Philly.NET Code Camp II 2008

Mark your calendars now for May 17th and look for the announcement at the Philly.Net Web site!

Next Philly IASA Architecture Meeting May 7th

Next IASA Meeting will be on May 7th at the Microsoft offices in Malvern, PA at 6:00pm.
Click here for map and directions

It looks like Max Zilberman will speak on Enterprise Architecture and .NET. I have seen this talk and it is a great presentation, so come out and lets talk architecture.

Details:
Maturing the .NET in the Enterprise - an Architect Perspective

Learn the reasons for common pitfalls and issues most organizations face while developing .NET solutions. Get insights on how enterprise frameworks can assist with delivery of world class systems predictively and efficiently.

Max Zilberman is an Enterprise Framework Architect at Aetna where he is resposible for setting the technical direction of the ,NET Center of Excellence. With over 12 years of experience, he has helped organizations like Verizon, Deuche Bank, Morgan Stanley, AT&T to create highly scalable enterprise systems. Aside from his interests in enterprise .NET applications, he has participated as an advisor to a number of Microsoft internal product teams.

I have been in Seattle for the week

I attended the MVP summit and learned about what is coming in the next view versions of Visual Studio, C# and VB.NET plus a slew of other things. Most all of it is under NDA of course, so I won't be mentioning most of that right away. I went to a session on ASP.NET MVC and wrote a basic application with it in about an hour. It works pretty well, though if you are familiar with Web forms you may think you have gone back to asp pages. The key benefits is that the controllers and models are easy to write unit tests for, especially with some of the changes coming in the next version. It would be interesting to hook up some different views to the engine like velocity templates or something. I will post some examples next week after I am able to get some rest. You can download the latest version (and also the source) along with many sample and tutorials at the ASP.NET MVC site.

Measuring Technical Debt

Where should a company invest their technology dollars? What should your precious resources be working on? Why can we ever seem to fix what is wrong with our architecture and code to make it easier extend while the various customers keep piling on the new feature request? Etcetera! It is difficult to balance out project work, maintenance work and R&D work. But your organization will not be healthy unless this is balanced. You will have customers that won't trust you when you tell them to release and you will fix the bugs later, because later never seems to come. You will be frustrated because you can't try out new technologies, nor fix what is wrong. What you need to do is create situations for dialog and transparency in the work and the impact of choices. Organizing the effort into portfolios can help shed transparency on IT workload. Your choices lie in one of three basic portfolios: Discovery/Innovation, Project and Asset/Maintenance. The question would be what would be the most appropriate way to measure the value of each of the items in each portfolio to try to strike a balance between the new project and feature work, but also getting around to update software, architectures and fixing bugs. I have been thinking about the first and the later lately and I am going to share a few thoughts about each over a few blog post. Asset/Maintenance portfolio would contain all of your hardware and software licenses and track what is under warranty, what has reached its end of life. This portfolio gives you the means to track and make decisions about upgrades and system purchases. It can also shed light on where you have overlap and lend in consolidating your infrastructure. The problem is that this does not address the custom code that never gets attention from developers because they are trying to satisfy their customers demands for the next great thing. Some code that is written is of high quality, other bits is of lower quality, but how do we make this transparent? Through categorizing it as technical debt. You are doing something cheaper, faster, less knowledgeable now at a greater cost in the future.
I need to collect my thoughts and trials of ways I have dealt with this. That will be a future post.

Whew, been busy!!!

I organized the Archtiecture track for Philly.NET Code Camp, spoke at Philly.NET code camp, wrote two articles on architecture, spoke at the Northern Delaware User Group meeting and have been trying to organize the IASA Philadelphia Chapter. I also have a full time job and a family. Anyways, I wanted to get this anouncement up in case there are some readers who did not get the email.

IASA Philadelphia Meeting

Date: Feb. 6th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location:
Microsoft
Great Valley Corporate Center
45 Liberty Blvd., Suite 210
Malvern, PA 19355

Agenda:
Refreshments & Network
Introductions
What do you want from an architecture professional group?
How do you want to help?

Topic:
What is Architecture?
Join us for a moderated discussion on the practicalities of what IT architecture is. We will discuss what is the meaning of IT architecture,roles and responsibilities, approaches to IT architecture, common architecture processes and artifacts and what should be in the architecture toolkit.

Moderator:
Mitch Ruebush is the Architecture Team Leader at ING DIRECT, fsb. He isresponsible for defining and coordinating the architecture for theapplications and infrastructure at ING DIRECT. He has written a numberof books and articles on .NET and enjoys spending his time as a father of two great kids, a hobbyist film maker, playing piano and saxophone and trying to write a video game.


IASA (International Association of Software Architects) is the premier association focused on the IT architecture profession through education, advocacy, events, and the development of best practices.

I Set up a Blogger account

Well, the server I was hosting my blog on died about 6 months ago. I have been meaning to get something else up, but I just don't seem to choose to spend my time doing this. Then I thought, there is this large thing called the Internet where people are willing to host my ramblings in their data center. Always up, no effort on my part, sounds great!

Mitch

Philly.NET Code Camp on Jan 12th!!!

This is going to be a big event. We have over 50 speakers and over 400 registered. This is possible because DeVry University at Ft. Washington, PA has donated ample space and the many other partners for this event. So check out the site and register for the event.

http://www.phillydotnet.org/Meetings/MeetingEmails/2008/January122008/tabid/603/Default.aspx

I organized the architecture track and it looks to be a really good event. The alt.Net track looks interesting also.

Should be a fun day and you get lunch on top of it.