I did a guest blog post for Imulus on this very topic.  You can find it here.

I was writing a quick T4 template in Visual Studio 2008 in a VB.NET project and noticed a few quirks/differences when compared to a C# project.

When you add a text file named “Test.tt” in a C# project, Visual Studio processes the T4 template and generates a corresponding “Test.cs” file:

I expected similar behavior in VB.NET, but I was quite disappointed.  For starters, I didn’t see any apparent output.  To fix this little issue, I had to click on the “Show All Files” button on the Solution Explorer.  Then the file showed up, but I was even more confused because I saw this:

Apparently, the default file extension for T4 templates is “.cs”, so this shouldn’t have really surprised me, but I found it odd that in my VB project, I would have a C# file.  Fortunately, the fix is quite simple: add an output processor directive to the T4 file so that the file extension is “.vb”:

<#@ output extension=".vb" #>

That’s it.  I hope this post saves a poor soul some time.

Thank you to everyone who came to the meeting to hear about Pragmatic Architecture!  Please find my code below. 

You can download the original code here: Original Shopping Cart Code

My converted C# Code

My refactored C# Code

More refactoring is left as an exercise for the reader  =]

Hint: use a strategy pattern and remove the dependency on the HttpContext and SortedList.  Enjoy!

I just started using Microsoft Live Mesh after hearing about it from Joe Shirey.  For those not familiar with Live Mesh, you can read more here, here, and here.

I have to say that overall I am very impressed with the promise of these services from Microsoft.

That said, the user experience leaves something to be desired.  I will do a more thorough review once I have been using it for a few months to give people a better feel for what Mesh is doing.  I also hope to have some time to be able to play with the Developer SDK, but that is probably wishful thinking =]

I am using Vista with UAC and Microsoft One Care.  Here are the few issues that I ran into when installing and synchronizing my first folder:

Installation

• I had to turn off my Microsoft One Care firewall as the firewall wasn't allowing Mesh to install properly.  I even tried to allow the application access to the Internet, but the initial wait time for the firewall dialog and the UAC killed the installer even when I tried to run it again.  Tried this a couple times.  Had to just turn off the firewall and then re-run the installer.
• Mesh takes forever to start up immediately after installing.  I have a reasonably fast machine and it took a few minutes, so I wasn't sure if the installation was successful or if the firewall had screwed things up.  A dialog letting me know that it would take a while would be nice.  Microsoft is generally good about these things, so I imagine this level of usability is at the end of the list of things to do.

General Usability

• There are few/no cancel buttons on some of the dialogs.  I just had to wait for the web operation to time out (which took like a minute or two).  I had a modal dialog on my screen with no way to do anything to it.
• Mesh takes a while to get going.  Again, more feedback would be nice.
• Mesh doesn't provide detailed messages in terms of what has been synchronized.  It just tells you X folders and Y files were uploaded.  A little more detail (although hidden from the default UI) would be nice.

Overall, I think this technology has great promise, and I look forward to other good software+ services from Microsoft (the Microsoft marketing people are in my head and I can't get them out!).

I was in a meeting with the AppVenture development team, and we sought to answer this question so that we could build a tool to help software architects design and communicate architectures. 

We needed to define architecture so that we could determine what needed to be communicated.  So using Single Responsibility and the Separation of Concerns principles as our guide for architectural layers, we defined architecture as all the software layers and the way those layers interact in terms of dependencies.  One interesting finding is that our notion of architecture uses a composite pattern. 

This leaves us with a simple conceptual model:

Figure 1. The conceptual model for architecture.

Using this simple conceptual model as our guide, we could create this simple architecture:

Figure 2. The AppVenture Simple Architecture (ASA)

Let's call this architecture the AppVenture Simple Architecture (ASA). So in this architecture, we have three architectural layers (this is probably the simplest architecture I can think of): a UI architectural layer, a Domain architectural layer, and a Repository architectural layer.  In the ASA, the UI layer would probably have a sub-architecture (which is of type Architecture) that has a different manifestation for each UI technology.  This UI sub-architecture would have another model that could resemble this for an ASP.NET Web Application:

Figure 3. The UI sub-architecture for an ASP.NET Web Application.

In this instance, the UI Architectural Layer has a sub-architecture (shown in Figure 3) that contains three architectural layers: a Master Page architecture layer, an Aspx Page architectural layer, and an Ascx User Control architectural layer.  One interesting thing to note here is that in Figure 3, the Ascx User Control architectural layer depends on the Domain architectural layer from the ASA architecture (Figure 2).  That dependency exists in these models to illustrate that in this architecture, the Aspx pages do not contain any dependencies to the Domain.  What this design decision means is that Aspx pages are simply containers for Ascx user controls.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this model and see which architectures do _not_ fit into this model.

In a previous post, I talked about the AppGen Revolution, and now I want to talk about how fast the business changes its mind and how AppGen aligns itself nicely with the needs of the business and the developer.

