Having just been to a conference, I saw a lot of different presentations, and saw a few things that [a] I hope I don't do when I'm presenting, and [b] definitely didn't help the speaker's cause. The biggest one was the number of speakers who kept turning back to look at there slides on the big screen. Not just a little peek to make sure they were in the right spot and get their bearings. I mean a full on reading of the slide with their back to us. Well, not reading - I don't think anybody pulled that old stunt. But looking at their talking points and keeping their back to us for the most part. Definitely not a very positive experience - at least some of them had content that made it possible to overlook this, but...

The other problem, one guy (won't mention any names) had his slides on a timer, so he could walk around. The problem was, his time interval was set too short, and he constantly had to go to his computer an re-adjust. If you want to walk around (and I think that's a great thing - I need to figure out how to do it), get one of those wireless remote things to control your slides.

On the positive side, several of the speakers were very obviously letting their true selves show, and it made the presentation much better. I don't know how they were able to be so relaxed, other than experience, which I'm sure was the case, but they were joking around, even poking fun at themselves, and just generally very engaging. I know its a hard skill to acquire - I am certain I'm not there yet, but its worth the practice, because these guys came across as real pros.

If you walk into a conference session, and every seat has a vendor's flyer on the desk, do yourself a favor - just walk out. Frank Cohen from PushToTest never really talked about testing services in any practical way. Then again, he also didn't do a very good job of demostrating or selling his product, either. It was very much the worst of both worlds, and I actually turned on the WiFi antenna (which I had resisted a few times in some other talks) and checked my email, as well as did a little GoogleTalking with the people back at home. The worst part was, because the room was fairly full when we walked in, we sat in the front row. I felt a little bit bad - Frank seemed like a really nice guy, and in fairness, the tool he was pushing was open source. But he really didn't have much useful to tell me.

The moment we were all waiting for - Scott Ambler. Ok, that's an exaggeration. I've read his articles, listened to webcasts, read some of his books. I really was looking forward to seeing him in person.

His talk was entitled Agile Model Driven Development, but he covered a lot more along the way to that topic. His view of Agile is very pragmatic. He took a few swipes at the dogmatics, which was good, because I could see where he was coming from, and I often find myself on the highway to hell, um, I mean, the religious aspects of Agile. His exaggerated lack of respect for the general tone on some agile mailing lists definitely helped remind me of what it is we are trying to achieve. I think the reason why I wasn't offended was because he pretty much attacked all of the sacred cows in our industry - it was very South Park in that way... :)

I took a boatload of notes, so I'll summarize the highlights:

There was much more, but I think I am heading past attributing and into stealing his content, so I'll just leave it there. If you ever have the opportunity to see him speak, DO NOT miss it. I think when you look at those currently practicing the art of software development, he's one of the 3 most relevant people (at least to me) right now. [The others would be Joel Spolsky, who might be falling a little and Steve McConnell, who is always that much needed voice of reason]

The final Udi presentation of the conference.

Key takeaway - pubsub is generally the best way to build your services - think of everything as long-running. Instead of having your billing service ask your customer service for their current address every time it needs it, have the billing service cache customer data, and subscribe to the customer service to receive updates. The important thing to note here - this is NOT replication. In replication, there is no authoritative source of data - all sources are authoritative. In this scheme, the customer service is the system of record for customer data, and is responsible for it. If the billing service were to encounter a discrepency in customer data, it would ask the customer service for the current data, and use that. There is never a conflcit - the customer service is always right (sorry, that's almost a pun).

As you design your system, think about how it worked before it was automated. An order was faxed in, and handled by various people. Eventually, good would be shipped and a bill sent to the customer. Each of these steps in the workflow are just a process in the business, just now they are automated to improve efficiency (hopefully). Services are not APIs in the RPC style of thinking - they are different parts of the business, and have their own responsibilites. They don't care about what happened before in the workflow (beyond what concerns them) and they don't care what happens after them. When they finish their work, they post events to whomever is subscribed, and let the next processes figure out what to do.

