#2782

Composite Application Guidance for WPF with EntLib 4.1

Ade Miller — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:16:50 +0000

I’ve been working on an application that uses Composite Application Guidance for WPF (Prism) and wanted to upgrade to use Enterprise Library 4.1 rather than the 4.0 version that Prism originally shipped against.

Turns out updating this is pretty straightforward (but not trivial)…

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Read the rest of Composite Application Guidance for WPF with EntLib 4.1 (169 words)

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Scaling Agile Up and Out - A Tale From the Trenches

Ade Miller — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:15:58 +0000

Thanks everyone who attended my talk today at Agile Development Practices 2008.

The PDF of the slide deck is available for download and includes some additional speaker notes.

This talk was based on two papers; Agility and the Inconceivably Large and Distributed Agile Development at patterns & practices which include lots more detail I didn’t have time to cover.

The books we based our process at patterns & practices on are listed on our agile showcase page (at the bottom).

The other book I mentioned was “Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Successful Large, Multisite & Offshore Products with Large-Scale Scrum”. It’s not available yet but I wrote about it and how to download a preview chapter here.

In the future I’ll be publishing more related content on my blog and also on the new patterns & practices Agile Development Showcase - http://www.microsoft.com/agile.

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Post tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Florida, Large teams, News & events

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Pat Helland on Green Computing through Sharing

Ade Miller — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Pat Helland gave an awesome keynote last week at the p&p Summit. I wasn’t able to blog about it until today as he gave the same talk at TechEd in Europe yesterday. You can read the abstract here. He got through over sixty slides in an hour so this just covers some of the things that really grabbed me, and a lot of his talk really grabbed me. I’ve been thinking a bit about Green IT since building a low power home server a couple of months back and Pat gave me a load more stuff to think about.

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Read the rest of Pat Helland on Green Computing through Sharing (329 words)

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Visual Source Safe and Distributed Teams

Ade Miller — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:00:35 +0000

One of the questions I got at the p&p Summit after my distributed agile development talk was, how do you use Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS) with distributed teams?

This is an issue because VSS was never written with distribution in mind. The VSS client connects directly to the database file which needs to be on an accessible network share. Doing this over a less than 100% reliable network eventually results in database corruption. Bad news, and doubly bad news when you’re talking about the database that contains all your source code!

Turns out there’s a fix…

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Read the rest of Visual Source Safe and Distributed Teams (97 words)

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Post tags: Best practices, Distributed teams, News & events, Seattle, Visual Studio

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Building a Green Windows Home Server: Fan Configuration

Ade Miller — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:24:21 +0000

Someone asked me exactly how I configured the fans on my WHS to run really quietly. The previous post on this didn’t have sufficient detail so here’s some more wiring information.

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Read the rest of Building a Green Windows Home Server: Fan Configuration (242 words)

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Agile Development Practices 2008 is Next Week

Ade Miller — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:00:37 +0000

As previously noted I’m going to be in Florida next week speaking at Agile Development Practices 2008 on Thursday afternoon (session details). It looks like there’s a great lineup of speakers for the conference… and then there’s me.

Here’s the abstract for my talk…

Scaling Agile Up and Out: A Tale from the Trenches
It seems like everyone wants to scale their agile teams. As projects grow in scope, the agile approach to software development needs to scale up to larger team sizes. Agile also needs to scale out to handle geographically distributed teams as businesses expand into new markets and seek the best talent available globally. These are challenging propositions for many teams.

I’ll be talking about my experiences at Microsoft—scaling agile up on the Visual Studio Tools for Office team and scaling out on the radically distributed teams within the patterns & practices group. I’ll cover some of the approaches we used—some which worked well, some not so well—and shares that the important thing is what was learned and how this new knowledge can be applied successfully to other projects. I’ll also present some successful practices when scaling agile projects as well as some key pitfalls to avoid on your projects.

Hope to see you there!

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Post tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Florida, Large teams, News & events

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The patterns & practices Top Ten

Ade Miller — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:15:46 +0000

John deVadoss and David Hill gave this morning’s keynote at the p&p Summit. They ran through a top ten list of things that p&p will be focusing on moving forward…

Questions - Your feedback is number one
There is a Method - What is the product frame
Working together - You can direct our backlog!
Who is using p&p? - Understand our community
Visual Studio 10 - Getting ready for 10
SharePoint - The road to Dublin
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) - A service bus for BizTalk
Enterprise Library - Cross cutting concerns
The Rich Client - Where to next
Cloud computing - EntLib for the cloud

We really do want feedback from customers on what we’re building, or planning to build. Leave a comment here or on one of the project discussions on our CodePlex communities.

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Application Architecture and the Agile Architecture Method

Ade Miller — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:15:41 +0000

On Tuesday at the p&p Summit in Redmond J.D. Meier talked for the first time about the work he’s been doing on the new Application Architecture Guide 2.0 for p&p. We’ve just released a beta of this on CodePlex and are discussing some of the thinking behind it with the community.

One of the things J.D. talked about was the Agile Architecture Method, which is something that has fallen out of the enormous amount of thinking and research his team has been doing while working on the Guide.

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Read the rest of Application Architecture and the Agile Architecture Method (191 words)

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Post tags: News & events, p&p, pnpsummit2008, Seattle

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Enterprise Service Bus from patterns & practices

Ade Miller — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:00:36 +0000

And just to round out the week, and the p&p Summit Dmitri’s Enterprise Service Bus team have shipped a CTP for ESB version 2.0.

ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP

The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server R2 and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions. The Microsoft ESB Guidance consists of a series of inter-operating components that support and implement a loosely coupled messaging environment that makes it easier to build message-based enterprise applications.

This is the first CTP release of the Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009. It incorporates several modifications and additions compared to the November 2007 release. The following list summarizes these changes.

New Features and Components:

New samples. This version includes the following new samples:
- SSO Configuration provider for Enterprise Library 4.0
- Multiple Web Service Execution Sample
- Exception Handling Service Sample
New ESB Web services. This version includes the following new ESB Web services:
- Generic Itinerary Services ( no itinerary header required)
New core features. This version includes the following new core features:
- Alignment with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 ( Beta )
- ESB Configuration tool
- Centralized itinerary store
- Itinerary resolver components
- Itinerary forwarder pipeline component
- Itinerary selector pipeline component
- Itinerary designer
- Centralized configuration uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Configuration Block
- Centralized caching uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Caching Block
- Multiple service invocation using both messaging and orchestrations
- Itinerary BAM tracking
- Improved ESB Core engine and itinerary execution

Note: This release will be available only for Microsoft BizTalk Server TAP customers at http://connect.microsoft.com/

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SharePoint Guidance from patterns & practices

Ade Miller — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:32:02 +0000

I said we were going to ship some SharePoint guidance “real soon”. It turns out that this means today, right now!

SharePoint Guidance

This guidance helps architects and developers build SharePoint intranet applications. The guidance contains a reference implementation (RI) that demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and lifecycle management challenges. This guidance discusses the following:

Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter.
Implementation examples demonstrated in the RI and in the QuickStarts.
How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
Set up of development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
Managing the application life cycle including upgrade.
Team-based intranet application development.

The following areas are not discussed in this version of the guidance:

Content-oriented sites that use Web content management.
Internet and enterprise-scale SharePoint applications.
Multilingual SharePoint applications.
Scale or security testing of SharePoint applications.

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