Rexiology... : Architecture

Blog moved to MSDN Blogs site...

Rex Tang — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 18:33:00 GMT

This post announces the depreciation of Rexiology MSMVP blog (this site).

for new post updates please update your RSS reader to http://blogs.msdn.com/rextang ,

or you can also point to my main personal work blog site at http://rextang.net/blogs/work/ .

Thanks for reading...

Rex

Software Architecture: Past, Present and Future...

Rex Tang — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:30:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rextang.net/blogs/work/

[via DiegumZone]

Emerging Architect Roles

The considerations of economical changes like globalization and technological achievements like the Internet’s impact 0n the digital economy, pressed for formalizing software architecture as a discipline.

Although there is not yet a definite agreement in the distinct roles, we can sketch three major personas:

· Infrastructure Architect. These define the platform and other environments (hardware, basic software) to provide for business applications’ high availability. They must also work with developers to define mechanisms and standards that allow applications to achieve the security, reliability, manageability, transparency, and policy compliance essential to the modern business. It’s expected that the natural evolution of a senior IT professional is an Infrastructure Architect.

· Solutions Architect. These are responsible for the design of one or more applications or services within an organization, usually within the scope of a division (and for that reason also known as Application Architect). Examples of such applications are: Internet banking, companywide knowledge sharing portal, and distributed point of sales applications. A senior developer is a good candidate to become Solutions Architect.

· Enterprise Architect. Their job is to keep the business and its IT systems in alignment. They strive to maximize the return on IT investment by making sure that IT spending is prioritized towards business opportunity, and by optimizing the impact of investments across the organization’s portfolios of services, resources, projects, and processes. They must be a bridge between business leaders, development, and operations to ensure that mutual understanding is achieved, goals are realistic, and expectations are properly managed. Enterprise Architecture is about the big picture — how people and technology work together to produce world-class, long-term results. For that reason, this persona is also referred as Strategic Architect. What is expected is that a Solutions Architect or Infrastructure Architect becomes Enterprise Architect.

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Just had a reading of this article which provided an overall view of Software Architecture progress, nice one to have a read also it introduced an architecture site at http://www.skyscrapr.net , full of resources and discussion related to architectures, don't miss the link...

Technorati Tags: software , solution, programming, architecture, pattern

Patterns and Practices Guidance Explorer...

Rex Tang — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 16:48:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rextang.net/blogs/work/

[via ScottGu]

Saw from Scott's blog about Patterns and Practices Guidance Explorer project, which lets you browse guidances from MS PAG, organize your own pattern groups, or even writing your own guidance and sharing with others.

It's also having online version to browse those guidances online.

This should be good for dev teams to organize, manage, and share group-wide guidances and accumulate knowledge assets.

download here . channel 9 wiki

Technorati Tags: microsoft , pattern , programming, architecture, guidance

Source Code for the Built-in ASP.NET 2.0 Providers Now Available for Download...

Rex Tang — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 08:48:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rextang.net/blogs/work/

[via Scott Watermasysk] [via ScottGu]

Providers Source Code Download.
Jeff Prosise's whitepapers about those provider source code.
Learn about ASP.NET 2.0 Provider model

According to ScottGu, "The source code is released under a permissive license that allows both commercial and non-commercial re-use of the source code, and should be very useful both for people wanting to build their own custom providers (you can take our source and just tweak it if you want), or to better understand/debug our existing ones."

This should be another goods to have when digging into the design of ASP.NET 2.0...

Technorati Tags: programming , asp.net , provider , model

Test Driven Development (TDD) in Team System...

Rex Tang — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 18:01:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rextang.net/blogs/work/

[via Rob Caron]

Doug Seven got a simple and easy to understand article for developers to understand the concepts of Test Driven Development using Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

Test Driven Development (TDD) is not a new concept. In fact, the idea of test-first, code-second has been around for many years. In the latest release of Microsoft's premier developer tool, Visual Studio 2005 Team System many new features have been added, including features for testing software. What does this mean to you, the serious developer? It means you now have integrated unit testing that can be leveraged for Test Driven Development.

Technorati Tags: microsoft , vstudio, architecture

Something new about MSF - Microsoft Solution Framework...

Rex Tang — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:11:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rextang.net/blogs/work/

[via rohanthomas]

Microsoft had released new MSF templates at 2006/03/17, which "are" version 8.0 templates (should serve as MSF v4), including those 2:

MSF for Agile Software Development

MSF for CMMI® Process Improvement

For more information please go to Microsoft MSF Website. I've downloaded those related files and demos and will find time to dig into them.

Technorati Tags: microsoft , architecture, agile, cmmi

New Taiwan Microsoft Technology Forums Announced...

Rex Tang — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 16:00:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rex.la/blogs/work/

The official Microsoft Technology Community at Taiwan used to be running web-NNTP based forums to communicate with the public, answering questions and sharing information with each others. This year Microsoft Taiwan announced new forum based community system, established new way to interact with the public. Using a forum system (should be based on CommunityServer forum framework) enables all the content be searched by popular searching engines and thus enables information be exchanged and shared more efficient and wide.

This should be Chinese based Microsoft Technology Forums hosted by Taiwan Microsoft MVPs and I'll also help on building a good Microsoft Technology related content base to help more Chinese-reading people know more about Microsoft Technologies.

[This post in Chinese]

Technorati Tags: microsoft , community , technology , forum , chinese

.netTiers templates for CodeSmith...

Rex Tang — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 06:03:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rex.la/blogs/work/

[via Rob Howard]

Nice post from Rob Howard on introduction of .netTiers templates for CodeSmith.

.netTiers templates are the templates for generation of Data Access Layer (DAL) that follows recommandations of Microsoft Patterns & Practices data access techniques, including the using of its Enterprise Libraries.

There are majorly 2 approaches of doing DAL for using in application design. one is to use Code Generation tools such as general purpose tools like CodeSmith or to use specialized DAL generation tool like LLBLGen Pro. the other way will be using Object Relation Mapping (O/R Mapping) frameworks like NHibernate. Code Generation is fast since it's hard coded data access code and strongly typed. O/R Mapping frameworks majorly using Run-Time type mapping thus it's flexible and dynamic, but the performance won't be as good as code generated DAL sinces there will be one more tier to deal with Object Class and Relational Data mapping.

It should depends on solution design requirements to use either tools, but to all of them, it just showed that with good tools and frameworks, coding or developing desired software won't fall into boring works and will be fun and like art works!

Technorati Tags: codesmith , DAL , orm , database , programming , pattern

Escape single quotation mark in sql query...

Rex Tang — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 10:57:00 GMT

crosspost from http://rex.la/blogs/work/

just a reminder of forming a sql query.

for concating strings in different databases, refer to my post here.

for concatenation, MS SQL uses " + " operator , Oracle uses " || " operator (as well as MySql uses function CONCAT() ) . so if one is designing a Data Repository using Repository Pattern, one may need to process this in repository level, which like providing a function for other code to concate strings in forming a query.

fortunately, for escaping single quotation mark in a query , it's the same as in MsSql and Oracle , they both used 2 single quotation marks to escape single quotation mark in a single-quotation-mark quoted string. (eg: for a string like o'connell to put in a query, it's 'o''connell' , " ' ' " is escaped and represents " ' ").

by the way, as NHibernate is just transforming object propertires in to real database field names, those rules above also apply to HQL query. also true if one is using escape chars in a "like" search (eg: select .. from class1 cls where cls.prop1 like '%My\\_Name%' escape '\\' ), the translation to real sql query both for mssql and oracle is tested without problems.

Technorati Tags: hibernate , nhibernate , orm , database , programming