But first: why should we care that our development aligns itself with the needs of the business?  At the end of the day we developers/architects get paid when the company for which we work makes money (or saves money – but I prefer to think of the glass as half-full  =P). 

Businesses make money when we build the right application and bring it to a receptive marketplace.  The last statement cannot be overemphasized.  Notice there is not a single mention of technology or architecture.  Can we use terrible technology and/or an ailing architecture and still make money?  Maybe.  Depends on the marketplace.  We have all seen technically inferior products reign supreme and superior products die.  The market is truly a strange and whimsical place.

You may be thinking: as a developer it is hard it is to deal with the way businesses operate.  The only constant in this world is change.  Changing requirements, changing their minds about the way things should work once they see the way the software was built, changing deadlines, changing colors, sizes and shapes of buttons  =]  So we try to build the software to adapt to those changes in a manageable way.  We may even create new development methodologies and notions (XP, Crystal Clear, Scrum, TDD, BDD, etc.) to help manage this change in new ways.

This area is where AppGen fits.  By being able to 1) model a business domain, 2) model the user interface in a technology-agnostic way, and then 3) generate working applications to get feedback from users in a matter of hours is truly revolutionary.  I believe that the reason Agile methodologies all work so well is that they are meant to focus on delivering working software.  AppGen always delivers working software and does it in the most rapid way possible.

Overall: 4 out of 5

Highs: protects 3 computers, great price, low resource utilization

Lows: VPN configuration required, requires Auto Updates to be installed automatically or goes red

When I upgraded to Vista, I was looking to find a product for a fancy firewall (my favorite firewall company was purchased and their product has taken a wrong turn) and an anti-virus that didn't use too many resources (tried a few and they were too invasive).  Enter Microsoft Windows Live OneCare.  I tried the demo and once it expired, I immediately purchased the product.  It just sits there and does its job quietly and uses a minimal amount of system resources.  I like it because I rarely notice it and it gives me quite a few firewall options.  Did I mention that my subscription covers three (3) computers?  Pretty cool.  However, there is always room for improvement.  Here are a few suggestions:

1. If a network zone is set as "Home or Work," the firewall should allow VPN connections.  By default, the firewall doesn't allow this, so you have to change it on every computer.  Not sure what the security issue is to not allow outbound VPN traffic, but I assume that there is some security best practice of which I am unaware.
2. If I don't want to automatically install updates, OneCare goes red and constantly reminds me that I am unprotected.  That is fine; I just wish that I could turn off that message and make it green/orange again since I want to know what is getting installed before it gets installed.  For now I just install everything that is critical and hope my machine doesn't get hosed.  Which reminds me...  I better get that backup working sooner rather than later.

Overall a great product.  I will gladly continue my subscription until something much better comes across my desktop.

The newest/greatest improvement in software development is AppGen.  In large applications, it can decrease your development effort by weeks or months and increase code quality, all the while maintaining the flexibility of architecture and coding standards you require.

AppGen is short for Application Generation.  And like the name implies, it is a method for modeling and generating entire applications from models.  These models can be graphical or textual or both.  There are tools out there that generate apps out of the box, or you can roll your own AppGen using by combining existing technologies (code generation, UML, MDA, DSL, and other TLAs in one or more combinations).  Most approaches generate 80-90% of an application’s code, and then a developer adds custom logic after generation.  Some try and generate all the code.

AppGen works great for large projects and small projects. On big projects you can create tens or hundreds of functioning screens, the entire data layer, and tens of thousands of lines of code in less than a week.  On small projects, you can go from design to deployment in hours.  We were able to model, generate, and integrate production-ready code from Foundations (our AppGen offering) into the e-commerce portion of our website in only 3 hours.  It took longer to properly install the SSL certification path on our website than to do the custom e-commerce code (that could be because I am an IT hack, but still).

If you aren’t using AppGen in your development process, you should go and figure out if AppGen is right for you. 

[You should ask your doctor first about using AppGen. AppGen is not for everyone and can cause increased levels of free time, general happiness and Halo 3 scores.  Make sure to see a project manager if your happiness or free-time continues for more than 4 hours.]

There are plenty of great AppGen tools out there.  Probably one of them can help you.  We recently publically released our first version (plus some updates) and are excited about the future of our tools and AppGen in general.  Take a look at our video demo to AppGen in action.  If you aren’t sure about how effective AppGen is or the quality of code that gets generated, download the sample code for an app that was created in less than one hour.

This post is the first of many on AppGen and how to increase developer/architect success on software projects, and I hope to speak with you soon about AppGen and its practical application.  Drop me an email or post a comment and tell me what you think!

P.S. – I checked on Wikipedia, and AppGen redirects to IDE.  To put it simply, I think that AppGen is the next generation of IDEs, and many of us will start using AppGen tools as pre-processors to our IDEs until AppGen gets integrated in.