Software Development

Performance Tips for VS2010

I found out today that, if you go to Help >> Troubleshooting in VS2010 (SP1), you’ll get lots of cool performance recommendations. You can also see these at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/e
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Posted On Tuesday, March 29, 2011 12:52 PM | Feedback (0)

Azure Free for 30 Days

I’m not the first to post this, by any means. However, you can try Azure for 30 days, free of charge. Details are at http://bit.ly/CRAzurePass. You’ll need to use promotion code DPCE01 (that’s a “zero” not an “o”)
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Posted On Sunday, March 27, 2011 4:32 PM | Feedback (0)

Azure WCF Service Errors

WCF services under Azure have a nasty habit of not really telling you what you need to know. Having fought through this – and having been challenged to find exactly what I needed in a Google search, I thought I’d add some more specific info here. Before I do, let me say thanks to Steve Marx, whose blog posts and forum answers pointed me in the right direction. Here are the exceptions that surfaced: ConfigurationErrorsException: Could not create Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diag...
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Posted On Sunday, March 27, 2011 4:20 PM | Feedback (0)

Architectural Renovation?

Mere minutes after I posted on “architectural refactoring,” Keith Nicholas has commented about the unsuitability of the term. He said: you'd be better off calling it "evolutionary design" The dilution of the word refactoring is disturbing, there's a certain rigor to "factorization" which shouldn't destroy the product. refactoring != a cool way to say "I'm gonna change stuff" There’s a fair bit to be said on this, so I thought I’d add another post rather than try to reply in an undersized comment...
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Posted On Monday, July 12, 2010 9:29 PM | Feedback (4)

New York City, Here I Come!!

I’m delighted to reveal that I’ve been accepted to speak at the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) IT Architecture Conference (ITARC) in New York City, September 22-24th. I’ll be speaking on effective architecture refactoring… or, in other words, telling people about the mistakes I made, in the hopes that they won’t have to repeat them. For those in NYC, this is well worth attending. The keynotes will be delivered by some people you may have heard of: John Zachman, Scott Ambler,...
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Posted On Monday, July 12, 2010 8:45 PM | Feedback (0)

Architectural Refactoring… Why Now?

You’ll notice for the next little while, I’m going to be talking about architectural refactoring. These posts will be a reflection on the past couple years as a software architect, specifically centered around what some people call “brownfield” development. That is, taking something that is in a less than ideal state, and improving it… not starting from scratch as in new (or “greenfield”) development. Leaving aside philosophical discussions about whether all software development is “brownfield” or...
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Posted On Monday, July 12, 2010 8:23 PM | Feedback (1)

Architectural “Refactoring” – Part 1 of N

I’m in a bit of an odd position, in some ways. CCI brought me on as a “software architect” a little over two years ago. That role wasn’t really defined – in fact, I got to spend several months doing what I felt would be a good use of my time, and then I wrote my own job description. (Perhaps that’s not exactly what other people remember, but it’s sure how things felt to me.) Like anything, this approach has benefits and drawbacks. On the plus side, I was empowered to go where the smoke was – to find...
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Posted On Monday, July 12, 2010 8:13 PM | Feedback (0)

Agile Like Jazz

(I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally...
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Posted On Wednesday, May 26, 2010 9:03 AM | Feedback (2)

RemoveHandler Issues with Custom Events

This is a case of things being more complicated that I thought they should be. Since it took a while to figure this one out, I thought it was worth explaining and putting all of the pieces to the answer in one spot. Let me set the stage. Architecturally, I have the notion of generic producers and consumers. These put items onto, and remove items from, a queue. This provides a generic, thread-safe mechanism to load balance the creation and processing of work items in our application. Part of the IProducer(Of...
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Posted On Tuesday, May 04, 2010 11:37 AM | Feedback (2)

IASA ITARC – Denver May 6th

The Denver chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is holding an IT Architect Regional Conference (ITARC) in Denver on May 6th. The speaker list for this conference is amazing. Paul Rayner, Dave McComb, Randy Kahle, Peter Provost, Randy Stafford, George Fairbanks – all great speakers, and from Colorado. Brandon Satrom (who also happens to be the president of the IASA Austin chapter) will also be speaking, as will some other heavy hitters (for example, Ted Farrell, Chief...
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Posted On Tuesday, April 06, 2010 12:40 PM | Feedback (0)

