"If you keep your data according to its version number, but need to work only with a particular version, what is the best SQL for the job? Which one works best? Which one do you use and when?"

"A motley gang of anarchists, free-love advocates, and banana-rights agitators have hijacked The Love Boat out of Puerto Vallarta and are threatening to sink it in 7 days with all 616 passengers and 327 crew members unless their demands are met. The demand? A million dollars in small unmarked bills, and a GPL implementation of WATFIV, that is, the esteemed Waterloo Fortran IV compiler. (It's surprising how few things the free-love people can find to agree on with the banana-rights people.)"

" Agile was once considered by project management professionals to be a fad. In the 10 years since the agile manifesto was written agile has matured; it has moved from being fringe to being a core methodology and from small software companies to the point where it is used, to some extent, in a majority of enterprise organizations today. Agile isn't a silver bullet though and agile methods need to adapt to the changed context of the enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to examine how project managers can successfully apply agile to their projects in an enterprise context."

"A few months ago, Jimmy Bogard, author of the excellent AutoMapper wrote a great article about Autoprojecting LINQ queries. Now that Jimmy has done all the hard expression tree work, this article extends his example to include caching and simple flattening capabilities and goes on to show it in use in a simple EF 4.1 Code First application."

"Something I've been looking at adding to AutoMapper was the idea of doing automatic query projection in the Select query projection in LINQ statements. One downside of AutoMapper is that projection from domain objects still forces the entire domain object to be queried and loaded. For a lot of read-only scenarios, loading up a tracked, persistent entity is a bit of a waste. And unless you're doing CQRS with read-specific tables, you're doing projection somehow from the write tables."

" Node.js has unleashed a new wave of interest in server side Javascript. In this session, you'll learn how to get productive with node.js by leveraging Connect and Express node middleware. Connect makes it simple to stack layers and build complex web services with minimal effort and maximum reuse. We'll also walk quickly through Express - an easy-to-use framework built on top of Connect that makes development even faster."

"There are currently two schools of thought in developing web services: the traditional, standards-based approach (SOAP) and conceptually simpler and the trendier new kid on the block (REST). The decision between the two will be your first choice in designing a web service, so it is important to understand the pros and cons of the two. It is also important, in the sometimes heated debate between the two philosophies, to separate reality from rhetoric."

"Patterns-Based Engineering: Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns book, by Lee Ackerman and Celso Gonzalez, focuses on how to improve efforts in identifying, producing, managing and consuming patterns - leading to better software delivered more quickly with fewer resources."

" Jeff Patton outlines the concepts behind design thinking: clear problem definition, ideation, iteration, and execution plans that emphasize continuous learning, accompanied by real-life examples. "

" Mike Rozlog discusses the need for software audits, proposing five code reviews that every developer should use: Numerical Literal, String Literal, god Method, Shotgun Surgery and Duplicate Code. "

" Mike Lee considers that a software engineer makes great applications not because he follows good rules but because he has a better way of looking at the world and he learns from experience. "

"If your team develops software through agile methodology, taking a whole-team approach is vital to getting the most out of agile practices. RelatedVendorContent Kanban for Agile Teams 3 Companies Share how they Implemented a more Collaborative Process to Deliver Software Quality Avoiding Mediocrity in Agile Adoption to Produce Tangible ROI Immediately Ten steps to better requirements management The Agile Tester Related Sponsor In today's hyper-competitive world, later may be too late to adopt Agile development and this Roadmap for Success will help you get started. Download "Agile Development: A Manager's Roadmap for Success" now! Whole-team approach - the agile practice in which the entire team works as a unit of generalizing specialists to share responsibility for producing high-quality software - is a kind of "glue" practice: It holds a lot of the other agile practices together. For example, whole-team approach is #1 on Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory's list of "key success factors" for agile testing."

" Kevlin Henney promotes live architecture through refactoring, recovery, re-envisioning, retrospection, re-engineering, repair, rewriting, reduction, reuse, reaction, re-evaluation and remembering. "

"Traditional contract models were designed for commoditized products and services. They are brittle and do not readily embrace change. This is because the products and services are defined upfront, and any change to this definition requires an amendment to the contract, which is usually governed by the change control mechanism. Instead of the change control mechanism embracing change, it is generally regarded as fettering and inhibiting change."

" John Davies addresses some of the difficulties dealing with FIX, FpML, SWIFT and integration in financial services software industry, challenging some of the canonical models existing today. "

"When building larger scale applications, message queues are often very helpful for both distributing and aggregating workloads. Distributed workloads are a natural fit for message queues, simply having multiple readers attached to the same queue is often enough. Aggregation, usually implemented with one reader and multiple writers, is used to bundle lots of small updates into a large block. This facilitates the use of advanced database techniques such as the use bulk inserts instead of individual insert/update statements."

" Ulf Wiger advocates for a programming model change based on the actor model which more accurately reflects old human concurrency patterns that we have used in our daily lives for thousands of years. "

" Stuart Halloway discusses how we use a total control time model, proposing a different one that represents the world more accurately helping to solve some of the concurrency and parallelism problems. "

" I've been hearing from people that have had a great deal of success using the Domain Event pattern and the infrastructure I previously provided for it in Domain Events - Take 2. I'm happy to say that I've got an improvement that I think you'll like. The main change is that now we'll be taking an approach that is reminiscent to how events are published in NServiceBus."