The Hubris of Architects

I  personally think it takes a bit of ego to drive software projects to success, so I disagree with  this chart posted on the MSDN Loosely Coupled Thinking blog.

I made a quick fix below.  The three virtues of a great programmer, namely laziness, impatience, and hubris apply to architects too, since your “architect” is just a glorified high level programmer.  To avoid being “zapped by Zeus” you should seek the Middle Path.

Perhaps, since so few architects (none?) lack ego, the above chart represents the right side of the curve…

@Lab

Company Picnic

The Lab49 picnic was a blast.  Sun, lake, beach, food, beer and volleyball.  Some cute kids came too.  I highly recommend the bus and my son keeps talking about the ski trip, but he gave this one a big thumbs up too.

Quote of the Week

On Erik Meijer:  “I disagree with …(insert RX duality criticism here)… but of course, he’s right.”

I wish I could be so confident to find a disagreement, but I bet I’d come to the same conclusion.

Architecture, Architecture, Architecture

Six glowing reviews for Release It! A couple Lab49ers, including who has met the author, think the book is worthy.  And it has a Jolt Award.  Interestingly, more than one Lab49er pans the Pragmatic Bookshelf in general.

Of couse GoF and PoEAA are must reads.  IMHO anyone who hasn’t read these yet must be a bit wet behind the ears.  After that Domain Driven Design is highly recommended, with an interesting critique on “Who should drive paradigms”.

On Agile:  Practices of an Agile Developer, Ship It!

Also, Continuous Delivery.

My reading list just got longer.

Lady Java

Great to see that JAVA now has its own anthem.

AC_Run_Content javascript wrapper used to load Flex applications

I don’t know what it means either, but there’s a few people @Lab who do.  It has something to do with Flex and Wmode, whatever that is…

HTML5

Boilerplate or Reset.

Misc

Flex: UML for Flex/AS, Saffron

Garbage

An interesting blog post on garbage collection on MSDN proposes that “Garbage collection is simulating a computer with an infinite amount of memory.”

The follow-up to the replies is here.

How To Kill Regions

If you are as annoyed by regions as I am do this in Visual Studio 2008:

Tools / Options / Text Editor / C# / Advanced

Uncheck “Enter outlining mode when files open”

RX Video Review Part 2

My previous post makes it seem like there’s no good RX videos.  Actually the RX in Depth videos are excellent for what they cover.  On the rxwiki, these are the only videos they link to specifically.  They mostly talk about how you can combine Observables and show “marble diagrams” (such as the above picture) that make it all very quickly comprehensible.

The drag drop demo is good to show the power and WOW Factor of RX.

So there are some good videos, but maybe what I’m looking for is some detail on the classes and methods.  There’s no videos about helpful classes such as Subject or ReplaySubject and no discussion of the methods available other than the combinators.  I’m sure there’s a wealth of classes and methods available in RX.  I’m going to have to look further to find the documentation I prefer.

The “Hands On Lab” is 42 pages – I may look into that.

WPF in 60 Seconds

Or:  So Much WPF, So Little Time

I’ll be presenting on WPF at the September 21st .Net Meetup.

A breezy tour of topics in WPF from the ground up with demo examples and source code.  Each topic will be given a one minute treatment.  For anyone interested in, new to, or learning WPF you can see the scope of the platform and see what you want to learn.  For anyone working in WPF, enjoy the highlights of your platform.  You might even see something you’ve missed.

Everything will apply equally to Silverlight, subject of course to this diagram.

@Lab

Welcome Aboard Jimmy Schementi

IronRuby core team member, Jimmy Schementi, is joining Lab49.  Read about his decision here.  MS bashing here.

Meetup

I caught David Padbury’s WPF/Blend demo at the July .Net Meetup.  He really made it look easy and the demonstrated behaviors were pretty cool.

I’ll be presenting on WPF at the September 21st .Net Meetup.

Coming Soon

For the worlds most useful WPF XAML Converter watch this space.  It even beats BooleanToVisibilityConverter IMHO!  It’s brilliant simplicity.

Grid Computing

Lots of grid computing talk.  Data Grid, Computation Grid, whatever, it all sounds pretty whiz bang cool to me.

Here’s some links.

Papers: http://www.globus.org/alliance/publications/papers.php

Software:

Globus: “the daddy of grid computing software”
Coherence: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15357_01/index.htm
Gemfire: http://www.gemstone.com/docs/6.0.1/product/docs/
EHCache (including Terracotta distribution option): http://ehcache.org/documentation/index.html
Hadoop: http://hadoop.apache.org/
http://jboss.org/infinispan
http://gridgain.com/

Web 3.0 is here – All Hail Web 4.0

http://byronmiller.typepad.com/byronmiller/2007/07/just-when-you-t.html

Access Memory Directly At Your Own Risk

Here’s some instructions on how to access memory directly in JAVA.  Use caution.

Canonical Data Models Considered Harmful

The Shangri-La of a single all encompassing data model for disparate business units will mostly likely become a tortuous chimera.

Peccavi

I missed the Lab Seminar Presentation on time management – maybe that’s a primary indication I should have gone.

Quote of the Week

“It’s like a popularity contest, but of failure.”

EventToCommand for Attached Property

To propagate events to a view to a ViewModel – use an attached property, not fancy xaml binding, but an attached property.  It says so right here in so many words.  So if you want MouseOver or DoubleClick, AutoComplete.Populating, etc. this is your answer.

Here’s the example everyone points you to.

The all purpose EventToCommand class in the MVVM Light Toolkit looks like the most convenient way to get this job done.

For any type of click, retemplating a button and using a ViewModel ICommand for its Command is the way to go.

HTTrack Project Template

I’ve been slurping a lot of video from Channel9, so I have another HTTrack tip.  As you can see here, an HTTrack project is copyable, so you don’t need to enter all the settings every time you find a new topic to download.  Just make a template project with the settings once and copy that folder in your “My Web Sites” directory whenever you want to start a new project.  Name the copied folder with the new project name.  The next time you start HTTrack, the new project folder will appear in your Projects list and you can just enter the new URLs and slurp away.