So yeah, absolutely pointless title except I’m gettin’ me some of that.

In other news, I’ve reloaded my main workstation.  This workstation is my spiffy 1.5+ year old Dell Inspiron 1720.  It is a fairly decent laptop for a workstation, with 1920×1200 resolution it gives me almost what one has with dual monitor support!

The Tools & Architecture Frameworks Listing

Every few months I end up with a different set of frameworks and applications that I use for development.  Being a developer one has to change frequently and stay updated with the latest and greatest, or risk losing value as a developer and fading into mediocrity.  I don’t dig that prospect so I tend to stay close to bleeding edge, without the blood (aka lotsa bugs).

Architectural Pieces – Major 5

1. entlib – For many of the internal pieces, I’m ramping up on and already using several of the entlib libraries (redundant use of library, eh).
2. Silverlight 2 – For many of my web efforts, I’ll be pushing through some Silverlight Apps for the UI part of my architectural standard.
3. .NET 3.5 SP1 – Of course, for the framework that binds it all together, it’s gonna be .NET 3.5 SP1.
4. The Cloud / Azure – I’ll be working diligently to get some initial cloud & Azure work done to prototype how and where I can place applications into the cloud for various reasons.  I’m actually hoping to avoid local database use in the future with use of SSDS (SQL Server Data Services) or SDS.
5. SQL Server 2008 – 08′ features rock!  Nuff’ said.

Architectural Pieces – Minor 4

1. Spring.NET – The architectural elements put together to make up this framework is awesome.  I dig the pieces and would prospectively use this if there is reason not to use entlib pieces (i.e. performance, existing code base, etc)
2. Adobe Air App – I’m thinking of doing development against Air instead of Silverlight 2 in numerous places, primarily because it deploys EVERY FREAKING WHERE!!!  Adobe Air is truly amazing, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more publicity.  It smokes Java for smoothness, Silverlight for compatibility and gloss, and overall looks pretty easy to develop for.
3. Java Struts – If need be, there could be future efforts I’ve seen coming down the pipe that will require Struts n such.  It could be an interesting ride to jump sides and build out some Java App with Struts.  I’d however, rather not, as there is no real reason to use this.
4. RoR or Ruby on Rails – I’m not explaining this.  If you haven’t heard or checked out the phenom that Ruby on Rails is, you’re doing yourself a disservice, just go check it out.  It IS worth your time if you build more than one application per year.  🙂

Tools / IDEs / Other Things – The 4

1. Subversion – Just because I have it, it is insanely simple, takes almost no time to use and maintain.  Simply, It aint broke, and I’m not fixing it.
2. Tortoise & Visual SVN – Total cost is $49 bucks.  It is worth every penny.  Integrates Tortoise into Visual Studio in a more flawless integration than Team Foundation Services source integration from Microsoft itself!
3. ReSharper – Again, if you don’t use it, you probably should.  It’s one of the greatest tools on the market.  Personal is $199, company license is like $349 or something.  It’s worth it, it is more than worth it.  If you aren’t using it you’re probably spending too much money on overall development and NOT writing code the way it should be.  I can’t rave about the awesomeness of this product enough.
4. Visual Studio.NET 2008 – Ya gotta have VS is you really want to get hard core with the .NET.  VS.NET Express is available for free.  VS.NET Professional is about $900 or more, but if you check out Microsoft’s Biz deals you can get it for free. Also if you are a student you can get it for practically nothing, or for free.  So no real excuse not to use this.  If you work for a company that has in excess of $1 million per year, they better buy you a copy.  If they don’t, and they’re making you use notepad or something to write code in for .NET, you should quit, because rest assured that company will strangle itself from being so cheap and you’ll be out of work anyway.

So that’s my list, any questions feel free to contact me or drop a comment.

Gotta say the release party rocked.  It was a good time.  Our gracious hosts, North, provided their work environment for the event.  Their environment looks amazing and I can honestly say, they've got to have a truly awesome work vibe going on.  Several of the North Crew were there.  So seriously, if in need of some beautiful work, check out North.

At the event there was a huge spread of great food, wine, and beer! Everyone, as we nerds do, sat around and talked geek chat.

Speaking at the event was Tim Heuer for the main presentation. After that we had a break out session with Tim, Jason Mauer, Erik Mork, and Ben [? Name might have slipped my mind. 🙁 ]. The presentations covered Silverlight 2 Data Grids, custom creation of controls in Expression, zoom features, and video media. Silverlight 2 is definitely improving on something that is great already. In addition to that actual C# executable code is possible on the client now along with a whole slew of other features.

I discussed with Tim for a few minutes the ins and outs of Linux compatibility too. I had not looked nearly as much as I should have (I kind of just gave up, I'll admit it) when I was working with Ubuntu before. So the slice of it is one has to check out Moonlight if they want Silverlight to work on Linux. Of course, it is totally possible. Currently however, Silverlight is really only supporting Apple & Windows Machines & the primary browsers on each. This amounts to Safari, FireFox, and amazingly Internet Explorer 7 & 8. I think it is supported on IE6, but seriously, I don't know why the hell they continue to support that monstrosity of a browser.

Toward the end of the evening I also won a Silverlight 2 Animation book during the drawing. The book is written by a local Portlander (or Lake Oswegoan – not sure we'd really admit they were Portlanders 😮 j/k) named Jeff Paries.

