When I purchased this book almost 3 weeks ago, I was surprised to find that it had been on the shelves for 3 months already. Books that unify advanced architectural concepts such as Domain-Driven Design and design patterns are few and far between. This is especially true in the .NET world since many of the source materials originated in the Java realm.

Nilsson does a rather unique job of puling together some of the best domain-driven, object-oriented patterns and approaches and explain them using .NET-specific examples. The pros and cons, as I see them, are taken from my Amazon.com review and reprinted below:

Pros

• Combines the ideas of Domain Driven Design (Evans) with Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Fowler). These books are pretty much mandatory reading prior to diving into this book.
• Draws upon a myriad of other well-known sources, including materials from Refactoring to Patterns and the GoF, work from Johnson and Lowy, as well as a rare reference to Naked Objects. The more experienced and better read you are, the more this stuff will make sense.
• Rare .NET coverage of advanced concepts like Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs), persistence ignorant (PI) objects, O/R mapping with NHibernate, Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control, and Aspect-Oriented Programming.

Cons

• While some sections are really insightful and could contain more interesting materials, other sections seem to drone on too long. The work on defining the NUnit tests, in particular, flows like a stream of consciousness and doesn’t really add a lot of structured value to understanding DDD, patters, or TDD for that matter.
• Embedded comments in the text adopt from the style used in Framework Design Guidelines. It worked very well for Cwalina / Abrams in their book because it seemed planned in from the outset. Comments like “one reviewer commented on the code with the following, more succinct version” seem like editorial comments left in and not collaborative authoring by design.

Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant which, at least figuratively speaking, is located right in my back yard, was the site of the nation’s worst nuclear disaster in March of 1979. What better site to select for my first custom Geocast then something so near and dear to the locals’ hearts.

Sure, the recording quality is not great but it just further proves that it doesn’t take too much to create a Geocast, convert it to an MP3, and upload it for consumption. I’ve included a link to the file below but you can, of course, also find this under the Pennsylvania category on GeoGlue.com. 

Drop me a line and let me know what you think and, if you’re ever in the neighborhood, make sure to include this tourist attraction on your itinerary.

With two little girls running around the house, I have plenty of material to fuel my zeal to experiment with online audio and video. I uploaded a cut of Anna using her own utensils for the first time.

Aside from the family and sentimental value, I learned a couple of things for a first timer:

• Use firewire and not USB for video transfer. This makes all the difference in the world.
• Don’t use the WMV format. I uploaded WMV instead of AVI at the recommended screen size and after the conversion to Flash, there’s quite a bit of residual fuzz.
• YouTube is slow in the evening (8:00 – 11:00 EDT). Video playback drags quite a bit. This will impact willingness to leverage YouTube video content externally.
• There doesn’t appear to be the ability to download YouTube video. I believe this option is provided on Google Video. Once again, this impacts ability to integrate into other applications.

All-in-all, YouTube makes uploading and sharing video an easy process. I can’t say that I understand their revenue model but someone is paying the one million dollar network costs they ring up monthly with their content distribution network and, at least for now, it’s not me.

I received an email from one of my clients a couple of days back referring to a quote of mine on Cenqua’s website under their Clover.NET product. This brought me back to an article I wrote for Dr.Dobb’s Journal when build tools, unit testing products, and continuous integration were making their way from the Java world over to .NET. I decided to meander over to Dr.Dobb’s site (I still call it a site although a barrage of emails from CMP Media constantly reminds me that it’s a new and improved portal) and see if the article is still available.

Googling around, I was quickly able to locate the articles, which were published in two parts: Part I and Part II. Reading through the articles, I reflected on how far we’ve come in the .NET community since then. Continuous Integration (CI) and the tools supporting it have been embraced by the community and have found fairly widespread acceptance on commercial and open source products alike. In fact, the pendulum has swung so far in this direction that Microsoft decided that it was time that they undertook the effort to re-create these tools and repackage them within proprietary Microsoft products. The ultimate incarnation of this effort is Team System, which represents Continuous Integration and everything else tangentially related to the software development process rolled into one… and then given a shot of steroids - the proverbial 500 pound gorilla.

