ARC-MID204 Disposable Architecture, Daniel Beaty

There is no such thing as a perfect architecture decision, just opinions all dependant on where your standing in time (modified Richardo Semler)

What is Disposable Architecture
- language to communicate with your business
- thinking with the end in mind
- Disposable Architecture is to Service Oriented Architecture, like Agile is to Waterfall
- compliments traditional architecture, doesn’t replace it
- it puts business enablement first, technical purity second
- ratification of what’s already happening today

When does it become in-disposable architecture
- Tactical vs Strategic
- situational apps: develop app within 6 weeks using Agile
- convention over configuration: the app is disposable, the data is not. by following a convention, you can later port the data over. No need to translate to another system
- Good architecture isn’t about good technology, its about good business outcomes. Most ppl’s job is situational. its not perfect, but it actually solved the business outcome.
- When you start to chain you need to switch. They replicate a cache data, which a day old data (rather accurate) to access the corporate data. The business users got so excited that they suggested to ‘chain’ apps. No no.

Dis-economys of scale
- When you spend more time talking about the project than working on it
- Duplication of effort. Large projects have many different people and they may be duplication of work
- Increasing our communication overheads.
- Slowing down the decision path. Small team with business users. You get decisions quickly.
- Value doesn’t go up because you spend more. Business outcome versus more technology-savvy outcome.

Are we at the Project Tipping point?
- 3-4 years in, you ask yourself what was our business intent again? SOA becomes a project, good development practises at a higher level
- We can’t stop now, we have already spent so much. If I build a disposable app and estimate wrongly, the amount is much less as comparing to building a massive app. We don’t estimate $ correctly all the time. Think about $ seriously.
- Don’t worryn about it, we will just amortize it
- You present an alternative that is cheaper & more effective but it’s ignored

How do I adopt Disposable Architecture
- think differently – 10 yrs ago, remember the boilerplate code
- you have to champion the idea that disposability = flexibility
- Start with your dev or product selection team
- Create the political space for solutions to be temporary as one of the main criteria. Disposability is flexibility. e.g. phone, if you want to dispose it is easy to do.
- Draw on all the ex. around you, Access & Excel powering organisations for 15 yrs.

 

 

 

DDD Brisbane

I was surprised at the turnout, considering its the first DDD in Brisbane. Videos apparently will go up at SSW, which I think is not out yet. To be updated.

Mehdi Khalili talked about Advanced Web Debugging with Fiddler

Miguel Midero talked about “DDD – When Scrum Goes Wrong”

• Balsamic Mockups for rapid prototyping
• SCRUM doesn’t talk about the specifics what to do in the daily process…Miguel suggests reading eXtreme programming
• SCRUMbut. We do SCRUM, but…

Brendan Kowitz talked about “Going Offline with JS”, demos are here

• He pointed out an interesting project, Mozilla Chromeless
• Recommended books
• Javascript Web Applications – Alex MacCaw
• Secrets of the Javascript Ninja – John Resig

Steve Godbold talked about “Taking Continuous Delivery beyond technical with Theory Of Constraints and Kanban”

• Recommended books
• Kanban
• The Goal
• The Toyota Way

Damian Maclennan talked about “Why software projects fail”. Very interesting talk on sharing how a project actually fails. I am sure many will agree with me on this.

John Bristowe talked about “Mastering the Art of Web Development with Kendo UI”

• Kendo UI
• For fun: HackerTyper
• microjs Javascript libraries

File search using Win32

I was working on a piece of code that plays video from a custom video format. Part of what I had to do was to search the files in a remote server.

DirectoryInfo GetFiles() with SearchOption.AllDirectories() did the job but it was slow, taking about 15mins.

I did a manual index that helped a lot, but that meant putting a scheduler that ran daily to index the items, which was not favorable.

I did some research about Windows Search and tried using the SDK. However, I found out that I did not have admin rights to create the custom index on the server, which meant I need to go through a lot of processes to get that indexed.

Someone mentioned that FindFirstFile{Ex} was much faster. However, a lot of code point me to C++, a language which I don’t know how to code. Lucky for me, someone did the job using Win32.

File System Enumerator using lazy matching ( I am guessing its lazy because its not indexed)

The future of this blog is in YOUR hands

.NET Create a windows media playlist and play it!

I know this technology is way old, and the information is out there…I’m just compiling it here for my own sake

• Create a windows media playlist
• Now, I have a playlist! Show me how to play it!
• Creating the Windows Media Player Control Programmatically

SQL Server – Clean your database

Setting up test cases for unit test and functional testing, I needed to clean the existing database, start from the clean state in order to properly test. Found this which worked fine

SQL Server Clean Your Database

QMSDN User group Sept

Patrick Klug did a presentation on WPF and how it is used in NovaMind. He mentioned a lot of the disadvantages in WPF (they don’t use Blend) and what it does.

Bronwen & John from SoulSolutions presented their Developing with Kinect SDK which was pretty cool. Their source code should be available at their website.

DDD Brisbane is coming up 26th Nov 2011! Join their twitter to get updates

 

I ripped out a dependency code today … kinda exhausting staring into the screen for so long but also very happy I get to do ripping!

