Sam Gentile's Blog

My four year old daughter, Heather, had her first ballet recital last night. It was a very proud moment for me. She had to wear a little makeup for the lights and with hair up, she looked beautiful but older and that was emotional. I have some things saved up.

Architecture/Software Design

• I am so tired of people recite the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" quote without knowing what it means. One of the best and practical discussions of performance I have read is Ayende's. I like this, "All of which brings me to the following conclusion, performance tuning in the microseconds is a waste of time until you have profiling data in place, but that doesn't meant that you shouldn't think about performance from the get go. You can code your way out of a lot of things, but an architecture that is inherently slow (for instance, chatty on the network) is going to be very hard to modify later on. That is absolutely not to say that you should consider everything in advance, and I had my greatest performance success by simply batching a few thousands remote calls into a single one, but architecture matters, and that should be considered in advance, and built accordingly. (And no, it doesn't necessitate a Big Architecture Up Front either, although where I would need to scale very high I would spent a while thinking about the way I am going to build the app in advance. Probably with some IT/DBA/Network guys as well, to get a good overview"
• Jeremy continues his series with Build Your Own CAB Part 4 - The Passive View and asks where he should go next.

WCF/SOA

• There has been a great discussion of Durable Messaging lately in the blogsphere and how important it is. I also think its very important and "There is no durable reliable messaging support in WCF." Nick picks up on that and reiterates quite rightly that system reliability requires message durability (WCF immaturity). He also states "Reliability in SOA is HUGE" upon which Harry says, "Not just huge, or Huge but HUGE. But for my taste, he could emphasis it even more – HUGE – and still not capture just how important I think durable messaging is." Amen to all of that.
• Steve Maines continues his WCF Orcas series Zen of the Web Programming Model (Part 3)
• Richard Turner has posted an updated version of the source for
the WCF Magic8Ball Sample

MAC OS/X

• The biggest news of that week as far as I am concerned is the announcement of the next version of Parallels for the Mac - Version 3. Check this out: "SmartSelect: A wicked cool new feature that lets you assign any OS X or Windows application as the default for any Mac or Windows file type. This means that when you right-click on any file in either OS and selects “open with”, SmartSelect automatically populates the recommended application list with compatible applications from both operating systems. 3D Graphics: You asked for it, and we delivered. Kick around your favorite Windows-only OpenGL and DirectX games and apps in a virtual machine on your Mac, without shutting down OS X!" Oh ya, that's what I'm talking about!!
• Lifehacker has the Top Ten MAC OS/X Tweaks
• Here is 52 Ways to Speed Up Your Mac

Tools

• Scott Hanselman has two great VM posts: Here's a great list of tips on Optimzing Performance with Virtual PC (VPC)  and Virtual Machine CPU Performance

The Ruby Discussion

• Scott gets to tell us all why Ruby is the ***, if you didn't know already
• He also had the original Is Microsoft loosing the Alpha Geeks post
• Good news from John Lam on Microsoft's intentions with IronRuby

I'm rocking out to Band On The Run by Paul McCartney And Wings from the album Band On The Run (Remastered) (Bonus Tracks)