Chris Bowen's Blog : Patterns and Practices

Big Changes for the Acropolis Project

cbowen — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:48:37 GMT

If you're been looking into the Acropolis project for building composite applications, take a look at this post by the Acropolis team.

The short of it is that the project in its current form (as CTP's) will no longer be versioned (but will remain available.) However, the goals, concepts, and lessons learned from Acropolis are being transitioned to the Patterns & Practices team for long-term direction and development of guidance:

"We are very excited to announce that we are going to be working closely with the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team to provide guidance (samples, applications blocks, patterns and so on) for building composite client applications for .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008."

The post includes a summary of guidance for customers who have been considering how to implement composite applications:

"If you have evaluated Acropolis and are unsure whether to adopt it for your project, or to use the existing CAB, or to wait for the new guidance, our guidance for this situation remains the same - if you are building a Windows Forms LOB composite client (with maybe rich islands of WPF content) you should carefully evaluate the current CAB release. If you are specifically interesting in building composite applications on .NET 3.5, please get involved with the Patterns & Practices project and help us to deliver a guidance package that meets your requirements."

In a related announcement, Glenn Block of the P&P team has announced plans around the WPF Composite Client. It will be a new set of libraries and guidance, not a new version of the existing CAB, to be delivered in several smaller releases so customer feedback can be incorporated into subsequent iterations.

-Chris

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Technorati tags: Patterns and Practices, Acropolis, CAB, WPF

Speaking on Enterprise Library at Beantown .NET UG on 10/4

cbowen — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:23:17 GMT

I'll be in Boston tomorrow night (10/4), giving a talk about the Patterns & Practices group and Enterprise Library for the Beantown .NET User Group. If you're in the Boston area and are interested in learning about how Enterprise Library can help with your development efforts, drop by for a listen!

The meeting runs from 6-8:00 PM.

More details and directions are at http://www.beantowndotnet.org

See you there!

-Chris

Technorati tags: .NET, User Groups, Events, Boston

May Roadshow Content Available

cbowen — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:40:23 GMT

We've collected the slides and content from our most recent Roadshow and have made them available at:

http://www.arcStreamEast.net/arcStreamEast/Download/zips/BandC-May2007.zip

Covered sessions are:

XML and the Database
What's New from the Patterns & Practices Group?
Silverlight
ASP.NET AJAX - Going Deeper

I'm on the road at the moment, but keep an eye out for follow-up posts with resources relating to questions I received during the various days.

-Chris

Bob & Chris' MSDN Roadshow - Back for More!

cbowen — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:34:00 GMT

We're back in the saddle again, gearing up for another five-city tour to bring deep technical content to a projection screen near you!

Dates, locations, and registration links are at the bottom of this post.

Note that we've changed venues from Farmington to Hartford, CT and Manchester to Nashua, NH.

See you on the road!

-Chris

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bob Familiar and Chris Bowen are two guys who love to write code and can’t stop talking about it. And now they’ve decided to take their long winded rants and questionable demos to a city near you. And if you were at our last event, you know the line about questionable demos is no joke!

AGENDA: AJAX, Extensible Scrubbing Bubbles and that Cross Browser Cleansing Motion
8:30am	Arrive, check in, grab a nosh and a seat
9:00 – 10:15	XML and the Database
9:00 – 10:15	SQL Server 2005 offers architects and developers a slew of great features for creating data driven solutions. For this session we will focus on the XML features including XML Indexes, XQuery, the XML Datatype, the FOR XML clause and validating XML within the database using XSD. The use cases for these XML capabilities will also be discussed.
10:15 – 10:30	<Break />
10:30 – 12:00	What’s New From The Patterns & Practices Group?
10:30 – 12:00	Like doing things the hard way? Well, unfortunately for you this session is all about making your life as a developer or architect easier. The Patterns & Practices group keeps churning out great tools, reference code, and guidance to show you Microsoft's recommendations for designing, developing and deploying great applications. We'll cover Enterprise Library 3.0, various Software Factories, the Guidance Automation Toolkit and more, explaining how they could fit in with your development efforts. If you suddenly find the hard way less thrilling, don't say we didn't warn you!
12:00-1:00	Grab a lunch and search for patterns in the carpet
1:00 – 2:15	Microsoft Silverlight (aka Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere)
1:00 – 2:15	At our last meeting, we dug into the Windows Presentation Foundation, a .Net Framework development library that sits overtop of DirectX allowing one to create the next generation of Windows user interfaces using advanced graphics, animation, rich documents and multimedia along with traditional UI controls. Windows Silverlight is a subset of the capabilities of WPF that can be used within browser based applications on the PC and the Mac. This session will discuss the architecture of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrate how integrate XAML into your browser-based applications.
2:15-2:30	Take a break and animate
2:30 – 3:45	ASP.NET AJAX – Going Deeper
2:30 – 3:45	If you're developing applications for the web, you've likely heard about AJAX and how it can improve the usability and functionality of your site. In this session, we'll quickly introduce the main concepts of ASP.NET AJAX and then we'll roll up our sleeves for other details that will help you when you're in the trenches with AJAX. We'll talk about the client side library, Silverlight (formerly codenamed WPF/E) integration, enabling and invoking server methods and web services, debugging, best practices and more.
3:45 – 4:00	Zune Giveaway