My experience at TechEd Australia 2011

Finally! Something to write about… I’ve been rather ‘quiet’ in this space, and it’s because of current work policy that actually stops you from writing blog posts from work (which I love to do, because a problem just pops up and you’ve spent that X amount of hours figuring the solution) which means I need to bring in a personal laptop and hook up to a personal hotspot, which I have tried doing but at the moment my phone/network is just pretty much dead at my office spot (ugh!) and I haven’t figured out how to fix it… imagine how  long it took me to adjust working in a total-firewall-workplace, no delicious, no googling any sort of personal on work desk…

Anyways, aside from the rambling, I finally got to go to TechEd Australia 2011 this year! You can imagine my excitement when it’s something you’ve dreamt about for the last 3 years, something that you’ve pinned on the ‘Things that I must do at least ONCE in my entire career’. When the opportunity popped itself this year, I asked my boss about going and he was pretty cool about it, but we  only had the chance to nominate a specific session that we were interested in and attend TechEd for a day. A day??? There were so many topics that were interesting and relevant to my work that a day just didn’t cut it. So I took the liberty and a bold decision to ask my boss’es boss (I am in a weird structure at the moment where I have a direct report line to my boss’es boss) to ask if I could attend the entire session, and justify how it relates to my current work. Result? Green tick! One whole ticket just for myself

So I had to claim it for myself instead of ‘sharing’ my ticket around the team (selfish I know). I was contemplating whether to attend TechEd from Tues, or to just go from Wed till the end. The other issue was to organise my own transportation/accommodation, which at this stage it was very near to the TechEd date. And I had work which I was responsible for which prevented me from going to TechEd ‘unnecessarily’. In the end I decided to pass the Keynote on Tuesday because at this stage I haven’t organised my accommodation at GC yet. Bad decision..( to all out there, I would strongly advise you to go for the Keynote, beg your boss if you have to)

I arrived probably about 15 mins late for the 8.15am presentation on ARC-MID204 Disposable Architecture. Doors closed. Seriously?? I never expected geeks to be so punctual given that we normally have flexibility at work to turn up within a range of ‘acceptable’ business hours. Looks like I really need to throw my love for sleep aside and be extra-early for the morning sessions if I really wanted a seat. Loitering around the building and waiting for the next session which was my lab DEV272-HOL Microsoft ASP.net MVC 3: Fundamentals.

I queued early. By the time the lab was about to start, the queue was super long. I managed to get in because I was there early (pointers out there for all of you who have never been TechEd, be super early) but we had technical issues with the speaker’s microphone, and after that was sorted he gave a brief introduction. After the introduction was over, we started on the lab work, but VS2011 took 5 mins to load up. Every click was taking 3-5 mins response time. SeRiouSly?? Seriously…I kid you not. This wasn’t starting all too well for me. I took a snapshot of the online tutorial website and head off.

By this time the expo has opened so I went stall to stall, asking questions so that I appear interested in their products when all I really wanted was their freebies, most of the companies I have not even heard of…

Next up, ARC203 Prototypes, prototypes, prototypes and the difference between them. My thoughts? This is a neat one, I would probably rate this no. 2 on my favourites. I am so pumped up to use this knowledge in my upcoming project!

I had to leave to settle some of my personal stuff and wasn’t aware of the Spotlight going on till the very last minute ( and I couldn’t rush back ) so that’s day 1.

Day 2

COS204 Migrating your applications to Azure…I probably took not much with me given that I’m not all that interested about the cloud ( cloudy days mean rain was coming, and getting wet on the way to work rather than sleeping cozyly in bed ) but since there was nothing to do, I just tagged along with my bunch of ex-colleagues who were there too all the way from Melbourne.

DAT302 Developer features in SQL Server 2008 R2 this was an interesting one, at least for me if not the majority. Some pointers for me to take away/research on:

• dacpac ( or also called SQL server data tier application in VS2010)
• T-SQL merge, grouping sets, sparse columns
• model first/code first (new!) / database first

ARC307 Domain Driven Development, Domain Events & Unit Testing I was floating on this one, it was a good presentation with a very catchy case scenario, but I just couldn’t understand. Nevertheless, took some keywords with me to do research on.

WEB 308 There is no web: HTML5 Offline, NoSQL and MVC3 too full to even find a seat, I only had the option of standing, but given my recent fainting experience and failing to go to the doc I had to pass this. Tried the Hands on Lab, and again, too slow to run.

DEV203 Over the fence – Designer Developer Workflow this was a talk on the problems they faced working as a team (developer vs designer). I like how Expression Blend works. Heard that the price is pretty too! More to investigate on that one whether we have the funding to buy it.

WEB305 Javascript with a view – Advancing Client Side Code again this was a good one, but probably given that I haven’t done much Javascript in the past, couldn’t grasp it fully. It was cool to see Knockout though

ARC205 Hitchhiker’s Guide to Technical Leadership if I had 5 stars, I’ve give all of them to this. It was a very inspiring talk about becoming a leader, and had key pointers to the questions that I have in mind ( long term goal ). Some of the key points were mentioned before by my mom when I was at the start of my career, and it was a refreshing time to hear it again. What speaks to the heart touches the heart. I went teary on this talk. I had jot down several items on this but I won’t post it here, its too good that you would have to get the slides/video from the official site.

DEV411 The Future of C#: Good Things Come to Those Who ‘Await’ again, overflowing room…heard that this was pretty good

That’s it! It was a pretty intensive back-to-back 3 days for me, and I immensely miss my bed at home, but I had a great time catching up with my ex-colleagues (rare opportunity), meeting new people from different places/line of business/personalities. I definitely got something out of TechEd, and I certainly hope that I would be able to attend future TechEds.

Why PDB files are important in your build

 

 

 

 

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2453841/how-to-turn-off-pdb-generation-and-vshost-for-all-release-builds
• http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2009/05/11/pdb-files-what-every-developer-must-know.aspx

 

 

 

 

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