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Talks Abstracts

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:09:34 GMT

This is an update of an old post of mine, listing all the talks that I am thinking of / had prepared. I am using this mostly as a way to centralize all my talks. Comments are welcome.

Level 200: Producing Production Quality Software

Working software is no longer the only thing that we need to produce. We need to create a software system that has a chance of surviving in the cruel world of production system, outside the clean room and sterile environment of development and QA. Understanding bottlenecks in the system, preventing cascading failures and recovery strategies have ceased being the problems of the very high end players. With the cost of system downtime being measures in $$$/second, this is an area we have to consider all the way.
In this talk we will cover how we can map common weaknesses in the system design, preemptively protect ourselves from them, and produce software systems that can withstand the real world hostile environment.

Level 200: Building Zero Friction Development Environment

Development is a fun process, most of the time. But in any development environment, we have areas where we have friction points that we have to deal with. If it is the pain of having to add a column to the database, or taking three weeks in order to deploy to production. It doesn't have to be like this. Being conscious of those friction points and actively eliminating them is a key to creating sustainable development environment and keeping our software design from being corrupt by "quick fixes" or hacks.

Level 4/300:Object Relational Mapping += 2: More then just data <-> object

Object relational mapping are becoming only more popular, as people developing complex systems find that they need more than the tabular model to work with in their applications. A sophisticated ORM can do a lot more than merely get the data out of the database in object form, it can be a valuable assest in simplifying development and making things possible. In this session, you will see how you can utilize an ORM in untraditional ways to get an additional, better, approach to solving complex issues.
Some of those ways include business rules, localization, state transitions, inversion of control, etc. All done via the ORM layer, and all can be used to drasticly simplify the complexity of the given scenarios.

Level 100: Using Active Record to write less code

What would you say if I told you that you can stop writing data access code in .Net? Aren't you tired of writing the same thing over and over again, opening connection, querying the database, figuring out what to return, getting back untype data that you need to start putting on the form? Do you really see some value in writing yet another UPDATE statement?
The Active Record framework allows you to fully utilize the power of the database, but without the back breaking work that it used to take. Active Record uses .Net objects to relieveyou from the repeating task of persistance. Those objects are schema aware and can persist and load themselves without you needing to write a single line of SQL. Building business application using Active Record is a pleasure, the database stuff just happens, and you are free to implement the business functionality.

Presentation for this can be found here: Using Castle Active Record

Level 200: Rapid (maintainable) web development with MonoRail

If you're a fan of Ruby on Rails and want to see similar capabilities in .NET, or you're an ASP.NET developer looking for an easier way to do things, MonoRail will be irresistible once you find out what it can do for you. Strong support for Ajax makes writing buzzward compliant web applications a breeze. Utilization of the Model-View-Controller architecture and convention over configuration makes web development with MonoRail a pleasure. Free yourself from page-life cycle issues and viewstate worries, start working with MonoRail, where the framework works for you.
This talk will introduce the general concepts of the framework, and how you can use them

Level 100: Interaction based testing With Rhino Mocks

Beyond the simplest scenarios, all objects had collaborators that they work with. This flies in the face of testing objects in isolation. This is the problem that mock objects were created to solve. In this talk you will learn what mock objects are, how to utilize them and best practices on when / how to utilize them. Rhino Mocks is a mock objects framework for .Net whose core goals are to let the developer rely on the compiler work well with refactoring tools.

Level 200: Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection: Breaking out from the dependecy hell

Responding to change is the holy grail of software development. Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI) are two related patterns that allows to make significant changes to an application without having to touch every part of the application. IoC and DI encourage breaking the application into discerete, highly cohesive parts, so a change, when it eventually comes, is very local. A nice benefit is that applications that uses IoC are also very testable applications.
This talk will introduce the concepts of IoC and how to use them in your application.

Presentation can be found here: Inversion Of Control and Dependency Injection

Level 4/300: Advance usages of Inversion of Control containers

You already understand the concepts of Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection, now is the time to see how far we can make the IoC container works for us. This talk will focus on using an IoC container in complex scenarios. We will talk about generic decorator chains and generic specialization, contextful containers and IoC DSLs. These powerful concepts can greatly enhance your ability to respond to change in your application.

Level 300: Writing Domain Specific Languages in Boo

Domain Specific Langauge is not just the DSL SDK from Microsoft. A DSL can make working with the domain much easier, since you are capable of leveraging the domain concepts directly. The other alternative to a DSL is an XML file, and we all know how well declarative model can work when you need imperative concepts, just consider NAnt for a minute and you will see the issue. Usually, writing a DSL in .Net would be a complex issue, requiring writing a parser, interpreter, etc. Boo already handles all of that, and its open architecture means that it is very easy to extend it to express the concepts of the domain. This talk will show you how to build DSLs in Boo and how to utilize this power in your applications.

Presentation can be found here: Writing Domain Specific Language in Boo

Twitter

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:24:29 GMT

Still not sure that I figure out what is going on, but I am here:

http://twitter.com/ayende

The MVC Storefront

Ayende Rahien — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:25:19 GMT

Rob Conery has been doing a screen cast series, showing how to build an application using MS MVC. He has also decided to not only take care of application building, but do it in a way that many members of the community, myself included, feel passionately about. Using TDD, DDD concepts, etc.

Rob freely admits that he is exploring a lot of ground as he is producing those screen casts, and I think that he is doing a good job.

