go and we still have some room so be sure and register right away. It's going to be a great week and it's a perfect way to get some face time with the movers and the shakers ... especially since the PDC is sold out. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Symposium Progress Report

LockSmithDon — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:59:00 GMT

We've been making some great progress on the Symposium ... so I guess you could call this a progress report. I wrote most of this up as a response to an email asking if this event was focused on ISVs and if it would be recorded. I ended up answering these questions a quite a few more ... so I thought I would just provide my response:

I wouldn’t say the event is focused on the ISV because we also cater to the enterprise developer/architect. I also wouldn’t say it’s 100% developer focused. We find that architects and project managers also get a lot of value. Our target audience is people building solutions on the .NET platform who care a great deal about their craft - whether it’s coding, patterns, architecture, process, teamwork, testing, or the best way to think about some of the new technologies. Here’s a very brief rundown of what we have planned:

Oct 18 (Workshops): Three simultaneous half-day hands-on workshops on Enterprise Library, Prism and Windows Azure
Oct 19 (Architecture and Software Engineering): Uncle Bob Martin keynote, Inversion of Control/Dependency Injection pattern, Reusing UI, Solution considerations, Parallel tasks and Architecture Katas.
Oct 20 (Server side stuff): Azure keynote, REST, Cloud Guidance, Command Query Separation Pattern, Codename “Dallas” and Agile ASP.NET MVC development
Oct 21 (Client side stuff): Windows Phone 7 keynote, Windows Phone Guidance, JQuery, MVVM, Prism 4, Design data & the repository pattern
Oct 22 (Visual Studio): VS2010 keynote, Feature Builder Power Tool, Agile team patterns with TFS
List of many of the sessions and their descriptions (more being added regularly) also, check out the speakers we have lined up

There will be a game show night hosted by Scott Hanselman called Who’s Code is it Anyway? on Oct 20th (with dinner and drinks) and a bowling party with dinner and drinks on Oct 21st. Of course lunch is provided every day. One of the big changes this year is creating more time for everyone to interact with … well, everyone else. The breaks between sessions is 20 minutes and lunch is 80 minutes. Lunch is also done in an ask-the-expert style setup where each table with have a topic so you’re more able to sit with other like-minded individuals. The long breaks and lunches will also give us the time we all need to plan the 3 Open Space sessions we end Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with.

We will be recording the screens and the audio of each of the sessions. We won’t record the full-motion of the speaker, workshops, open space discussions, or lunch (duh). We’re not yet sure how or when we’ll release them. Certainly many of them will be available online shortly after the event. We’re not sure where yet (probably MSDN or Channel9), we’ll see. We still need to work with our external speakers on the posibility of publishing their talks.

For completeness, I should also mention that we’ve worked out some pretty good deals with sponsors. For example, each attendee will receive a month of OnDemand! training from Pluralsight ($100 value) and we’re working on arranging free books/ebooks from some well-known publishers including (of course) many p&p books. As always, attendees will leave the event with a thumb drive containing all the presentations and code samples. These events have been really successful in the past. Last year’s NSAT was 153 and 97% of attendees said they would recommend this event to others.

Well, I hope this gave you some ammunition to convince the powers that be to let you join us :) If so, you can register here.

Let me know if you have any questions. Hope to see you there!

Symposium planning and registration are in full swing

LockSmithDon — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:51:00 GMT

We have enjoyed the patterns & practices Summit for many years now. And each year it seems like we try something new. This year we’re combining some new ideas with a name change. And I’ve been spending a ton of time lately preparing for what we intend to be another great week. Not all of the sessions are locked in yet so there is still time to make some improvements. Here is what we currently have planned. Use the comments to let us what you think.

Web

Idea: a session on the results of the Microsoft/JQuery collaboration (templates for example) and how customers are using JQuery with ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure to build engaging Web experiences.
Idea: a session on development and unit testing patterns when using ASP.NET MVC (like testing routes for example). This talk could also provide a sneak peek into ASP.NET MVC 3.

Cloud

Confirmed keynote: Yousef Khalidi, a Distinguished Engineer on the Windows Azure team, will deliver a keynote on October 20th on the current and future state of the on-premise and off-premise Windows Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: the Cloud Guidance team in patterns & practices will deliver a hands-on workshop on how to get the most of the Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming (soon).
There are plenty of other options for sessions about the cloud. I’ll post some of our other ideas in the near future. In the meantime, I’m interested in what you would like to see. Perhaps something like connectivity with ...

