Commonwealth Bank of Australia CommSee Solution (Case Study)

Commonwealth Bank of Australia CommSee Solution: An interesting look at a case study, in this case the CommSee application at the CBA. Part 1 focuses on the overall backend architecture for the application; Part 2 focuses on the front end: a Smart client Windows Forms application and Part 3 focuses on the infrastructure and development/test process.

Workflow in Application Integration

Workflow in Application Integration

Kevin Francis on the 7th edition of the Architecture Journal talks about workfow in applicaton integration

Cockburn on Crystal and Agility

Info Q has interviewed the great Alistair Cockburn, who talks about agile processes and Crystal a familily of methodologies which allows you to be agile in any environment (eg: you wouldnt use XP in any project or Scrum etc)

In-process Interoperability

InfoQ: In-process Interoperability Ted Neward has written an article on the different options of interop JVM and the CLR. Definitely things have advance since I had to research onto this 2 years ago. Worth having a look.

In-process Interoperability

InfoQ: In-process Interoperability Ted Neward has written an article on the different options of interop JVM and the CLR. Definitely things have advance since I had to research onto this 2 years ago. Worth having a look.

COM Surrogate has stopped working: Vista

Do you have an error "COM Surrogate has stopped working" any time you select an avi / mpeg file in Vista?

This error is caused when Vista is trying to build a thumbnail, and you don't have the right codecs for that file.

To fix this you can either download the latest ffdshow code pack
or disable thumbnails in explorer.

ARCast.net - SOA and Workflow with Udi Dahan

On my way home last Friday i listened to the podcast of UDI Dahan on Windows Workflow and SOA.

He explains why workflow fits very well on a pub/subs scenario. Also gives a valid reason on when to use workflow instead of coding (which is an ongoing debate i have with the rest of my development team).

In my opinion WF provides you with a valid framework architecture for an orchestration service. This can later on be scaled up BizTalk if required.

You can listen to the podcast in Arcast.Net

The Stack is the new Os debate

The other day I had the opportunity to be part of a small debate, on how the OS debates are moving towards to the stack. (LAMP, .NET, WAMP...). During the debate I argued that you don’t have to stick with a specific stack if you architect your layers correctly.

Even if you prefer a particular Stack, you should always develop in a way that you are not dependent to any layer (easier said than done i know). Now the most “easy” part to replace could be the OS, being Java, Php and .Net (with mono) platform independent. The web server could also be easy to replace. .Net (not mono) now can also be hosted in a different web server than IIS.

The database with a good persistence framework can also be considered an easy option to replace. Obviously, never having (or trying to not have) any business logic buried on your database.

Probably the most significant element when you choose a stack will be the framework / development language (.Net, J2EE, Php, Ruby on Rails). This can be definitely the most difficult one to replace, but a SOA will allow you also to interchange the elements of the traditional Business Logic, not tying you to a particular framework.

The presentation layer through composites applications should present those service consumers, enforcing the decoupling of the user interface and business logic layer.

Custom ASP.NET AJAX Control Extender

Joe Stagner shows you how to create a control extender to add client behaviour to a standard web control. This could be translated to AOP on Ajax, how good is that. Now you can add / extend your current applications without the fear of breking anything.

In this example, the TextBox control is extended to provide immediate feedback on the strength of the password entered by the user. (Note is Vb.Net)

You can view it at the ASP.NET site