Little Architecture Huddle

"ORM users have grown accustomed to thinking in terms of .NET and LINQ, forgetting the specifics of particular databases, differences in their functionality and effectiveness of certain SQL-constructions. In this article, we shall briefly discuss some of the problems that the user may face in the process of developing an application for Entity Framework (EF), which is meant to interact with Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite rather than Microsoft SQL Server. I hope this will be useful both for users who create an EF-application for these databases for the first time as well as for those who create an application that must support interaction with multiple databases, i.e., SQL Server and Oracle. As examples of implementing EF-providers for databases other than SQL Server, we shall use Devart ADO.NET providers."

" Howard Lewis Ship talks about Clojure, a language more concise, testable, and readable than Java, letting the developer to focus on his work rather than a verbose syntax. "

"Gabriel Schenker's excellent series of posts on "How we got rid of the database" offers a great insight on the benefits of a CQRS/ES application. One of the problems often seen with designing user interfaces that introduce eventual consistency into the mix is how to present this new paradigm to the end user. But whether we've thought or not, eventual consistency is all around us, as Gabriel points out in a few examples:"

"There are sufficient videos available in the video repositories provided by YouTube and Vimeo to make it difficult locating the good ones. In addition, not all of them are professionally produced. However, InfoQ.com could identify some pearls which are worthwhile watching. We have reviewed what we found and tried to figure out the interesting ones. But, of course, such activities are always driven by the author's taste."

Udi Dahan shows you how to use the fabulous NServiceBus to provide reliable messaging using both a request/response and publish/subscribe architecture. He shows how much easier it is to use NServiceBus than to use WCF for reliable messaging.

"Join us for a Scrum Safari in South Africa this September. It will be a unique opportunity to be exposed to like mindedScrum and Agile practitioners. Come along and spend some time with the big 5."

Best books on Design patterns - anyone read Head First Design Patterns?

" Julie Lerman is recognized as the foremost expert outside of Microsoft on Microsoft's ADO.NET Entity Framework."

"2 Want to build a successful web app? Then it's time to Get Real. Getting Real is a smaller, faster, better way to build software. Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing."

"State machines. State charts. Automata. Whatever name you may have heard them called, they are a great tool for some situations."

"Socket.IO aims to make realtime apps possible in every browser and mobile device, blurring the differences between the different transport mechanisms. It's care-free realtime 100% in JavaScript."

"Imagine a world where you don't have to worry about authentication. Imagine instead that all requests to your application already include the information you need to make access control decisions and to personalize the application for the user. "

"This post reflects on the steps I needed to perform to create my first Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) application from zero to Hello World. It can serve as a bootstrap for starting developing Claims-Aware ASP.NET application using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). "

"In todays programming IDEs, web development and JavaScript were little more than an afterthought. With their roots dating back to the 90's, they haven't adjusted to the current needs of internet application development, they are difficult to extend and they use far too many resources. Cloud9 is a state-of-the-art IDE that runs in your browser and lives in the cloud, allowing you to run, debug and deploy applications from anywhere, anytime. A complete game-changer that will change the way we develop applications forever."

"A large number of the world's applications manipulate money values. Here is a convenient, high-performance money structure for the CLR which handles arithmetic operations, currency types, formatting, and careful distribution and rounding without loss."

"Why are so many sites vulnerable to these well-known holes? Probably because it's insanely hard for programmers to solve the fundamental "strings problem" at the heart of these vulnerabilities. The problem itself is easy to understand, but we humans aren't equipped to carry out the solution. Simply put, we just plain suck at keeping a bazillion different strings straight in our heads, let alone consistently and reliably rendering their interactions safe whenever they cross paths in a modern web application. It's easy to say, "just escape the darn things," but it's hard to get it right, every single time."

"Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality via WebSockets to web and mobile apps."

"In the world of software management there exists a dread place called "dependency hell." The bigger your system grows and the more packages you integrate into your software, the more likely you are to find yourself, one day, in this pit of despair."

"vFabric SQLFire is a memory-oriented, shared-nothing distributed data management system designed for applications that demand high speed, scalability and availability."

"Thanks to the NoSQL movement, data storage solutions are no longer a solved problem. Many are working hard to build new storage solutions, and even more are willing to use them. On the flip side, if you are a programmer or a solution architect who wants a data storage solution for your application, you have to face the daunting task of weighing and understanding the tradeoffs associated with the application and make a decision. This article explores the data needs of end user applications and various tradeoffs. It provides guidelines on the criteria for selecting data storage choices enabling the architects and developers to make an informed decision."