Randy Miller gave a ridiculously short (under 45 minutes) presentation on Composite Architecture. I went in thinking he would be talking about how one hooks up different technologies into one system, which is a problem we face at McKesson Automation - our product lines are based on various technologies, and our customers like them to work together.

I completely forgot my brainwashing back in my Microsoft Merit Badge days - Composite Applications used to Microsoft-speak for cobbling together an application from various Office applications and enough VB and VBA to make them stick. Randy works for Microsoft. So, it should come as no surprise that Composite Architecture is the updated version of that vision, where instead of hooking together Office products, we're hooking together server products such as SharePoint, BizTalk, Excel Server, etc. Certainly a good solution in a lot of cases, but he didn't really dive into the details very much, or at all for that matter.

The only useful thing he mentioned was adding a "Productivity Tier" between your business logic and presentation logic, to allow for non-human systems to interface with your application easily. Definitely a good idea, if you have the need to take order via a web service, or reservations via a message queue, etc. The Productivity Tier essentially reformats your data into a form that your business tier can use, and that external applications can make use of going the other direction. Of course, its kind of a logical, common sense thing to do, but it is good to mention, I suppose. I just would have rather gone to a different presentation (Rob Daigneau had a presentation, Messaging-Oriented Design Patterns for SOAP Services, that might have been better at the same time).

The first talk I attended on Wednesday was Chris Armstrong's presentation on Agile Enterprise Architecture. I'm going to have to be honest - he started with a 10 minute rehashing of the Agile Manifesto, in his own thinking, and for me it went down hill from there. He is one of those delusional folks that thinks RUP can be Agile (anything with distinct phases for the different activities (requirements/design/coding/testing) is NOT agile). I just couldn't get over the fundamental difference there, and his constant reference to such BIG PROCESS things like TOGAF and IEEE processes didn't help. For an old-school architect, what he was saying was indeed agile, but it wasn't the kind of agile I was expecting. My friend and coworker Jim Patula (no blog) found him to be a half-way decent, so it could just be me.

There were two useful points he made, that I agree with completely - Agile is about minimizing rework (probably more than just that - what about other wastes, but a good thing to keep in mind all the same), and "At the end of the day, Microsoft Project doesn't work".

Rob Daigneau's presentation on Introducing Domain Services was a pretty decently balanced between "astronaut-y" architecture and practical advice. He was a fairly engaging speaker. Probably the biggest takeaway I got from his talk was: "If you want to do anything useful in software, coupling must exist". He spent a good deal of time discussing this paradox - we want to have loosly coupled everything, but at the end of the day, if our code is going to do anything, it has to be coupled to other code in some way. So, in the end, its a matter of determining what type of coupling is best for a given scenario - different systems will have different needs.

He described the types of coupling as:

Pramod Sadalage presented on Agile Database Development. I'm slightly familiar with his work, as I have read Scott Ambler's Agile DBA book, on which I believe Pramod contributed. At the very least, the two have also written Database Refactoring together, so I pretty much knew about the topic. I have been taking notes in OneNote all through the conference, and I created a page on which I'm listing things I need to do when I get back to the office (things to research more, or things to talk to someone about - mostly things we should consider re-evaluating). My list of things to re-evaluate grew greatly during this talk. There are lots of little things we could do better database-wise, with regards to our adoption of Scrum.

Our DBA's have a database build script, but its hardly automated, and it depends upon some crazy Access application to run it (yes, you read that right - an Access application to build a SQL Server database). The database team also uses a crazy versioning scheme in SoresSafe. But more importantly, we don't really include them like we should, and talk to them about what we are trying to achieve, and it causes conflict.

The coolest thing Pramod demonstrated was dbdeploy. It doesn't really do anything all that crazy, and yet what it does is pure genius. It will run a series of scripts to bring your database up to date, and also allow you to roll back to an older version. You have to write the scripts, but it manages the process for you, and makes it real easy to get an up to date database for you development or QA environment, or even production (although if your DBAs are squeamish, it will generate the script necessary to go from one version to another). Its nothing complicated, and yet incredibly elegant.

