http://www.simonsegal.net/blog A practitioner's introspective on technology Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:21:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I am happy to announce that Lextrico will be running Udi Dahan’s 3 Day Enterprise Development with NServiceBus course in Melbourne between the 7th and 9th of November 2011. The course will be delivered by Mark Harris and myself and will run at Karstens Training facility in Queen St Melbourne. ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/09/19/nservicebus-3-day-course-comes-to-melbourne-australia/ I will be speaking at the September meeting of the alt.Net User group about Task Based user interfaces, their benefits and how explicitly modelled code can make the job easier, more manageable and lead to systems that leave the business in control. I will also discuss how this approach can ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/09/17/speaking-at-altnet/ Most developers spend a lot of time learning. Who can claim an entire lifetime career invested in a single language, or platform?…VB6 to C# to TSQL to JavaScript to Ruby and so on. Sure there are plenty of professions that don’t necessitate quite the same level of time investment in ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/08/22/a-sense-of-entitlementstop-your-whining/ An interesting discussion on UI layout came up the other day regarding when / where / how it was appropriate for business rules to surface to the User Interface . The topic of the discussion was based around the value of consistently and explicitly directing user attention to an entities ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/08/19/when-to-ask-users-to-use-their-eyes-to-reason-by-omission/ Perhaps you’re the Development Manager or Architect with an ISV, where the commercial landscape plays into your technology choices constantly. Maybe your product roster is tied to a SQL vendor or possibly more than one. Meanwhile you keep hearing a nagging noise about NoSQL, its been circling the wagons for ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/08/14/institutional-resistance-to-document-databases/ Some time ago when I looked into the MVVM pattern I decided it wasn’t the right choice for me, that hasn’t changed since and I don't expect it to change anytime soon. The burning question for me was “will MVVM suit my needs”?…and the answer was simply no it wasn’t. ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/08/11/modelling-task-based-smart-clients-explicitlypart-1/ I recall some time ago I heard Scott Hanselman suggest that “strong opinions loosely held” were of little interest or consequence to him…at least that’s the sentiment I remember being expressed. That thought resonated strongly with me at the time and just today it occurred to me that the inverse ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/08/03/opinions/ In a time where mankind had come to think of itself as highly evolved, there was a technology princess known as JezebelScript. She was a Queen in waiting and in her latter years she strode throughout the land upon her faithful horse who went by the name High. ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/06/29/jezebelscript-her-followers-and-the-downtrodden/ On the back of running his ADSD course in Sydney this year Udi Dahan will be also running a one day NServiceBus introductory course. The one day course is a highly condensed event so its sure to pack a wallop and if you are interested in taking NServiceBus for a ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/06/25/nservicebus-1-day-kick-start-event/ This (now series of) posts(s) will be something of a stream of consciousness, an exploration that has no single objective, rather a journey of discovery with no guarantee (sought nor otherwise) of any practical application. Something tells me that there is some niche lurking behind the premise however beyond my ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/06/21/hacking-on-the-nservicebus-generic-host-with-ironpythontbc/ Without discussing the merits of the argument as to whether or not HTML5 and its (potential) level of inclusion in Windows 8 is to the exclusion of Silverlight, I feel compelled to note the level of mean spiritedness of some members of the “community” (if one dare lay claim they ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2011/06/03/developer-schadenfreude-leaves-me-cold/ I’m super excited, 10Gen are currently taking a survey for registrations of interest for MongoDB training run by them in Australia. So, I would implore anyone with a eye on the NOSQL or MongoDB space to get over quickly to survey monkey to fill in the Survey and show your ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/05/19/mongodb-training-in-australia-with-10gen-be-counted/ Just as I was about to embark on  a new project (codenamed PONGO), the IronPython team announced a CTP 2.0 drop of the IronPython tools for Visual Studio 2010 which is exciting on a number of different levels. If IronRuby and IronPython eventually make it all the way ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/05/09/ironpython-tools-for-visual-studio-with-expression-blend/ I have made the code from the NFetchSpec spiking / proof of concept available here. Be aware that it requires .NET Framework 4.0, Entity Framework 4.0 and the Feature CTP  versions 2 or 3. I won’t be revising this code until the official release of version 4.0 and it will ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/03/18/nfetchspec-code-entity-framework-repository-fetching-strategies-specifications-code-only-mapping-poco-and-making-roles-explicit/ Before diving in you might like to read parts 1, 2 and 3 if you have come to this post out of sync. Also if you are not familiar with some of the newer aspects of the Code Only CTP for Entity Framework it might be worth looking here on ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/03/15/helping-entity-framework-v40-play-its-role-part-40/ Does this look like you? Are you surrounded by like minded individuals, sharing a community experience at work with your fellow geeks? Perhaps you have even gone further than that and made a lasting friend or two out of your fellow developers. That certainly describes  the kind ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/03/12/are-we-not-men-we-are-devo/ Hot on the heels of Udi’s visit to Melbourne this year (in January), comes another chance to make good if you missed out. Plans are underway for Udi to visit us yet again, this time in Sydney. If your interested check out Udi’s post and register your interest using ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/03/04/adsd-course-with-udi-dahan-in-sydney-australia-for-november-2010/ In part 1.0 we laid the foundation and part 2.0 unravelled some of the internal details of how NFetchSpec (the libraries that are subject of this discussion) goes about enlisting the benefits that can be derived by using explicit roles in your system by collapsing a swathe of Entity Framework ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/02/21/helping-entity-framework-v40-play-its-role-part-30/ Doing .Net Days for March 6th 2010 is now fully booked. Thanks to all those who have registered. It’s becoming apparent that the current venue may not be large enough to accommodate the interest moving forward so we are exploring alternative venues and will keep you up date as ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/02/18/doing-net-days-march-6th-fully-booked/ The content of this series of posts is based around a spiking effort / proof of concept that aims to modularize (I am avoiding the word framework) a set of libraries for the express purpose of addressing business intent for Domain models persisted with the Entity Framework. In part 1.0 ... http://www.simonsegal.net/blog/2010/02/17/helping-entity-framework-v40-play-its-role-part-20/