There were several instances of overly harsh critique about the screen casts, which do injustice to the work being done. Don't treat this as the Final Guidance, treat this as a journey, and pitch in if you have interesting commentary.

Rob has been very open about it, and I, for one, am very happy about it.

With the blinders off

Ayende Rahien — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:15:22 GMT

Scott Bellware is talking about Gloryhounds:

Gloryhounds are often already visible members of the community. Upon achieving a certain level of authority in their particular specialization, and a sufficient level of visibility, they rally to an impending new technology release, and work with the benefactor to bring a semblance of impartial evangelism to the community while the benefactor provides the Gloryhound with opportunities that bolster his status through promotional engagements supporting the new technology.

Scott has a decidedly... un-commercial streak, which I can both appreciate and disagree with. I appreciate it because I have been flat out lied to by people that had commercial interest in technological decisions, and I disagree because I don't think in advance that anything commercial is suspect by default.

Ben Scheirman then asks:

Is it wrong that I'm excited about ASP.NET MVC? Should people not listen to me "preach" it because I didn't invent Rails, MonoRail, Django & others?

No, it is not, period.

However, getting excited about it without ever going out and learning about the rest is a bad idea in many ways. Deciding that this is the true path, so decreed by [vendor] is almost always a bad decision.

Making the decision that this product or approach is the best out there because you have tried a significant portion of them is almost always a good decision.

Some people thinks that NHibernate is problematic, because it doesn't comes with VS integration and drag & drop. I disagree, and I see a lot more value in the flexibility that I get from the approach that NH has chosen. That means that if you want to argue OR/M with me you should have experience in building applications that relies on OR/Ms. If one would want to argue, "I just saw an EF demo, and the designer is great, so it is the best thing out there" I am going to label that guy as uninformed.

No, demo applications are not good enough. You need a real project or two to get things rolling, you need to bang your head against a technology. You need to code in anger and swear eternal vengeance against the authors' ancestors nine generations backs and three forward.

In other words, if your use of the tool has never cracked it around the edges, you haven't done enough to really tell how it is going to be. After you have done that, you should also look at the other tools, not to the same level, but to a degree where you are familiar with them enough to discuss their pros and cons from a knowledgeable position.

Then, I think that you are capable of being a "recognized leader in the problem space", as Scott so eloquently puts it

For myself, I read Java, Rails and Erlang books occasionally, just to make sure that I don't walk with blinders on. I keep an eye on what is going on around in both the .NET land and in other frameworks and platforms. This is also not something that I believe that you can just sit still and let past results indicate future performance.

And, I think, the key point to take from Scott's post and Ben's question is that there is a distinct difference between saying: "oh look, it can do back flips while singing the top 50, cool!" vs. "as a recognized leader...".

Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 13:07:05 GMT

I just watched this, and I am impressed. More than the content of the talk itself, it is the delivery of this talk that is really impressive.

This is not a talk, this is a show, and Larry is a talented actor.

High performance domain models

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 01:30:50 GMT

Udi has an interesting presentation that I recommend that you go through. He is going to present it at Tech Ed (Thu Nov 8 13:30 - 14:45 Room 117).

Most of the ideas are familiar to me because I have spoken to him about them before, but it represent new concepts to most people. I would preface his suggestion with the usual warning about designing for performance. Udi's points are about big systems, so consider if they are appropriate to your scenario first.

A pal of mine once told me that he designs systems for an order of magnitude increase in the requirements. So a system that works for a hundred users should also scale to a thousand users (additional hardware, maybe, but the architecture should hold), but going beyond that will require more than just throwing hardware at the issue.

This sounds like a good rule of the thumb.

Well, it started life as an IoC Container ,but then we added this bit...

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:07:33 GMT

I hate planning. This comes from a long experience at all the problems that raise when you have faulty planning.

So, today I intended to have the class write an IoC container ,but somehow, still not sure how, we ended up building the trivial OR/M imp

https://rhino-tools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rhino-tools/trunk/SampleApplications/Course/SampleORM

Let me say first that this is sample code, written in the span of a few hours, off the cuff coding, etc. Not meant for production... It doesn't even have identity map or unit of work. But, it shows that it takes only a few hours to make a significant improvement in the way you work, if you are not already using the best tools out there.

And allow me to reiterate that this was written by me and the students in about two and a half hours only. I hope that this would take care of the "can't handle it" muttering.

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional

Ayende Rahien — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:06:11 GMT

Visual Developer - Visual C#

I am not that much of a visual guy, but I can leave with that. I have been told some horror stories about mismatching skills and distinctions.

Many thanks for Justin Angel, for all the effort he put into it.

Random Impressions from JAOO: Web Forms on the Enterprise

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:24:14 GMT

When Hamilton and me gave the MonoRail talk to the Enterprise Application track, we asked how many people were .NET vs JAVA vs Ruby. The results where roughly 43%, 43% and 4%, respectively.

The interesting part was when I asked how many of the .NET guys used Web Forms, almost all of them said that they do. Then I asked how many enjoyed using Web Forms.

No one raised their hands.

Random Impressions from JAOO: Agile Adoption is not relevant

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:20:38 GMT

It is not relevant because it is a thing of the past. Quite a few of the people that I met there, both speakers and attendees are taking agile and its practices as granted.

As in: Well, obviously this is how you build a software project, how can you do it any other way?

My company doesn't do agile development, lots of background here, and I am not going into it, and my own efforts seems both puny and diminishing values at some points, it was incredible to see people with that kind of mind set, and to know that this was basically everyone there.