If you were thinking that the previous statement was a ramp-up to a bout of low-brow Microsoft bashing, you’d be wrong. Sure, Team System is huge and some of its beta versions were more like pre-Alpha. The last couple of demos I’ve seen, running off of laptops, I’ll add, looked not only fairly stable but pretty darn interesting. Since it was engineered from the ground up as an integrated suite of tools, the integration points appear much more polished than they do with the Rational Enterprise Suite. I can’t speak for how well the product works or for the validity of the third party extension approach. I can, however, attest to hearing quite a bit of interest from clients in the new product. If Microsoft would clearly articulate its strategy for integrating modeling tools with Team System, I would go as far as to say they’d had themselves a single and were picking up speed and heading for second.

If you pull back the covers on Team System, you’ll recognize all of the components that make up your standard Continuous Integration environment; the same ones I wrote about in the article. They’re all there and then some: a build engine, unit testing tool, code coverage reporting, static code analysis, and a completely revamped VSS version control system. This overt infringement on the open source’s domain might rub you the wrong way if you’re a proponent of the open source tools. I still love (and regularly employ or recommend) these tools but I’m open to the way that Microsoft went about making these ideas their own.

Employing James Newkirk, the creator of NUnit, to design the Team System unit testing tool leverages the lessons learned in building and maintaining NUnit and recognizes a valuable member of the open source community for his contributions. The story of a phenomenal documentation tool, NDoc, ends on a less positive note. Whether or not Sandcastle (Micrsoft’s codename for their new documentation tool) would have otherwise spelled the end for NDoc will never be known. The utter lack of financial and maintenance support for NDoc left its creator, Kevin Downs, frustrated enough to relinquish NDoc project ownership. Thankfully, Microsoft has picked up the ball here and I’m sure that once the bugs are worked out, we’ll be able to easily churn out documentation for our .NET 2.0-specific code.

“So where does this leave us?” you might ask. It leaves us with options. Choose to use the open source tools or their Team System counterparts. If you’re feeling particularly lucky, you can write some custom build script tasks and mix and mingle the two. Either way, acceptance of continuous integration will continue to grow in the .NET community. Furthermore, CI will continue to be augmented by tools of ever-increasing sophistication, be it Team System from Microsoft or a Trac or NProject-like variant from the open source community. This is good news for those employing the .NET platform or those considering a move in that direction.

Pennsylvania’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) issued the Keystone Technology Plan to serve as the information technology blueprint through the year 2009. The plan’s phased approach is quite interesting, with the following phases taking center stage:

• Yesterday: Enterprise Planning and Governance
• Today :Shared Infrastructure Services
• Tomorrow: Business Centric Services

BSCoE plays a prominent role in OIT’s vision and is mentioned as a driver of infrastructure today and key player in the creation of business-centric services in the future.

Although I was notified of this release through offline communications channels, I also stumbled upon a Technorati link to a Pennsylvania-specific technology blog – PATechSpot. The folks running this blog seem to have a pretty good handle on technology happenings in the Commonwealth. It’s definitely a site worth adding to my blogroll.

For some time I’ve been giving thought to user-generated content on the Internet. In particular, I’ve been interested in audio and video content. A recent post by Dion Hinchcliffe drove me to put a bit more structure around my ideas and put pen to paper, figuratively speaking.

I’ve been following Dion’s blog for nearly a year now and his writing helped shape my thinking about Web 2.0. Although I strongly agree with his statement that user-generated content is one of the pillars of Web 2.0, it appears that we disagree somewhat with respect to the limits of its potential. I can honestly say that user-generated content on sites such as Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and del.icio.us has added tangible value to my online experience. In many ways, there is no way to even emulate these services in the world outside of the Web. I don’t think, however, that I will ever be able to make a similar assertion about video and YouTube, in its current incarnation.

