New and Notable 118
We have a new addition to our house - a 60 pound 2-year old English Bulldog!
Agile/TDD
- The big news of the day is my good friend Jamie Cansdale's TestDriven.Net - Check here for download. To say this product is indispensable is an understatement. I sit inside Visual Studio all day writing NUnit tests and the right click Run Tests has saved me thousands of key strokes. The right-click "Test With Debugger" is lifesaver in the very few times I use the debugger. Jamie has got some really cool new features like Repeat Test and Reflector Integration! I don't know of anyone personally who already doesn't have this tool but you owe to yourself to get it if you are one of the few without it. BTW, I have had the benefit of having Jamie's help and support many times during IM sessions and he is a real asset to the community. He has given thousands of hours so I support him fully in trying to cover support costs by having his Professional and Enterprise Editions. I highly encourage you if it you are using it in your company to buy Professional and Enterprise licenses.
Architecture/SOA
- Nick Malik writes well on the benefits of Enterprise Architecture "Rocking Your World"
- Eric Newcomber on Incremental Approach to SOA Infrastructure
- Tomas points to a bunch of discussions on WCF and Duplex Channels and support for long running transactions. Before, I get into that, I see WCF Duplex Channels as a real useful feature for doing certain types of architectures and applications. For instance, Steve and myself have discussed it many times for a product we want to have in our banking/financial environment to allow direct inter-bank communications. This would be very different than the SWIFT type support. But the concern that always stops us is the security one and that not many banks (or customers) would want another firewall port opened up for the return channel.
- In that same post, but I needed to call it out separate, Tomas rightfully says, "I'd say SSSB is a good match only as long as the long running tasks you're going to be executing are purely database driven and can be executed completely within the database," in response to Harry liking Service Broker so much. Talk about a narrow edge case. That's way I never really got excited or cared about Service Broker. Its a narrow solution to a special edge case when everything is database driven and can be executed totally inside the database. That's the old Microsoft Data-Driven Architecture for sure. Me, I'd rather have a rich Domain-Driven architecture most of the time. Then if you have Oracle databases in your architecture too, where does it leave you? Nowhere.
- Harry is knocked out by the custom authentication ease in WCF. So is I. I did something similar a ways back with our STS/Kerberos authentication and ability to move to SAML tokens and WSFederationHttpBinding
Data/LINQ/ADO.NET