Asynchronous Messaging Patterns with WCF

Asynchronous Messaging Patterns with WCF

I'll be giving this presentation at VS Live! San Francisco on April 2, 2008.

Anti-Patterns in Software Projects … The Human Factor

The creation of software products is a highly complex endeavor. Technology and programming are the easy part. The hard part is the human factor, the ingredient which ultimately has the greatest influence upon the success of any software project. Join us in this session to see how we can be our own worst enemies, and even subvert the benefits that we should be realizing from methodologies like Agile.

The talk will be given at Code Camp 5: Code Frenzy!

Implementing SOA Design Patterns with .NET

I'll be giving this presentation at VS Live! Boston on October 25, 2006, and at VS Live! Dallas on November 15, 2006.

Service-Orientation offers the promise of greater interoperability and ease of integration, but in order to realize its benefits we must evolve the way we architect solutions.  While many of the lessons learned from Distributed Object-Oriented Architectures can be leveraged, much of what we did “back in the day” will not help us to achieve the goals of SOA. In fact, many of the old ways have become Anti-Patterns. Join us in this session to learn how the .Net platform and Microsoft’s new “Web Service Software Factory” can be leveraged to rapidly deliver versioned, interoperable, extensible, and easy-to-maintain web services. All concepts will be presented with an eye towards the Windows Communication Foundation (a.k.a. Indigo).

Using Generics to Enable the Data Director Pattern

Context:

• You decide to use the Data Mapper pattern because you’d like to decouple the data model from the domain model (i.e. business objects).
  
• You decide not to use code generation for Object-Relational Mapping because you want more flexibility in the ways you work with domain objects. For example, you might want to flexibly build object hierarchies, or you might want to merge or split business object fields and and database columns. You might also use continuous integration techniques to build or check the validity of your calls to stored procedures.  
  
• You decide not to use the reflective approach for Object-Relational Mapping because you want a higher degree of run-time performance.
  
• You decide you’d rather not use a vendor product so that you may avoid vendor lock-in.
  
• You want to minimize the amount of code required to map data from business objects to stored procedures and vice versa.
  
• You want to achieve a highly structured and consistent way to organize the mapping logic for all database CRUD operations for individual business objects or for lists of the same.

This article will discuss a simple pattern that leverages the power of Generics to achieve these ends.

Are Code Comments an AntiPattern ?

Professors, books, managers, vendors, and colleagues have, since the beginning of our craft, urged us to comment our code. These recommendations still echo like a song that we can’t get out of our heads. Once upon a time when languages mandated brevity in the naming of variables and methods, and the tools were less capable, this advice was irrefutable. These days, however, perhaps comments are an Anti-Pattern?