Call it frivolous, but I’d rather spend a couple of dollars to download the latest version of Lost or 24 onto my iPod than watch any number of the best of the best YouTube clips. Creating quality programming usually involves capital expenditures beyond most individuals’ means; casting and directing a team of professionals – be it actors, animators or otherwise; leveraging a professional production staff; and having a mechanism for distributing this programming. YouTube only addresses one facet in the programming production chain – distribution.

The fact that YouTube represents such a radical departure from traditional video content distribution channels has lead many to attribute much more disruptive potential to YouTube than might ever be realized. In my opinion, creating video content that will compel a potential audience to pay to be entertained still requires a talented team and some degree of financial backing. The existing TV networks, their content acquisition pipelines, and advertising revenues continue to be the driving force in enabling the creation of programming with sufficient mass market appeal to justify its creation.

In many cases, the existing networks churn out content of questionable artistic, societal, and intellectual value. In some cases, however, they hit a home run. Will a Seinfeld or 24 ever emerge from YouTube directly? I consider this highly unlikely. In this sense, I believe that the true power of YouTube and its Web 2.0 brethren is the way they can shift the balance of power in the way that quality media is identified and consumed.

The trend towards on-demand and pay-per-view programming is already well underway. Leveraging Internet technologies, YouTube can compound this trend by decoupling us from conventional viewing medium (the television) and making video consumption location independent. It also provides a channel for aspiring actors, directors, and producers to create and distribute content of real artistic, societal, and intellectual value that they might otherwise never have had. This channel could also serve as a feeder for obtaining lucrative financial backing and making a trip to “the big league”.

The first, albeit very rudimentary, version of GeoGlue is now available online at www.geoglue.com. As described in previous posts, this release is really nothing more than a soundseeing mashup with Google maps. The functionality is very basic, allowing the user to browse for soundseeing tours graphically using maps and a menu system or to search for tours using a combination of keywords. All tours are provided via MP3 streaming audio, either from the site that created the tour or from GeoGlue.com directly.

We are planning a follow up release in the near future. This release will make the map-based transitions a bit smoother by using AJAX instead of pure postbacks. We will also be working on increasing the content base, allowing users to suggest new soundseeing torus and rolling out a user provisioning system. Keep your eyes open and, as always, email us at admin@geoglue.com if you have any questions or suggestions.

Phil Windley’s recent post on e-Government mashups is a great introduction to the topic of citizen-facing Web services. As refreshing as it is to see that progressives in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are exposing government data to their citizens and opening themselves to the law of unintended consequences, this only scratches the surface of what is possible. As I’m sure Phil knows as a former state CIO, fully open citizen self-service is likely to only go so far. As cool as it is to mashup public highway, crime, and public entity data on a map for the world to see, enabling truly effective government is going to be, to a greater extent, dependent upon empowering government knowledge workers. Imagine if, as an example, a knowledge worker was able to pull together information from their state’s welfare, criminal justice, and revenue (i.e. tax) systems and mash these up in a way that enabled them to uncover hidden relationships between this data and serve the state’s citizens more effectively.

Behind the scenes, what state governments should be doing is exposing all of their data through services. Then, through the combination of public policy setting and comprehensive identity management frameworks (another thing Phil knows a thing or two about), they can filter through as much of that data as is possible and allowable to each of their discrete stakeholder groups. Those of us working on such monumental tasks recognize that this is truly much easier said than done. However, the rewards of pursuing this route clearly are worth the effort expended. Although I do have a working knowledge of other states’ activities in this area, I can say concretely that Pennsylvania has already begun reaping the rewards of pursuing this approach. Our state’s Justice Network (J-NET) system is allowing for the effective exchange of offender, court, and other criminal justice data between state systems and empowering the knowledge worker. This ranges from high level policy setters who can now integrate criminal justice information into their data analysis and policy setting right down to the police officer making a routine traffic stop who can now more comprehensively assess the situation using data available on his wireless device.

Phil has got it right when he says that the goal should be to “set the data free”, exposing ourselves to the law of unintended consequences. the thought of better informed citizens, empowered knowledge workers, and greater transparency cause those famous words to echo through my head - government of the people, by the people, for the people.