This weekend is my Army Reserve drill weekend for the month of January, and I finally have some time to catch up on blog reading. Most of the unit is in the field, but I’m at the HQ because I’m outprocessing and preparing to go into the IRR. I did a year stint in Iraq, and I can move on from the military as a proud veteran.
Anyway, here are some really interesting things happening in the blogosphere:
Blair Jennings comments on Rocky’s TSS article:
This got me thinking. My company has a LOT of large applications, and we are slowly adapting them to communicate with one another. We have used SOD (Service-oriented design) even before web services. Instead of an xml node over http, we use message queues and batch files. Even so, my team’s main application is said to “own” the database, but there are other smaller apps (that we control) that hit the database directly as well. So if there is a bug in one of those apps, then it may affect our larger app because of data corruption. This is really something to think about. It makes me think about the reall need to have an application OWN the database and disallow any other write access. Then if other apps need the data, the owning application could expose services (web service or other) that allow manipulation of the underlying data only after all business rules have been checked (since the same core business layer is actually doing the work).
John Wood provides a great look at C# off-spring, C Omega.
John provides code samples and explanations. Wow, I can see great potential. This might, indeed replace stored procedures because no longer would it be SQL code in a string in C# code, it would be C Omega code compiled running directly against the database connection. Wow, a data tier with a real programming language!! I am of the mind that the only code that should run on the database box is simple stored procedures if any. This would be only CRUD sprocs, no SQL that would require debugging. Any logic needs to be in a business object, not a procedure. OOP. Down with procedures!
Eric Wise gives interesting insight into methods of corporate America that destroys public corporations.
I agreed with a lot of what Eric put out. No pension plan, decreasing medical coverage. Just the term “human resources” irritates me to no end. And the diversity campaigns? I am very upset that of all the interns being hired this summer, the policy is that caucasion men and women are excluded from the internship program. Period. Not hiring whites. As a rule. Staffing will ONLY be hiring non-whites for summer interns. And they call it “diversity”? What a load of crap. If I were the staffers, I’d have applications that didn’t include any demographics. I would decide interviews based on the quality of the resume. C’mon, let’s be fair. Hire the most qualified.
Wolf relates a client who was told that event-driven design was an extension of SOD.
This was a really great article. I like wrapping my head around these design concepts that are being thrown around in discussion. I do think that the terms are getting watered down and business people are starting to use them in meetings when they have no idea what they mean. Or what about when your manager says to the development team: “My only requirement for this application is that it be n-tier and interoperable.” What does that mean, anyway? Sounds like some buzzwords strung into a sentence.
Steve Smith has returned safely from Iraq.
Welcome home, Steve! Glad you back. Wow, what a miracle that you only had to stay over there for 6 months. I was over that for 1 year and 3 days with a 15 month mobilization in total. I know how you feel because I got back from that dustbowl just a couple months before you left. And for everyone reading this: Stopping watch the large media now. They report no good news from Iraq, only bad. And they will try to twist anything to make it sound bad. If you have been keeping up with what is going on, 1300 troops have died so far. Less that any other war in our past. . . less that Houston’s traffic fatalities last year. And the bad guys (Al Quaeda ) are blowing up Iraqis mostly. We can pull out now, and Saddam won’t be able to go back, but Al Quaeda would rule. Would that be a good thing? Anyway, I’m glad you’re back, Steve. Maybe we can swap Hadji stories at Tech Ed!
This Thursday, David W. will be putting on an MSDN event in Austin, TX at the Gateway cinema. The topics will cover ASP.NET, WinForms and Team System. This will be my third event, and David has been kind enough to slip our Austin .Net User Group info into his slide deck.
I have been swamped at work, so I’m a little behind on reading/writing blogs. I’ve been slinging a lot of code. We’re in a testing push toward deployment next month, and we’re setting the foundation for may projects to come with a few shared assemblies. It’s exiting stuff and the first reall OO programming we’ve done as a team. I say that because it seems like our previous .Net projects have used the .Net framework, but we didn’t incorporate OO in our design, just our implementation. I think we’re on a better road now.
On Dec 22, I earned my MCAD.Net credential, and I hope to be MCSD by Tech Ed. I plan on taking the WinForms with C# test next week, and then I’ll just have 70-300 to go. Any book suggestions for 70-300 would be welcome.