Little Architecture Huddle

" Expanding on the topic of "are you kidding me"... one of the MOST PREVALENT problems I see today is the dreaded "GUIDs as PKs" problem. However, just to be clear, it's not [as much of a] problem that your PRIMARY KEY is a GUID as much as it is a problem that the PRIMARY KEY is probably your clustering key. They really are two things BUT the default behavior in SQL Server is that a PRIMARY KEY uses a UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX to enforce entity integrity. So, I thought I'd take this post to really dive into why this is a problem and how you can hope to minimize it. "

"User Story is suitable for describing what user needs, but not what user does and how system reacts to user actions within different contexts. It basically gives product team a way to quantify their output and let their boss know that they are doing their job. As a developer, you can't write code from user stories because you have no clue on what is the sequence of user actions and system reactions, what are the validations, what APIs to call and so on. As a QA, you can't test the software from user stories because it does not capture the context, the sequence of events, all possible system reactions. User stories add little value to dev lifecycle. It only helps product team understand how much work they have to do eventually and it helps finance team get a view on how much money people are talking about. But to UI designers, solution designers, developers, they are nothing but blobs of highly imprecise statements that leave room for hundreds of questions to be answered. The absence of "Context" and "Cause and Effect", and the imprecise way of saying "As a...I want... so that..." leaves room for so many misinterpretations that there's no way development team can produce software from just user stories without spending significant time all over again analysing the user stories. Software, and the universe eventually, is all about Cause and Effect. The Cause and Effect is not described in a user story. "

" The Xcoordination Application Space is a small framework to make writing asynchronous and distributed applications easier. It´s based on the concept of Space Based Computing which revolves around the notion of autonomous functional units communicating only indirectly and possibly in a stateful manner."

" Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a managed code library, a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL), accessible from any language targeting the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CCR addresses the need of service-oriented applications to manage asynchronous operations, deal with concurrency, exploit parallel hardware and deal with partial failure. It enables the user to design applications so that the software modules or components can be loosely coupled; meaning they can be developed independently and make minimal assumptions about their runtime environment and other components. This approach changes how the user can think of programs from the start of the design process and deals with concurrency, failure and isolation in a consistent way."

"From time to time I hear people asking what value of test coverage (also called code coverage) they should aim for, or stating their coverage levels with pride. Such statements miss the point. Test coverage is a useful tool for finding untested parts of a codebase. Test coverage is of little use as a numeric statement of how good your tests are."

Awesome article! "The most exciting engineering challenges lie on the boundary of theory and the unknown. Not so unknown that they're hopeless, but not enough theory to predict the results of our decisions. Systems at this boundary often rely on emergent behavior - high-level effects that arise indirectly from low-level interactions."

"C# is a great programming language, but there's still a bevy of features in other programming languages that I often wish were in C#. I'm doing quite a bit of work in F# nowadays, and I thought it would be fun to jot down a few F# features that I really miss when I come back to C#."

" Performance is a topic of increasing importance in the software industry. Today performance engineers and architects as well as operations people have to ensure that complex application landscapes works seemlessly and problems are resolved fast and with minimal effort. "

"Do you feel that estimating the documentation effort required for a project is nothing short of predicting the future? This view is strengthened when the estimates are inaccurate and the project is plagued with variance in scope and delays in delivery."

"We thank everyone who joined us for Jeff Sutherland's presentation on the Secrets of High Quality Development which is now available on-demand for those who may have missed it. Below, Jeff has answered some of your questions that we did not have time for during the live event. We hope you find it valuable. Please feel free to ask any additional questions in the comments. "

"Domain Driven Design (DDD) is an approach of how to model the core logic of an application. The term itself was coined by Eric Evans in his book "Domain Driven Design". The basic idea is that the design of your software should directly reflect the Domain and the Domain-Logic of the (business-) problem you want to solve with your application. That helps understanding the problem as well as the implementation and increases maintainability of the software."

"I'll let you in on a secret: I don't care what letter you put in front of "DD." I don't care so much about how code is written or the ins-and-outs of software development. It's not because I don't realize how incredibly important it is - it's because what I care most about is the value delivered. How can what you do save me time, money and/or frustration? I'm smart enough to know that without you - the incredibly talented member of the development team - my life will go into a tailspin. Nothing will work. I realize and appreciate that what you develop creates value for me."

"This new toolset and approach will revolutionize the way individuals and organizations: design, build and deploy their repeatable solutions by capturing, incorporating and scaling-out their best practices, knowledge and expertise to increase the consistency, predictability, supportability and maintenance of solutions they deliver. "

"IDEAL CHALK mnemonic acronym and mnemonic images for Object Oriented Principles"

" Jon Skeet loves to hack .NET. He went spelunking into how the new await keyword (part of the new Async CTP) works with the Parallel Task Library in .NET 4.0 and came up with his own implementation of it. This is part one of at least a two-part series. "

"This site has been setup to replace the creaking and aging site at dddstepbystep.com, which for all it's plus points, was proving impossible to maintain. Sorry Community Server you had to go!"

"if(dev) is the vNext.org home page and main blog about whats hot now in the dev world from HTML5 and Android to win8 and Phone7. Want to know what everyone else is into? Trying to stay a breast of the current technologies, then if(dev) is the one blog source for you."

"SisoDb is a document-oriented db-provider for Sql-Server written in C#. It lets you store object graphs of POCOs without having to configure any mappings. Each entity is treated as an aggregate root and will get separate tables created on the fly."

"I am a believer in the value of testing. However not all tests are equal, and actually not all tests provide value at all. Raise your hand if you've ever seen (unit) tests that tested every corner case of trivial piece of code that's used once in a blue moon in an obscure part of the system. Raise your other hand if that test code was not written by human but generated."

"Based on DbDeploy, the popular Java version, DbDeploy.Net 2 is written using modern .net technologies and provides support for MsBuild and command line execution."