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New Post: Scalenet.pdf update planned?

dalepres — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:17:41 GMT

Is there any planned update for scalenet.pdf (Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability)at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998530.aspx? This came out in 2004. While it is still useful, it is hard to use it as a reference in performance and architecture discussions without being challenged that we're 3 levels later on .Net Framework since then.

Regards,

Dale

New Post: Durable Services for Mobile

dasblonde — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:09:20 GMT

This document states:
If you need durable state, you can use the durable storage (introduced in .NET 3.5) or implement your own custom solution.

If this is referring to WCF Durable Services here (not durable storage) then this is not so simple to support in the Mobile client since you can't use context-aware bindings OOB. You would have to roll your own client implementation to get this done. I suggest that if this document is to suggest an implementation, it would be good for readers to know what is supported OOB and what is "roll your own". Otherwise we could be guiding people to think that things are supported as they are for rich clients. Just a suggestion.

New Post: WS-ReliableMessaging Support for Mobile?

dasblonde — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:05:40 GMT

This document states:
You can use WS-Reliable Messaging to implement reliable end-to-end communication, even when one or more Web services intermediaries must be traversed.

I don't think that WS-RM is supported for mobile, since we can't use WSHttpBinding. Unless you want to roll your own WS-RM protocol.

New Post: Silverlight For Mobile Doesn't Exist?

dasblonde — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:02:51 GMT

My understanding is that Silverlight for Mobile does not exist. Am I wrong? If not, will this document be updated to remove that section?

New Post: Correct Link for Data Access Layer Video

Gooch — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:09:58 GMT

The correct link for the Data Access Layer Video is:
http://www.codeplex.com/AppArch/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Video%3a%20Data%20Layer%20Layer&version=3

New Post: Prism - I don't see the pattern...

Billkrat — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:20:21 GMT

Probably a poor choice of pun ;)   Prism effectively utilizes patterns such as Supervising Controller MVP and Separated Presentation. The point is more towards seeing Silverlight as a fat client than thin, and like patterns, architectures should twist and turn with the times.

With new and emerging technologies we have to continually revise and twist existing patterns
   + MVC -> MVP
   + ASP.NET MVC (Model2) from MVC
   + Presentation Model from MVC/Application Model.

Enter stage left Prism (aka CompositeWPF); permitting us to create fat clients on client side with the language we love so much - .NET.

The Presentation -> WCF -> Service Layer -> BLL -> DAL meets conventional programming needs but not for Prism.   With Prism, modules are in different assemblies (which can be loaded dynamically). To use Silverlight as a simple (but elegant) UI is a waste of client processing power resulting in unnecessary round trips - much of the application business logic can be in our Prism applications keeping our WCF services more generic and reusable across multiple applications, e.g., an Employee service that knows how to get data from numerous corporate application databases and resources such as ADS.

What became problematic on a recent sprint was the addition of our first module's Web Service.   A problem because there is no SvcUtil.exe for Silverlight (yet) and we are tied to L2S so we are forced to go with "Add Web Service" and as such we can only reference our entities from our data layer (yes, we have a IBLL->IDataProvider in our silverlight module). Not to mention it's configuration file; this file coupled with the Website configuration file and the requirement to give the main assembly a copy of the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig (Prism V2 Drop 8) which results in three configurations to maintain for a simple, single module application; this application will grow into a multitude of modules.

Some may think that three configuration files in itself doesn't seem so bad, but wait until you have to move them through a cycle of Development, Staging and Production servers.   With every new module that accesses WCF Services comes additional configuration files to maintain.

---

In the absence of an authoritative source and guidance (if it's out there I can't find it) the solution I'm toying with is pretty basic - when dealing with a fat client we're taught that you should have a pattern (PresentationModel, MVP, etc) that consumes a reusable service - so it starts to look like this:

Presenter -> IService -> IBLL -> IDataProvider  ~~~ WCF -> Service layer -> BLL -> DAL

Where the IService, IBLL and IDataProvider are configured in the application's Unity configuration section.   Unfortunately with "Add Web Reference" we can only reference our entities from the implementation of our IDataProvider so I'm researching the fastest method to project the results into a Shared library entities; this way our IService and IBLL are oblivious (as they should be) to the data object model - for example if I want to have my IDataProvider dynamically set to an implementation that operates from an Isolated Storage data file if available.

Any guidance from the gurus on this matter would be appreciated.

New Post: New type of solutions

rboucher — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:27:06 GMT

Hi plpasta,
This was beyond the scope of what we examined. We haven't really brought in any 3rd party frameworks by name with the exception of logging for mobile clients because some of our experts felt it was important enough to give a few examples. We were going for something more timeless. As external frameworks can change and we just recommend "3rd party" solutions in certain cases or ignored the issue in favor of stating the principles that a framework should utilize. We didn't want to refer to much in print. We often even pass over our own offerings, leaving them at the bottom as reference and out of the main principles.

But, we do recognize the power there. Afterall, we do have our own dependency injection framework (Unity).

Anyone in the community is welcome to comment the pages where these frameworks are relevant. Just comment the wiki pages on http://www.codeplex.com/AppArchGuide .