The application I'm working on has Java Back end and .NET Back end code projects. This leaves a lot of little hacks here and there for communication between these two code bases. By mere functional fact, it leaves the entire application connectivity between these two code bases in a weird state of coupling, or lack thereof.

The Java side, anytime something changes, is not particularly propagated to the .NET project side. Thus any changes between either or, leave the unchanged side in a lurch for forward development. There is an easy way to resolve almost all of the issues with this mixed environment of development.

Service Oriented Architecture

A service oriented architecture, not a partial or supposed one, but an honest to goodness business case serving stand alone services oriented architecture that can be used by front end client, applications, or even other services would resolve this odd dependency issue.

Communication

Instead of two varying code bases trying to communicate with differing and often confusing session architecture or passing back and forth query string parameters, with SOA state can be managed in a completely different manner. With the services available to the application the state could even prospectively be managed specific to the services instead of the client. This way WCF or the other slew of service frameworks out there could utilize their built in state management capabilities to enable the clients to perform their workflow or what have you flawlessly between Java, .NET, PHP, or whatever might be on the client side.

Security

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, services, at least web services, aren't oriented at all toward security. But with frameworks like WCF the increased ability to lock down, provide authentication, and even authorization is drastically simplified. Not as many "hacks" are needed to secure web services these days. With that an SOA project could easily be setup for strong security, with extensive services and appropriately loosely coupled silos.

Workflow

This is where I need to strengthen my skill sets. I've actively been working with WCF lately and know there is a good bit of integration with workflow that is possible. The problem is, I don't know what or how it works from an integration perspective. This will definitely be on my list of "figure it out". However, even without the dedicated workflow framework, setting up and utilizing the WCF for control of state, the inherent abilities with session control, etcetera, drastically alter the conflicts in autonomous code bases working together in an application environment.

OpenID is sweeping the web. With announcements by Microsoft and Google recently to support the OpenID Framework, things have effectively gotten huge! One of the things I’ve been wondering about is WCF Security and how one could integrate with OpenID. Here’s what I’ve been able to dig up and implement so far.

First off, it is a good idea to review what OpenID is. Check it out at openid.net for a starting point. A good read is available at the what page for OpenID. However, if you want to get into the nitty gritty internal workings of OpenID, it is a little trickier. The developer page is a good place to start, but it is somewhat minimal. Once jumping out from that page the information gets more useful. Plaxo has an interesting recipe for OpenID and also OpenID for non-Super Users are great. Both get into the grit more.

But skipping past a ton of the existing specifications and documentation might be a better idea once I realized that there truly were some .NET libraries for Open ID.

• DotNet OpenId
• ExtremeSwank which is hosted at ExtremeSwank Google Code.

Out of these two examples ExtremeSwank definitely has the best documentation out. Easy to read code examples are even available. I started to just go with ExtremeSwank, but after looking up integration notes on OpenID support in BlogEngine.NET I decided to download both.

For my pending BlogEngine.NET Integration I found the following articles:

• jmpinline "How to add OpenID support to BlogEngine.NET"
• Chris Blankenship’s Ramblings "OpenID for BlogEngine.Net"

I’ll have the follow up to my discoveries soon, so stay tuned!

…and if you do want to read the specifications, feel free.

The Scenario

A Continuous Integration (CI) Build, which I’ll dub “Cib”, takes approximately 1 hr & 30 minutes. The build takes into account various builds from various platform technologies; Java, .NET, and PHP. The emphasis of course being that no single stack is available. To build the end solution all of these stacks need to be rolled into the build.

At a build time of 1 hour and a half, there is little ability to accurately watch the build, assure check ins work, or to be accurately notified of what is or is not being included in the build if numerous check ins are occurring.

What instead needs to occur is a short build. Builds in a CI environment really should not take a long time to compile, if they do, you really lose most of the CI benefit. So how long is acceptable? I’d prefer something around 5 minutes, not much more, and definitely less if possible. In most scenarios, no matter how big the project, this is possible. So what are the solutions?

Just to get a few ideas I spoke to a few guys at work about their ideas. Both Josh W. (Code Recon & System Configuration Guru) and Robert S. (Build Management Ace) gave me some good ideas. A few other conversations were had about what others had done in the past and two solutions came up the most preferred first steps.

The Solutions

1. Split Em’ Up; Functionally, Technically, Departmentally, or However. The first thing in a multi-technology stack environment is to split up the individual builds. If need be split up various solutions into independent development teams functional segments. At some point, the solutions or projects would be broken down enough to have reasonable build times. These smaller segmented pieces are what should be setup for continuous integration. With that completed, then keep a single large, long running build as a daily build. Whatever the case, just leave it solely as a build versus a continuous integration build.
2. Autonomous Continuous Integration Builds. Setup the builds autonomously on the build server and monitor only the build or build(s) that you need for daily development. On TeamCity this is super easy, probably is easy on VSTS, and I know it can be done with Cruise Control. It is important to monitor and be able to track any error that occurs during the segmented builds, specifically the one pertinent to a particular developers efforts.

Summary

I’m sure there are many other solutions. If you have any, please do leave a comment. Overall, the point is, continuous integration is NOT a long running build. At best, one could call that a scheduled build. A continuous integration build must be efficient and run in a reasonable amount of time. The safest range is between 2-5 minutes. Of course, less time is better.