No, that isn’t meant to be an oxymoron. But something I’ve noticed recently is that people’s approach to JavaScript seems to be diverging down two common paths. This blog post is designed to encourage you to adopt the one you probably aren’t planning to adopt right now! The approaches I’m describing...

Often when I speak with people that are planning a new solution they have a few different products or platforms in mind. To compare these options, most try something like a “capability matrix” (which goes by many names). Roughly these end up looking like this; Feature ...

If you write a lot of JavaScript, you really should consider adopting Progressive Enhancement as the standard way that you work. This is basically whereby you write a web site without script, and then enhance it with script. The result is a site that does not rely on JavaScript (and hence works with...

I've been consulting with various customers of late to help them understand how they can prepare for "the cloud" (specifically Windows Azure), and what elements of their system might need work in order to work well there. This blog post is so that I have a handy checklist to hand to help drive these...

This week I hosted an interactive session at the Architect Insight Conference with my colleague Josh Twist ... if you were there thanks for being so interactive! We really enjoyed it and found it useful so I hope you did too. One concept that I mentioned during the session was an approach I use to...

Windows Identity Foundation has been around for a while now, and "Claims Based Security" is the cool kid that everyone wants to be friends with. The problem is that everyone (except Zulfiqar who speaks SAML natively) seems to think this stuff is impenetrably difficult to do... Enter stage left: "...

Something I get asked by most customers starting out with ASP.NET MVC is how they should package, group, factor, and reuse their UI components. We're all used to thinking about User Controls, Custom Controls, and other Web Forms approaches. But rest assured, MVC provides a wealth of options. The thoughts...

Q : Should I have a view Model in my ASP.NET MVC architecture? A : Yes. Well, that was a short post! J Being more serious, this is an interesting topic that the advisors and p&p team discussed a few times while they were building the Reference Implementation for the soon-to-be-complete Web...

If you've not come across the Web Client Guidance that patterns & practices have been working on, now is the time to head on over to their CodePlex site; http://webclientguidance.codeplex.com/ The team have been really busy pulling together resources, advice, and guidance on a lot of topics...

I was working on a Proof of Concept recently that needed to support loosely coupled Ajax components. The idea is a common one – components need to be able to hook into an existing page without detailed knowledge of how the page works, and immediately start responding appropriately. This is basically...

Then tell us what you need! Blaine has blogged a link to a survey that patterns & practices will use to help them understand what challenges that are affecting you the most... so that they can choose the right areas to focus effort in providing guidance. If you’ve got a couple of minutes spare...

Unobtrusive JavaScript is a concept that’s been around for quite a while, but it’s now finally starting to make its way into the mainstream. The basic idea is that you should separate your JavaScript from your HTML – so instead of; < a href ="Default.aspx" onclick ="alert('Sorry, that is unavailable...

One of the tasks I used to hate when building a new system was adding admin pages to allow simple create/update functionality for lookup data. For example, maintaining a simple list of Products. It takes ages to write, and is very boring – even if you write templates to generate code it consumes a lot...

In my previous post I described the basic concept behind my auditing approach using the Entity Framework, and covered some of the problems I encountered. This post focuses on the solution I went with; do feel free to comment if you have any thoughts. Audit Lifecycle To get to the root of my requirements...

If you’ve read my last post on Types of Auditing , you should be primed for this one; I’m looking at a way to do Data Operation Auditing in the Entity Framework. That is, I want to track who changes which tables & columns , when , and in what way . Why does this specifically apply to the Entity...

Auditing almost means something different to everyone I speak to... just a few things people mean when they say “our system has auditing” to me are; Business Operation Auditing . This is recording when a business operation is performed, such as “Hire Employee”. They usually signify that a whole lot...

I spend quite a lot of time nowadays advising on architecting applications to be scalable, recommending performance testing approaches and processes, and being called in to help an organisation remediate problems with an existing application. It’s one of my favourite sides to the job. But in spite...

Have you been using the Web Client Software Factory ? Or have you tried it and not adopted it? Or have you used some of the bundle content but not the whole factory? Michael Puleio has just started a thread on codeplex requesting feedback on who is using the factory , and talks about it briefly in...

I’ve been thinking for a while about how people tend to build AJAX applications, as there seems to be something a lot of people have forgotten. This post examines how applying a pattern you probably know very well to AJAX could help – and leaves it to you to decide whether this is useful. Let me know...

“Sufficient Architecture? What does that mean?!”, I hear you say!! Bear with me. Over a beer this week I had a good conversation with a colleague about the principles of architecture and design, and as a result I feel compelled to recount something that I have tried to adhere to for a long time. I...

I am constantly surprised when speaking with people how few have heard of or use the “Service Interface” pattern. It is actually a very straightforward pattern, is very little work to use, but brings such practical, quantifiable, visible, benefits I think it has to be one of my all time favourites. The...

This article is part of a series; · WCSF Application Architecture 1: Introduction · WCSF Application Architecture 2: Application Controller · WCSF Application Architecture 3: Model View Presenter · WCSF Application Architecture 4: Environment Abstraction · WCSF Application Architecture...

This article is part of a series; · WCSF Application Architecture 1: Introduction · WCSF Application Architecture 2: Application Controller · WCSF Application Architecture 3: Model View Presenter · WCSF Application Architecture 4: Environment Abstraction · WCSF Application Architecture...

Long live “Dependency Resolution”! OK, so I’m not really serious – but I got your attention right? Truth is, I personally love Dependency Injection , but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without its flaws. The Service Locator pattern is often touted as Dependency Injection’s nearest rival, so let’s very...

Have you used Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) or Policy Injection? They’re pretty much the same thing. If you haven’t, I’d highly recommend doing some reading, as I believe it is a Software Engineering practice that has moved out of the “fashionable” and into the “enterprise”. For separation of concerns...