Rob

New Post: But what about the database?

rboucher — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:00:29 GMT

Thank for the link. We agree that database design is certainly important. However at 387 pages, we had to draw the line somewhere. Proper database design is a huge topic in itself.
I've passed on this feedback to p&p management for either a KB topic on this site or perhaps more guidance in the future.

Rob

New Post: Where is ASP.NET Model-View-Presenter (MVP)?

rboucher — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:04:46 GMT

Hi Chris,
We've certainly mentioned this in the Guide itself and even done videos on it. See the main site http://www.codeplex.com/AppArch and scroll down to videos. We haven't covered ASP.NET MVP in depth in the Main guide, other than to mention it, because it's actually too low level for most architectural discussions in the guide.

Rob

New Post: Guidance Explorer Online Store

rboucher — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:14:03 GMT

Hi Matt,
Sorry we are later on answering this thread. Yes, this content will go into GE in some form. J.D. Meier, the leader of this project, is actually the inventor of the GE concept. After the guide is complete, we work on getting the content in GE. It can sometimes take some time. We've got a new revision of GE out with some bug fixes.

For those reading this thread who don't know, GE is guidance explorer. It's a tool used to slice, dice, store, and even modify and edit our content via Rich Client application (or a web version which is less functional than the Rich Client app). Since we write guidance that's highly modular, we can "nuggetize" it the guidance so it fits in the tool. For more information see http://www.codeplex.com/GuidanceExplorer for more information.

Rob

New Post: How about Release via Wiki?

rboucher — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:29:21 GMT

The codeplexwiki is on the http://www.codeplex.com/apparchGuide site along with the download of the PDF guide. It's right on the main page

New Post: How about Release via Wiki?

hardywang — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:46:23 GMT

In this case I don't really support anoymous editing, because P&P team is the expert.

The benefit of Wiki is fast releasing, I don't need to wait for certain amount of time to see next version, but I can always see P&P team's most up-to-date change right away, plus like what you said comments on certain section of article.

BWT, where is the CodeplexWiki?

New Post: How about Release via Wiki?

rboucher — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:10:57 GMT

Hi Hardywang,
We do release to Wiki (codeplex wiki) on this site and you can comment on the botom of various pages.

What I'm hearing is that you'd like an anonymous wiki like Wikipedia where people can edit the pages themselves?

Rob

New Post: How about Release via Wiki?

hardywang — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:02:42 GMT

Wiki is a fast way to update information. For this guide I believe there will be a lot of feedback from various sources, and the P&P team does not need to wait every change to be done and release next version, with the help of Wiki team can modify on the fly and readers will always have the latest version.

New Post: Road Map

rboucher — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:59:30 GMT

Hi Bipin,

We are targetting for PDF release to Codeplex between Dec 15th and Dec 31st. After that, it will take some time before it comes out on MSDN and in book form. Likely 1st quarter of 2009.

We will continue to add items to the App Arch KB that will expand on the guide after PDF release.

Rob

New Post: Guidance Explorer Online Store

mattortiz — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:24:45 GMT

Is this content along with other, related, P&P guidance available as a feed or online storage that can be sync'd to Guidance Explorer? Do you guys use GE for this content - if not why not?

Thanks,

Matt Ortiz
matt [at] footheory [dot] com

New Post: Road Map

bipin — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:26:51 GMT

Hi
When we expect final version App Arch Guide? I wud like to take printout and to use as reference guide!
Any tentative dates

TIA
Bipin

New Post: Where is ASP.NET Model-View-Presenter (MVP)?

ChrisAniano — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 07:19:02 GMT

Where is ASP.NET Model-View-Presenter (MVP)?
Is this not included?

New Post: Architecture Frame comments - Beta 2

salvapatuel — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:06:06 GMT

Hi guys,

Couple of things that you can answer for me on the architecture frame.

Page 79: Quality Attributes: Why is this not aligned with the Qualities of Service that MSF pushes? They look more complete as they properly decouple the overloaded term "Performance", for us is all about responsivenss, concurrency and efficiency. Some customers are trying to push the MSF and this document looks a bit different in this area.

Chapter 3, Architecture frame: it is good to present the frame here but after a couple of pages you start describing the considerations. This considerations are not general enough, some of them apply to the different layers. indeed, on each layer on part III you repeat some of these entries, looks confussing and repeatitive.

Page 61: Communication: you are stating to use unmanaged code for communications across AppDomain Boundaries, I don't get it, why unmanaged?

Page 61: Composition: the document state that we should avoid dynamic layouts, but there is a technology called Dynamic data released in .NET 3.5 SP1 that promotes this.

I will continue reading and post more comments.
Thanks

New Post: But what about the database?

ID10T — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:54:40 GMT

Thank you for providing this helpful document. One area I see that is missing has to do with how to design the application database. Today developers are wearing many hats, doing things that only DBAs and IT staff used to do. I started a discussion on how to design a modular database for a modular application. I'd love to see some meaningful feedback to this important question. It's located at “patterns & practices: Data Access Guidance”, which is here: http://www.codeplex.com/dataguidance/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=39883.
TIA!