Architecture, software factories, frameworks; terms you may have heard of quite often these days. It is expected that any serious software developer knows exactly what they mean. But many forget that all of these concepts are based on the foundations provided by well-known patterns. These patterns, commonly referred to as Design Patterns, have been written down by gurus like Martin Fowler and Eric Gamma.
Most developers will be able to tell you what a Singleton is, and the Factory pattern shouldn't pose a real problem either. But what do we mean with Separation of Concerns or Dependency Injection? And what about patterns like Command, Bridge, Adapter or Chain of Command.
Want to know more? Then subscribe for the technology session on either the 11th or 25th of October hosted by Dennis Doomen. Using a lot of examples in C#, he will show the purpose of many common patterns, and explain how these are used in many modern frameworks and software factories.
Prerequisites
Experience with C# 2.0 and thorough understanding of the object-oriented principles inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation.
Registration and location
To register, send a mail to Barbara Buitenhuis at barbara@aviva-it.nl. The evening will start at 18:00 with pizza and end around 21:00. It will be held at our office in Leiden:
Haagse Schouwweg 8
2332 KG Leiden
071-5351730
Maybe a bit late, but next Thursday, September 27th, I'll be presenting an open whiteboard session about the Patterns & Practices software factories I've been using in my current customer project. Check out the invitation at DotNED. The invitation is in Dutch, but the presentation will be either in Dutch or English, depending on the audience. This is the same presentation I gave on September 7th and then we had about 20 people. Initially it was meant as an internal presentation, but we got some requests from other developers also. So we decided to open it up.
The entire Aviva Solutions team has been away for a few days, from the 7th till the 9th of September, to celebrate its first year anniversary. Usually a company will pick up the beamer and go to some standard venue to show off the boring slides with numbers. Or even worse, invite customers and show even more slides. Our bosses however, in blessed wisdom, decided to take the whole company to the south of Spain to party, celebrate and have fun. No slides, no pep talk, no team building, just beach, bar and disco.
Destination? A four star hotel Fenix in Torremolinos. What? Do I mean that genuine tourist trap? Yes indeed! A city full of teenagers, gays and elderly Dutch people? Fortunately not. The place was chosen because it would be possible for us to depart at a reasonable time, around eleven in the morning, and be floating in the sea in the afternoon.
Torremolinos turned out to be very lively and friendly. Add to that the “Pick up the towel from your hotel room and at the end of the street either take your place at the El Velero terrace or dive straight into the friendly waves.” kind of holiday and you get the picture. Bliss for three straight days. And you don’t have to check the weather forecast when you go out.
Take 16 professional Microsoft architects, developers and specialists (i.e. geeks) to a location like that and what do you get? Burnt foreheads and white legs? Endless pictures of barely dressed beach creatures? A group of stupid grinning wall flowers in disco’s? Weell… lets say there was a lot of fun, fooling around and dancing. A lot of small talk with locals and tourists and a healthy dose of inter-collegial discussion on Nhibernate and the ADO.NET Entity Framework, MOSS 2007, Silverlight and what have you. A special thank you for our bosses Mark and Bart for this “Weekend Legendario”.
Although Microsoft claims that the new Entity Framework is really not an OR/M product, if you look closely at the examples and the whitepapers, you'll agree with me that they are very similar. Nhibernate is an awesome product, and I've been using it for a long time now, but it currently has two major drawbacks. First, there are no serious GUI tools assisting in the creation of mapping files and/or business classes. Second, various rumours indicate that further development (other than bugfixes) is uncertain at this time. Well, if you tried the new Entity Framework tools for Visual Studio 2008, you must love the integrated environment. And obviously, LINQ is much better than NHibernate's expression object model and HQL language. Nevertheless, until we have support for the major important database vendors, the EF is no real competiter yet. Luckely, there is good news on the horizon.
PS. If you have problems trying to get the CTP tools to work, see this post. It might help.