Live Labs Volta

Posted on December 5, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

Refactoring has been confined to object-oriented design for too long. The refinement through successive transformations and ability to revisit design decisions often is equally valuable (maybe even more so) for architecture. Live Labs Volta, one of the projects I’m working on, aims at providing just that. Today we are releasing a Live Labs Technology Preview of Volta. Volta introduces the Tier-Splitting refactoring, allowing a designer to move the distribution boundary in a declarative manner, while handling all the plumbing associated with distribution. In effect, it hides what Fred Brooks called accidental complexity, allowing the designer to focus on the essential complexity. Volta also stretches the reach of .NET to cover the cloud, but that’s the topic for a different post.

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Live Labs Listas

Posted on October 29, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

Right before leaving for OOPSLA 2007 I noticed that my colleagues from Live Labs released Live Labs Listas. Listas is a great example of the user experience that can be achieved in modern web applications (i.e., Web 2.0). For that reason a couple of months ago I invited a member from the Listas team to showcase the UX features such as responsiveness, drag-and-drop, etc. to p&p’s Web Client Software Factory team. Great to see it ship and I look forward to other sites providing a user experience on a par with Listas!

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The Future Workspace

Posted on September 22, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

A few months ago a CNN crew visited paterns & practices on the Redmond campus. They shot a few videos in our offices built from the ground up for agile development.Their feature on the future workspace has been available for a while now as a 3-part series: the Google Plex, Microsoft Workplace Advantage, and the Perfect Office Chair. The footage from patterns & practices is in part 2, mixed with other Microsoft clips.

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URL Compression

Posted on September 6, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

Many useful URLs are way too long to memorize or even type. I’ve known and used TinyURL for many years to compress long URLs. A recent conversation reminded me of this service. It turns out that several other options are available. I’d like to see more people use these services to trim long URLs, particularly when they’re printed on paper. Can you imagine typing something like http://spaces.msn.com/members/siteexperts/Blogs/cns!1pNcL8JwTfkkjv4gg6LkVCpw!2085.entry? This is in fact an example from a real printed book. Why not http://tinyurl.com/2jjl2f instead?

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Patterns Article in IEEE Software

Posted on July 9, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

My article The Growing Divide in the Patterns World (co-authored with Wojtek Kozaczynski, Ade Miller and Jason Hogg) appeared in the Software Patterns issue of IEEE Software (July/August 2007).

Here’s the abstract:

Recently Microsoft’s patterns & practices group conducted a survey that indicates a significant gap between the patterns expert community and the software practitioners attempting to use patterns and leverage pattern thinking in their daily work. As this gap widens it will lead to an irreversible divide between the two communities, and patterns will fail to deliver their potential. In the light of our experience using patterns to package development guidance as well as input from practitioners using patterns we analyze the key causes behind this gap and recommend a set of actions aimed at the patterns community. Bridging this gap will have a dramatic effect on practitioners’ understanding of patterns and their ability to leverage them as the patterns expert community envisions.

More info off their web site (assuming the server is responding, which is not the case now).I’m glad to see that after over 12 years software patterns are still interesting. How many of the hot topics of 1994 are still talked about today?

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Patterns for Fault Tolerant Software

Posted on June 16, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

My fellow Hillsider Robert S. Hanmer has just finished his book on fault tolerant patterns (to be available from John Wiley & Sons, October-November 2007). Here’s the book’s descritiption, in Bob’s words:

This book presents proven techniques to achieve highly available, fault tolerant software that can be implemented by software developers, software architects and small teams. The techniques are presented in the form of patterns as a resource for teaching developers and students about fault tolerance principles and also as a reference for experts seeking to select the technique appropriate for a given system.

Within the phases of fault tolerance (fault detection, error processing and fault treatment) the patterns will be organized in a way that leads from high-level abstractions to the concrete mechanisms. The collection of techniques will be programming language independent, and will be presented in a way that supports their working together to design fault tolerant software. This allows the designer to build the fault tolerant pattern language needed to solve their unique design problems.

Readers are guided from concepts and terminology, through common principles and methods to advanced techniques and practices in the development of software systems.

This book gives present proven methods of increasing the fault tolerance in a way that helps individual architects and developers. The fault tolerance domain lacks a handbook that provides well-known techniques and practices that are larger in scope than ‘defensive programming’ as many books focus on specific techniques or exclusively on reliability engineering.

I’ve been following Bob’s work and I am very happy to see it come to fruition in this form. For years seasoned programmers have been extracting techniques and insight from carrier grade software. It’s great to see a book on this topic from one of the long time members of the patterns community!

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The Emerging Phenotropic Identity

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

Robert Lucky’s column brings up the question of identity on the Internet. In contrasting the old identity with the new, Google/Flickr/YouTube/MySpace/FaceBook one he points out that “Now you’re at the mercy of what other people and what various computer algorithms think of you.” His example reminded me of an older post about interviewing in an era of long-lived databases. Are we seeing the emergence of the phenotropic identity?

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Online Books

Posted on March 20, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

As my list of pointers to free books has started to grow I decided to put it on my web site so I could easily point my friends to it. Here it is, in no particular order for the time being. I have several additional titles that are not within easy reach (the bookmarks, that is). Please do share if you gathered similar pointers.

If I was a stock broker I wouldn’t buy shares in any traditional (i.e., dead-tree) publishing house right now.

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Software Engineering Radio Interview

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

At JAOO 2006 I gave an interview for Software Engineering Radio. Markus Voelter asked me questions about architecture evaluation, the topic of the talk I gave in the architecture quality track. Here are some of the questions that we covered:

  • Why would you perform an architecture evaluation?
  • When should you perform an architecture evaluation?
  • What are the prerequisites for evaluating an architecture?
  • How does architecture evaluation fit with agile development?

The interview is now available as a podcast; you can also download the slides from the Talks section of this site.I am surprised with the quality of the recording: the bartender was removing clean dishes from the dishwasher clese by. I don’t know how much post-processing was done but all that noise is not distracting. It was distracting while we recorded the interview so I’m glad that it doesn’t interfere with the conversation.

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Don’t Miss this QCon Keynote: Democratizing The Cloud

Posted on March 9, 2007 by Dragos Manolescu

If you’re going to next week’s QCon in London do yourself a favor and attend Erik Meijer’s keynote Democratizing The Cloud. Here’s Erik’s abstract:

The web is rocking the world of developers. Our customers love consistency. They want to have the same rich experience, anywhere, any time, on any device. Our sales people love market share. They want no platform that cannot leverage their web services. We ourselves have embraced agile methods. We want to keep our options open as long as possible and create software incrementally by successive refactorings. This surely sounds like a contradiction, another impossible triangle. As the Dutch artist MC Escher once said “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible”. Hence we are trying to stretch the .NET framework to cover the Cloud such that it will become possible to incrementally and seamlessly design, develop, and debug complex distributed applications using your favorite existing and unmodified .NET compiler and deploy these applications anywhere.

Erik will show what consistency means; he will demonstrate how agilty translates into what you do right after you go to the File menu; he will prove how you can keep your options open until just about the very end. So if you’re only planning on attending a single QCon keynote, I strongly recommend Democratizing The Cloud. A few hours ago Erik, Jeff Van Gogh and myself reviewed the demos that he’ll show next week in London. You won’t believe me if I’d tell you, so better see for yourself. Do trust me though that they’re cool–I did work on the one involving validation. Hint: you’ll see p&p’s Enterprise LIbrary like you’ve never seen it before.

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