My discussion with Craig Shoemaker about Live Labs Volta is now available from polymorphicpodcast.com. It was fun, though I wasn’t aware of the echo in my office.

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.