Windows Phone 7

Confirmed keynote: Charlie Kindel, a General Manager on the Windows Phone 7 team, will deliver a keynote on October 21st on the developer experience. Abstract forthcoming.
Idea: given its mobile nature and its ability to always be connected, a session illustrating how best to use the Azure and Phone platforms together would be mega-useful. Other areas p&p has been working on is push notifications and how to take advantage of specific features like geo-location awareness and how to hook into the camera and audio features of the phone.

SharePoint

After having delivered three different sets of SharePoint guidance, there is a lot we can talk about. Some of the options include exposing and consuming data to/from SharePoint, testing and development practices, a broad overview of the changes in SharePoint 2010. Let us know.

Parallel

Confirmed: Parallel Programming with Design Patterns and .NET – Ade Miller
Multi-core and HPC technologies are rapidly moving into the computing mainstream, allowing us to develop applications with improved performance, increased responsiveness, and reduced latency. The many established design patterns in this space can help developers and architects reuse proven approaches to solving many types of problems using parallelism. This talk covers many of the key patterns and gives examples of how they can be implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 libraries. This talk is aimed at experienced software developers who are relatively new to the parallel computing space but expect it to become more important to their work.

Enterprise Library

Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: This relatively-advanced workshop will focus on the patterns and implementation of EntLib’s provider model to show how it reduces coupling and facilitates testing. This is a great choice if you’re using EntLib today. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Session on the new features of EntLib 5.0: If you attended the Summit last year, you heard about data accessors, the perf gains and a few other things. This year you’ll hear about the new things that made it in and see the new (super) config tool and other asked-for features. Abstract forthcoming.

Inversion of Control

Idea: How would you feel about a duo session between 2 heavy-hitters in the dependency injection space? We’re thinking one speaker can cover the preliminary principles, background and concepts to make sure everyone is on the same page and the other speaker can follow it up with implementation details using say, MEF. Thoughts?

Rich client

Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: The infamous David Platt, accompanied by members of the Prism team, will cover the latest Prism release in an overview of the major parts of the project. Abstract forthcoming.
This is another space that we have the opportunity to talk about a lot of different things from patterns to implementations and we’re talking to some rock star speakers on possible topics. Let us know what you would like to see and we’ll try to accommodate.

Visual Studio

Confirmed keynote: Jason Zander, Corporate VP of the Visual Studio team, will be delivering a keynote where he discusses the new features of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server and how they improve the experiences for .NET developers and architects. Abstract forthcoming.
Confirmed: Session on Feature Builder. The patterns & practices team has valued the automation and consistency that can be achieved through extending the developer’s tool box. Feature Builder is the latest incarnation of such tooling and is easily the most compelling offering to date. This session will focus on how easy it is today to bend Visual Studio to your will. Abstract forthcoming.

Agile Practices

Here are some of the titles we are currently considering. Which are you the most interested in?

What has changed in Agile
Behavior Driven Development and Executable Specifications in .NET
Patterns of Healthy Scrum Teams using Visual Studio and TFS
Be a Better Developer with Coding Katas
Effective Test Automation Strategies

There are a bunch of other sessions we’re kicking around that I haven’t included here. Be sure and stay tuned for them. You can also regularly check the Symposium page on MSDN to stay tuned. But the easiest way would be to follow the Symposium on Twitter or the event on Facebook.

My App Arch deck from the China Summit

LockSmithDon — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:31:00 GMT

This is a deck I created for the China p&p Summit. I'm posting this because I spent some extra time creating each of the 5 application type diagrams (from the Application Architecture Guide) in PowerPoint. I thought this might be useful for others who would like to use/modify them for their own use. Since this deck can have a dual purpose, I also included 12 slides of nice vector icons for using in network/software diagrams that I've benefited from for years. I used them in both PowerPoint and Visio. Let me know if you find it useful.

AppArch-ChinaSummit2009.pptx

Unfortunately, I optimized this deck for the delivery - opposed to being useful as a standalone deck. The presentation was video taped, so if you're interested in the delivery, I'll update this if I learn of the link if it is published publicly. Otherwise, I can update it with loads of comments in each slide.

