Architecture is very fashionable these days. Everybody wants to be an architect. Many vendors are coming out with strong messages targeted at architects. It's where the industry's at. But can you really expect a developer who doesn't have a solid grasp of OO principles to define a decent architecture? And who would check the results? I strongly...

I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with the kind of asynchronous programming model supported by the .Net framework. The common API looks something like this: public IAsyncResult BeginXXX (data, AsyncCallback callback, Object state); The purpose of the "state" object is to allow you to put in some data that you'd like to get back with the...

I'm proud to anounce that shortly after the third installment of the “Ask Udi” podcast came online, we hit our one thousand subscriber mark! Just so you know, number four is on its way up, and number five is currently being edited. Podcast number 4 is about Domain Driven Design (DDD), layered architectures, the different kinds of workflow,...

You might remember my previous post on Dependency Injection Woes where I bemoaned the issue of string naming as well as the lack of method injection. Well, it turns out that the latest version of Spring.net has just added method injection. I just wanted to mention one not-so-small issue I have with method injection - it's testability. When...

A couple of days ago, one of the programmers on a project I’m consulting on came in to ask me a question. With a puzzled look on his face, Alex asked me “Udi, in your design you have these two tiny interfaces, IEntity and IMapEntity, that together wouldn’t justify belonging in their own DLL, and you gave each of them their very own DLL!...

A couple of days ago, one of the programmers on a project I’m consulting on came in to ask me a question. With a puzzled look on his face, Alex asked me “Udi, in your design you have these two tiny interfaces, IEntity and IMapEntity, that together wouldn’t justify belonging in their own DLL, and you gave each of them their very own DLL!...

The question of testing has been gaining quite a bit of traction lately in the whole SOA context. Jimmy's been aggregating quite a bit of it. The catchall question, “how do I test my SOA?” is much too generic though. First of all, we have to specify what kind of testing we’re talking about. Functional, non-functional, load, usability...

In my latest podcast I tried to describe the value that the bus architectural pattern can bring a distributed system. You can also find a link there to a detailed analysis of the API of a bus, and how well Microsoft latest communications platform (WCF, formerly known as Indigo) fits in with that API. What isn't immediately apparent is how the...

You'd think that with Indigo/WCF/WinCom out now, people like me who develop distributed systems would be overjoyed. Finally, a single technology stack to deal with, right? Well, maybe if the API wasn't so cumbersome. I know that Indigo tries to be almost everything to all people through its pervasive extensibility model, but I'd really like to...

I'm proud to anounce the beginning of The Software Simplist blog on Dr. Dobbs SOA, Web Services, and XML portal. Also, don't forget to check out my new podcast on the Dr. Dobbs site - Ask Udi, the podcast where listeners get their questions on SOA and Web Services answered. Subscribe to the feed here. The first installment (also available from...

When using dependency injection, you often find two different kinds of scenarios that are common - singleton and single-call, which match the lifetime of the objects being injected. If the object you're currently working on needs a reference to a repository, the main form, or something like that, you'll probably expose either a setter, or...

Everybody's talking about it so I'll chip in my 2c. I'm an architect. I code. I intend to keep coding. This includes production code. One of the main purposes I code is to show programmers I concrete example of an implementation of the design. Not just to show, but to explain - both the code and the design; why this code is better than...

I've been hearing more and more accounts of decreased ROI of TDD in rich UIs. After analyzing many of them I have come to the conclusion that the problem is not TDD, but rather one of design. Let's take, for example, a use case where the user can select a customer from a list (or grid) and open the detailed view by double-clicking, or selecting...

Now that I have your attention, let me rephrase that. If all you want to log is what method was called and with what parameters, knock yourself out, go and use aspects (maybe like this). But what about when something interesting happens and you want to log that? Something interesting, maybe some like this: as a result of his last purchase,...

There was a topic that came up recently on one of the SOA discussion groups as to the relationship of message queuing (vendor agnostic) and ESBs. If we consider a specific message queuing implementation as "just a transport", a way to get a bunch of bytes from one place to another (since there's a good chance that we can't count on a specific...