Microsoft Events Come Back to Fort Collins

It’s been a while since Microsoft MSDN and TechNet events have been in Fort Collins. I’m very pleased to be able to pass on Microsoft’s announcement that on April 21st, these events will be held at the Drake Center as half-day events. A huge “thank you” to Erin Dolan, Joe Shirey and Daniel Egan for making this happen! Join us for an in-person event you won’t want to miss! No matter what your role, you’ll find an event series that fits what you do—and what the 2010 products from Microsoft have to...
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Posted On Thursday, April 01, 2010 10:05 AM | Feedback (0)

VS2010 Training Kit

With the release of the VS2010 Release Candidate, a new edition of the training kit has also been released. Some of the features: 17 presentations, 22 demos, 32 hands-on labs. Newly added content includes VB.NET, Office, SharePoint and Application Lifecycle Management
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Posted On Friday, February 12, 2010 3:27 PM | Feedback (1)

Why is “Legacy” a Pejorative?

I had the tremendous privilege in the last couple days to spend time with a bunch of architects at ITARC in NYC. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all… but that’s always the result when I spend a couple days around a bunch of people smarter than me. (Those of you who know me know that’s not too hard to accomplish… but just to drop some names, some of the people who were there – and accessible – included Grady Booch, Eric Evans, Len Bass, Roger Sessions, Angela Yochem, Bill Imnon). One of...
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Posted On Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:15 AM | Feedback (0)

Oracle + Azure = Crash and Burn

One of the downsides to Azure is that it’s error messages need a LOT of work. I just installed the July CTP of Azure. After doing so, even the simplest cloud project would fail. I’m talking “Create New Project” then F5… wait 30 seconds… bomb. I kept getting the ubiquitous “Role instances did not start within the time allowed. Please try again. If you continue to encounter this behavior please try shutting down the Development Fabric." message. Nice and descriptive. Digging into the problem, it looked...
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Posted On Monday, September 07, 2009 11:06 PM | Feedback (0)

Craftsmanship vs Engineering

I've had a number of conversations lately where I argued that software development is much more akin to craftsmanship than to engineering. This usually leads to a lively discussion, especially in an informal context. Seems I'm not the only one thinking this way. Uncle Bob (Robert C Martin) posted a link to the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship. It'll be interesting to see what degree of impact this has on the development community...
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Posted On Monday, March 09, 2009 1:59 PM | Feedback (0)

Alt.NET Seattle -- Subversive Agile

What techniques can you use to get agile practices into a waterfall project/legacy code base? Approaches Small greenfield project smaller, greenfield project started with source control (moved from Source Safe to Subversion) once SVN was in place, other tools were able to be used starting to do CI (TeamCity is free for small teams; can target multiple build mechanisms) then the door for NANT (or other unit testing) is open; not only does the code compile, but nothing is broken integration tests can...
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Posted On Saturday, February 28, 2009 12:57 PM | Feedback (0)

ALT.NET Seattle -- Keynote [Ward Cunningham]

I have to admit that when I heard there was a keynote this morning, I was somewhat taken about. The very notion seems to be antithetical to the notion of Open Spaces. On the other hand, getting the chance to hear Ward Cunningham speak was well worth the "architectural purity" of the organizational principles. Intro (Alan Stevens) referred to Channel 9 video with Ward Cunningham being interviewed by Scoble WC: "the only thing I'm sure of is that [the future] will involve cloud computing" AboutUs.org...
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Posted On Saturday, February 28, 2009 11:13 AM | Feedback (0)

Putt's Law

Came across this great quote last week: "Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand."
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Posted On Wednesday, February 25, 2009 7:19 PM | Feedback (0)

Using Exception Handling to Retry an Operation

I got the following question via e-mail: I want to catch timeout errors when I execute a script. Catching the error is easy, but I then want to retry 3 times. In VB6 I could just resume a command when I caught the error. How can I do this with vb 2008 using try..catch? This is a case where two different techniques come into play. The first is using a number of Catch statements to allow you to catch specific types of exceptions. The second is to make essentially a recursive call to the function, with...
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Posted On Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:37 AM | Feedback (2)

Accidental Perplexity

I was discussing accidental complexity with some co-workers after reading Dave Bouwman's recent post. One of them coined the phrase "accidental perplexity," which we quickly defined as "when you look at a code base and can't figure out what on earth the developer was thinking." This is especially bad when the core reason for the perplexity is in the architecture...
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Posted On Tuesday, December 09, 2008 2:40 PM | Feedback (0)

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