The final presentation of the day yesterday was a Birds of a Feather group discussion about what was important to make an agile project succeed. It was lead by Chris Sims, who did an excellent job facilitating. I don't know that I necessarily learned anything, about agile, but I did learn another way to give a retrospective, which in many ways was what Chris led. Going around the room and giving everyone a turn to mention something (after having them write up a list) seems like it would be very empowering to those who often don't speak up - I'm definitely going to give it a try the next time I facilitate a retrospective.

If you're keeping track of fads, Scrum and 2 week iterations are the most popular way for people to do agile, at least according to the show of hands...

I attended Mike Rosen's (doesn't appear to have a blog, and the domain for the email address he gave doesn't appear to have a web site, but you can try searching for him by name and his company, Wilton Consulting Group, which will give you a ton of hits on presentations he's given) talk on Designing Service-Oriented Applications. It didn't quite meet my expectations. It was very high level, architecture-astronaut-y. Mike admitted many times to being a UML guy, and I got the distinct impression he hasn't written any code in years. Guys like him are the reason why I resist the title architect. If you don't have that same bias, it probably would have been a pretty good presentation. Mike's presentation skills are decent, and he does have a lot of experience. I was just hoping for something a little more practical.

The first presentation I attended was an excellent presentation about building distributed systems given by Udi Dahan. He talked a little about his open source enterprise service bus (ESB) nServiceBus. He had a boatload of material, and ran through it all - it was a little bit too much for the time, and yet he managed to do a good job of not crushing us with it all.

Some of the more interesting notes I took:

If you have the opportunity to see Udi speak, I highly recommend it. I'm hoping to get a chance to play around with nServiceBus - maybe I'll have somethign to write about that in the coming weeks.

This seems about right.

My friend Rich just posted on his blog about 4 openings. At my company (McKesson Automation), we have a bunch of openings that we are having a hell of a time trying to fill. I wouldn't say its the Roaring 90's again, but it seems to be a pretty good time to be a developer in Pittsburgh.

If you work with Microsoft technology, as a developer, QA, or sysadmin, contact me if you want to know more...

One of my fellow developers is making the transition from VB6/ASP/COM+, and moving into the .Net world (he's be chained to a product that hadn't been scheduled for upgrade, but now it finally is). He's been asking some good questions. Here's one I'd like to share…

Question:

Are there any string truncation methods in C# that remove a number of characters or substring from the end of a string? I've been playing with TrimEnd and it seems to ignore anything I try. My purpose is that I have built a string dynamically (SQL statement) in a loop and I need to remove the last "UNION ALL" keyword I add.

Answer:

The biggest problem is that the string functions in .Net to do not replace the string you are working on – instead they return the resulting string. This is behavior is more flexible, but entirely different from the way things used to work in VB6, thus leading to confusion. Here is a snippet that will do what you are looking for:

string crap =

" SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL ";

crap = crap.Remove(crap.LastIndexOf(" UNION ALL "));

Another thing, though, if you are building a really big string, you might want to consider using the StringBuilder class. The way I'd get around the extra UNION ALL is to not write it in the first place – create a bool, check to see if it's true in your loop, and if it is, write the UNION ALL before the rest of the stuff you were going to write in the loop. Then, if it isn't true, set it true, so that the next time through you'll get the proper UNION ALL written:

string [] selects = {" select 1 ", " select 2 ", " select 3 "};

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

for ( int i= 0 ; i<selects.Length; i++)

{

if (builder.Length > 0 )

{

builder.Append(" UNION ALL ");

}

builder.Append(selects[i]);

}

Console.WriteLine(builder);

Actually, I cheated on the bool – I just used the fact that the StringBuilder would be empty. But it's basically the same thing…