Little Architecture Huddle

"In many conversations, and in many comments here, you hear phrases like "well that's not really suited to DDD" or "DDD isn't the best fit for that problem". You even see those kind of comments on my blog, and often they are posted by me."

"As a book and methodology, DDD is an excellent way to approach complex software problems, and make them far more understandable and manageable. As a buzzword, DDD is in danger of being corrupted like many other good software practices."

"Udi and I agree on probably 95% of what we talk about, one of the places that we have differing opinions is in the use of Event Sourcing I use the term as described previously to mean the rebuilding of objects based on events, not the definition that is currently on the bliki. To me this is an important distinction and I figured it would be worthwhile to write a post on why I feel the way I do, I explained parts of it in the previous post about CQRS and Event Sourcing but I wanted to talk not just about how the patterns are symbiotic but also some of the other reasons I use event sourcing."

"How does mocking benefit me? That's a question I hear a lot as I travel around the world giving talks. So before we dive into how to use a mocking tool like JustMock Free Edition, let's discuss why this is important and the benefit that mocking provides over other techniques like Fakes and Stubs."

" Siddharth Anand overviews Netflix's business model, then he explains why they chose Amazon AWS, and how they moved their data into the cloud using a NoSQL solution. "

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.

" If you develop any serious software, I'm sure you're tired of manual steps required to collaborate among the various tools involved in the process of Agile software development. You need to take a hard look at IBM's Rational Team Concert (RTC) for its ability to facilitate collaboration among the multitude of tools development shops use for managing requirements, stories, code, builds, tests, deployments, issues, defects and all of the various threads that run through a large software development effort. Hint: RTC has legendary Eclipse pedigree."

"It's fair to say that the mere mention of the word REST causes polarisation in people. For a while REST struggled against the WS-* wave and then appeared to have surmounted that obstacle only to start to fall fowl of those people who believe that there is a benefit to be found within REST but perhaps not as much as others might like to believe. One of the main advocates against buying in to the totality of what "RESTafarians" believe is Jean-Jacques Dubray, who recently published an article on what he calls unREST. As JJ begins:"

"Mark Seemann, author of Dependency Injection in .NET, talks to us about the differences between DI and Service Locators and the importance of having a Composite Root. He also touches on how these all relate back to the SOLID principals of object oriented design."

"Agile development starts to build before the outcome is fully understood, ad­justs designs and plans as empirical knowledge is gained while building, trusts the judgment of those closest to the problem, and encourages continual col­laboration with the ultimate consumers. Architecture establishes a technol­ogy stack, creates design patterns, enhances quality attributes, and communicates to all interested parties. The combination of these two spaces is agile architecture - an approach that uses agile techniques to drive toward good architecture. Successful agile architecture requires an architect who understands agile de­velopment, interacts with the team at well-defined points, influences them using critical skills easily adapted from architectural experience with other approaches, and applies architectural functions that are independent of project methodology."

"There is a popular design for a database that requires a built-in audit-trail of amendments and additions, where data is never deleted, but merely superseded by a later version. Whilst this is conceptually simple, it has always made for complicated SQL for reporting the latest version of data. Alex joins the debate on the best way of doing this with an example using an indexed view and the filtered index."

"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."