Archive for category Architecture

QCon London 2012 – Retrospective

After couple of weeks of letting things settle a bit after QCon London 2012 has anything stuck with me? Have I learned anything? Was it worth? What did I learn and did it prompt me to extend my knowledge in certain areas?

My response would be: Hell yeah! to all of the above – I learned loads, met lots of interesting people, exchanged ideas with people working on different projects, in differently organized teams – and it did prompt me to action! My TODO list is gigantic with things to check out, try out, read, consider as an alternative, question. Quite frankly, that’s what you want after a conference, what would be the point going there and come back with nothing to say/think about.

We had beautiful view from the venue

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Opinions on Tech Ed Europe 2010

Once again wintery Berlin is the scene for yet another adventure deep in the bowels of Microsoft. Yesterday we discovered about the Windows Phone 7, the future of C# and Workflow 4. Today I was treated to more phone stuff and (amongst others) a hard core OS lecture.
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CPM Toolkit; Lessons Learned

It’s been a year since we first launched the very first edition of the CPM Toolkit into the Java world. We had spent many months developing the Toolkit and were already using it for managing and measuring application performance during the development life cycle for our clients with great success.

One year after launching the CPM Toolkit we have learned some hard lessons.

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Problems with Consuming many WCF Services in One Application

Recently, while developing a Web Application with a large development team, we initially encountered problems with keeping the many WCF interfaces consistent between the Client and Server applications. Because of parallel development, both Client and Server applications developed a sort of race condition. Client Application’s were typically built against older generations of the WCF interface. It was difficult to ensure that each locally developed Client Interface matched the current, deployed Service Interface.
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Pulling the all nighter ….. no more!

As technical presales lead at DSI I am often involved in deep technical discussions with prospective customers around software development, and I want to highlight a recent campaign that didn’t exactly go the way I thought it would. Let me set the stage. As our sales guy was taking the lead in prospecting and talking with developers and architects about “Continuous Performance Management” (CPM), I was there for support in case our sales guy ran into some difficult questions. As technical presales you need to know when to step in or step back on these calls. After arming our sales guys with the necessary information I sat back and waited for questions that never arrived. I was ready to talk about reliability, performance, quality assurance and Continuous Integration. What I was hearing instead was developers pulling all nighters when the code was not performing in production like it was in development.

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Documenting Code

The most important thing I can stress here is that I truly believe in the value of good documentation and that this article only addresses what I believe is a flaw in some documentation strategies.

Usually a software document begins its life as an accurate description of what a system is doing and how it’s doing it. As the software evolves, the documentation doesn’t always evolve with it and sometimes in fact the divergence between what the software does and what the documentation says it does, becomes a problem. Now I know in theory that documents should be maintained but the reality is that this doesn’t always happen… In a perfect world software would be right first time and every time and requirements would never change, sadly this isn’t a perfect would.
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Maven2: The Devil You Know

Maven is great, isn’t it? You just install it, download your favourite OSS project, type in mvn install and your jar file comes out the other end. Magic. It gets you thinking: Building should always be this easy, right? Your company should be using Maven to manage all its builds. Push-button builds could be just one download away. Right?

Think again.

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Continuous Performance Management in Practise

Over the last week or so you will have seen a couple of blog entries from my colleagues on how we are implementing Continuous Performance Management in our existing CI process and how CI and Application Performance Management are drawing closer and closer.

It’s time to start putting some meat on the bones of Continuous Performance Management and introduce HelloCPM and show how CPM and be integrated into an existing Java module using ANT as it’s build mechanism. Our CPM implementation can work with ANT or Maven, but for the sake of this introduction, we will focus on ANT.

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Application Virtualization – how cool is it ?

I was speaking with a fellow techie the other day beside the virtual water-cooler (amazing this cyberspace) – he was really excited about the latest virtualization technology, namely Application Virtualization. The conversation went something like this:

Virtual App Guy: The cool thing is the hardware is abstracted; the application is abstracted from the underlying hardware, so it will work on different machines seamlessly.
TG: Fantastic, just like Java.
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.NET Interfaces in brief

Recently I was asked by a colleague of mine about using interfaces, and the advantages associated with them. I went on a long speil extolling interfaces and I am sure bored the poor lad to tears. Now I intend on doing the same to yourselves by extolling the virtues of using interfaces here on my blog. Read the rest of this entry »

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