Little Architecture Huddle

"If you´ve read my previous posts about why I deem WCF more of a problem than a solution and how I think we should switch to asynchronous only communication in distributed application, you might be wondering, how this could be done in an easy way."

"SafePeak is a plug-and-play Dynamic Database Caching Solution, designed to improve data access performance for Applications built on SQL Server. It offloads the read queries and stored procedures which perform "Select" by dynamically caching in-memory result sets, thereby reducing read response time and overall database load."

"SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability and real-time analytics along with flexible APIs that make custom integration a breeze."

"We've all seen the statistics[1], and likely experienced first-hand, the reality of project failure. The majority of software projects continue to be classified as failures. In thinking about this situation we can see that there are a few different ways in which a project can fail (clearly this is not an exhaustive list!):"

" I would be willing to place a bet that most computer programmers have, on multiple occasions, expressed an opinion about the desirability of certain kinds of type systems in programming languages. Contrary to popular conception, that's a great thing! Programmers who care about their tools are the same programmers who care about their work, so I hope the debate rages on. "

"Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose. You'll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features."

"Bad data always seems to appear when, and where, one least expects it. Sam explains the great value of a defensive approach based on constraints to any team that is developing an application in which the data has to be exactly right, and where bad data could cause consequential severe financial damage. It is perhaps better seen as creating a test-driven database"

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."

"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."

" 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."

" 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."

"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. "

" 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. "

"The data-quality solution provided by Data Quality Services (DQS) enables a data steward or IT professional to maintain the quality of their data and ensure that the data is suited for its business usage. DQS is a knowledge-driven solution that provides both computer-assisted and interactive ways to manage the integrity and quality of your data sources. DQS enables you to discover, build, and manage knowledge about your data. You can then use that knowledge to perform data cleansing, matching, and profiling. You can also leverage the cloud-based services of reference data providers in a DQS data-quality project."

"Do you need to get your Java-based and .NET-based components to work together? JNBridgePro allows you to connect anything Java to anything .NET, anywhere: whether your components are running in the same process, across a network, or in the cloud. JNBridgePro's high-performance bridging architecture removes the complexities of cross-platform interop; you can generate a solution within a day - instead of weeks. "

"Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs."

"What is the culture game? It is a game you win by upgrading your company culture to value continuous organizational learning. Because of the current pace of change, organizations that learn fast can repeatedly outflank and outperform their so-called peers. New companies can seemingly come out of nowhere to develop and dominate new opportunities and prosper. The pace of change bestows nearly immediate rewards on the most adaptive company cultures. To be adaptive as an organization, that organization must intentionally engage in continuous learning. Organizational learning is by no means random but rather, a highly intentional act. Getting there is a game. . . and culture is the name of the game."

"Come hear how Code Contracts provides a set of tools for design-by-contract programming and how Pex is an advanced unit-testing tool that uses automated program exploration to intelligently create unit tests with high code coverage. See how they work together so that your code has fewer defects. Learn about new features for Code Contracts including automatic documentation generation, call-site checking for components and reference assemblies for the .NET Framework and for Pex including a light-weight mocking framework, improved support for large code bases, and more thorough test input generation."

"distributed-computingWe've had a lot of success applying the principles and practices of the Advanced Distributed Systems Design course into our project and Udi Dahan asked if I could shed some more light on how things played out for us, so here it is."

"This is a case study that describes how Kanban and lean development techniques were used to rescue a distressed project."