New and Notable 150!!
This is it, the big 150! The first New and Notable was on May 19, 2003, (my first post was March 29, 2002) and I paid homage to the master, "I have always admired Mike's ability to look at the world out there and put it all into one great post, The Daily Grind. While I can't pretend to have Mike's writing ability, I would like to start moving to something similar instead of multiple seperate posts."
I wish I had the discipline of Mike because if I posted daily I would be well towards 1000 instead of 150-) but hey I'm pretty proud of my record. I love this community and in the last 25 years this community (and Microsoft) have been real good to me and my family. I hope that what I have been picking here has been of good use to the community to keep you informed on key .NET activities as well as the architectural and design side. Thus, I go forth and pick:
Entity Framework, ADO.NET 3, Orcas, MVP Summit
- One of the best writers in the community today is certainly Jeremy Miller. His latest post, MVP Summit Recapped: Linq for Entities, MonoRail, and Shameless Name Dropping, is a fine example of why. In one post, he is able to write quite elequently on complex subjects like the subtle design choices in Entity Framework 3 and why EF 4 will rock your world. He is able to take a technology, stick to his design principles and stand his ground, educating and helping all involved achieve something better than was there before. He certainly wasn't the only one of us doing that but his post really captures the core design principles of no infrastructure code in business logic classes. Infrastructure is Infrastructure, business logic is business logic. I want the same thing: No marker interfaces, no codegen, no partial classes. Just plain "PO" and support for the Unit of Work pattern.
- David Laribee also talks on this area and makes clear that its a vision thing that doesn't really compare to NHibernate which is just OR/M; it's a full EDM with a logical respresentation of the data model and there are multiple places to go from there.
Windows Workflow
- K. Scott Allan captures correctly that I am trying to build a DSL for financial analysts on top of WF. Trying is the operative word. Questions raised in my Part 2 of my Workflow post remain largely that, questions. They were posed to brilliant MVPs in the BizTalk area and Microsoft employees and for the most part became "you can't do that" or "whoa that's hard." WF is freaking hard, harder than most technologies I have ever tackled and certainly a lot harder than Indigo. One voice in the darkness is the ever brilliant Jon Flanders who sat down in the Building 42 cafeteria with me and rocked my world with his code wizard and sample that implements a custom ServiceHost communicating out of a Workflow. I am allowed to say that John is building this as a public sample (don't ask me for it!) and to poll his blog for news-)
- Even with that, I have reached dead ends. Tomas and I spent all of last Sunday in my hotel room trying to get WF to allow us to create a Composite Custom Activity that represented just "one state" of a collateral margin call. So of course its state driven and event-driven and there's the rub. We tried to take a State activity that had two "event" activities - Send & Waive along with a StateChange activity and make that one activity. No dice. Wouldn't let us without forcing us into writing all this code for a custom designer. And that's just one area where WF is making my life bloody hell right now. Sure, its easy to drag sequential activities on a workflow, send email and do all that trivial ***. Just try putting a whole DSL on it, hosting both the runtime and the designer, and having a very state driven world and your world will suck too
Architecture/CAB/Smart Client
- Carnival of Enterprise Architects #4 is out
- Harry finds joy in adding Data Dude to the tools of VS
- SCBAT Iterations are looking for the right votes on this page. To me, the only real things that count is getting workflow (and guidance), full WCF and then getting CAB migrated to Avalon like yesterday. CAB has to evolve. Without either the ability to swap in a more efficient DI framework and a seemless migration to Avalon, a lot of people are screwed
Avalon/WPF
- Sahil says that Dependency Properties and Routed Events are an "absolute MUST" in learning WPF. He couldn't be more right. Check out his post and Adam Nathan's chapter in his book, IMHO, is the best tackling of these I have seen so far
I'm going to let it go at that as I have wreaked enough havoc for tonight/morning-)