Location	Date	Time	Registration
Sheraton Burlington Hotel	May 8^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Register!
870 Williston Road
Burlington Vermont			Event ID:
			1032339883
RIT INN & Conference Center	May 10^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Register!
5257 Henrietta Road
W. Henrietta New York			Event ID:
			1032339884
Sheraton Hartford Hotel	May 14^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Register!
100 East River Drive
Hartford Connecticut			Event ID:
			1032339886
MESDA	May 15^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Register!
506 Main Street
Westbrook, ME 04092			Event ID:
			1032339885
Sheraton Nashua Hotel	May 17^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Register!
11 Tara Boulevard
Nashua New Hampshire			Event ID:
			1032339887

Enterprise Library 3.0 Released

cbowen — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 04:06:48 GMT

Tom Hollander gives word that the official release of Enterprise Library 3.0 is now available! This is great news and provides architects and developers with new options for quickly implementing proven best practices for .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 applications.

Enterprise Library 3.0 includes the following:

Caching Application Block
Cryptography Application Block
Data Access Application Block
Exception Handling Application Block
Logging Application Block
Policy Injection Application Block
Security Application Block
Validation Application Block

Also, as Tom mentions, this release includes WCF integration (for Exceptions, Logging, and Validation,) a configuration editor that ties into Visual Studio, and the Application Block Software Factory.

Read Tom's post for all of the details.

-Chris

Prescriptive Guidance for Visual Studio Team System

cbowen — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:45:31 GMT

The Patterns & Practices team has just released an excellent set of prescriptive guides for Visual Studio Team System.

Read the detailed information in J.D. Meier's announcement post, but here are the direct links:

Explained: Branching in Team Foundation Server
Explained - Structuring Your Solutions and Projects in Source Control with Team Foundation Server
How To: Perform a Baseless Merge in Team Foundation Server
How To: Step Through Creating a Custom Check-in Policy for Team Foundation Server 2005
How To: Step Through Creating Your Source Tree in Team Foundation Server 2005
How To: Structure Your ASP.NET Applications for Team Foundation Server
How To: Structure Your Source Control Folders in Team Foundation Server
How To: Structure Your Windows Applications for Team Foundation Server
Source Control Practices at a Glance (updated)
Source Control Questions and Answers (updated)
Video: How To - Migrate from VSS to Team Foundation Source Control
Video: How To - Setup Your Source Tree in Team Foundation Server
Video: How To - Structure Your ASP.NET Projects for TFS

As J.D. mentions, keep an eye on the Visual Studio Team System Guidance Project on CodePlex as more guides, recommendations, and instructional resources are released!

-Chris

Enterprise Library 3.0 CTP Released

cbowen — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 02:18:58 GMT

Hot off the press, the Patterns & Practices team's Tom Hollander has announced the availability of the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Enterprise Library v3.0!

Download it from the new CodePlex site at http://www.codeplex.com/entlib.

Some highlights from Tom's post:

Core

Source Code installer

Partial Trust Support

Strong-Named Binary Assemblies

Validation Application Block

Core validation API

Minimal Validator Library

Attaching validators to objects via attributes

Attaching validators to objects via configuration

Not included yet (but in the works): Configuration tool support, complete validator library, integration with ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WCF etc.

Data Access Application Block

SQL Server Compact Edition Support

New Database.UpdateDatabase overload with updateBatchSize parameter

Configuration Tool

Visual Studio IDE integration

AppSettings support

Encryption support

Application Block Software Factory

Templates and recipes for creating application blocks and provider libraries

Preliminary documentation

Strong Naming Guidance Package

Recipes to assist in strong-naming and updating [InternalsVisibleTo] across multiple projects

Don't forget to be among the first to provide feedback for the team via the CodePlex forums.

-Chris