Updating the factories to VS2010

LockSmithDon — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:10:00 GMT

This is just a quick post to let you know that I just posted an update over on the p&p team blog. Since this effort spans GAT/GAX and 3 factories, it makes more sense to post the updates there instead of here. Sorry for any confusion. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions. I'll still be blogging here (hopefully more) just not about the factory refresh project. Thanks.

Data Access Guidance

LockSmithDon — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:26:00 GMT

A few of us in patterns & practices, with some help from our partners on the Data Platform team have been working on some guidance to help .NET customers build data access layers (DALs). We’ve been hearing for a while that data access on the .NET platform is not intuitive and this confusion is related to technology choices, approaches, design decisions, and implementations. So in response, we putting together some guidance that will hopefully reduce the confusion.

High-level Description

The role of the DAL is to consume services* that save and retrieve data on behalf of the application. Preferably it’s loosely coupled from the application through interface definitions provided by the application layer. Often the service it’s consuming is a SQL Server (TDS/T-SQL), which implies a relational store, and there are lots of APIs to use to do this (like ADO.NET). Other times – like when you can’t get to the SQL Server or when you’re using something other than a relational store – it’s a different kind of service or one you must build yourself (e.g. REST).

* I draw a distinction between these data services and services that represent course-grained business processes and operations (think SOA, SOAP, and things in that vein). I’m not talking about business services, but I am talking about crossing tiers.

There are quite a few factors that will influence the type of store you use and the services used to interact with the store. While I personally believe our industry needs (and is continuing to go through) a reassessment of various data storage solutions, that’s not the aim of this guidance project – we just don’t have the experience and resources to do an adequate job right now. So this project is scoped to address relational stores and custom data services.

Assuming a relational store, the app will either be able to access the SQL Server directly, or it won’t. This guidance will address both of these scenarios. In the case of being able to go straight to the SQL Server, there are 2 high-level patterns for doing so: object/relational mapping (O/RM), and tabular access. So to summarize the high-level scope of the guidance:

Direct access to SQL Server
- 1. Use object/relational mapping (ADO.NET Entity Framework)
- 2. Use tabular access (Classic ADO.NET)
No access to SQL Server
- 3. Consuming data services (ADO.NET Data Services, WCF, etc.)

Specifics

We’re going to use 2 forms of guidance to illustrate these 3 primary scenarios:

Reference Implementation (RI). This is a real worldish application that is made up of an ASP.NET MVC web app, a WPF client, and a Silverlight client that each cater to the 3 different roles who use the solution. This RI will only include the O/RM and data services scenario. Tabular access isn’t illustrated since it is better understood. The image below summarizes this online commerce platform.
Written guidance. This book/PDF will have 2 parts.
- Architecture. Technology-agnostic topics and cover important concepts, principles, and framing. These topics will cover all 3 scenarios (O/RM, Tabular, and Data Services).
- Implementation. Technology-specific topics that correlate the architecture topics with how and where they are implemented in the RI.

Engage!

Like all p&p projects, we’re dropping code after each iteration (2 weeks) on the CodePlex community site and are actively soliciting feedback from YOU about what you need and how we’re doing – the more you engage, the better the guidance will be.

So hop over, download the latest drop, and let us know what you think of how we view the world of .NET data access. We’ve set up a specific page for feedback if you’re curious what questions we have – we’ll continue to build on this list over time. We’re looking forward to your feedback!

What's the deal between Devs and DBAs?

LockSmithDon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:42:00 GMT

As part of this Data Access Guidance project I'm workin on (which I'll blog more about soon), we're having a discussion with our advisors about the contention between the influence a Developer has on an enterprise solution and the influence a DBA has on the same solution. Because one of the deliverables of this project will be some written guidance, this seemed like a great opportunity to help each side identify with the other perspective so they both can have maximum impact on the solution. This will likely have a considerable effect on the architecture of the solution too.

I've created a wiki page on the project's CodePlex site so we can capture your experinece. Please pop over and drop us a line. We'll incorporate the comments into the draft over time. Thanks!

EntLib is listening ... be heard now to influence the next rev

LockSmithDon — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:52:00 GMT

Grigori, the PM for Enterprise Library, just posted version 5's tentative backlog stories and is giving you the chance to influence the priority of the stories. So don't waste anymore time here, head over, get more details, and be heard.