GuruStop.NET

As ever, there’s

The usual intro …

The .NETwork day for December that took place this Saturday as the 10th group gathering/event was pretty much worth being the day that makes a whole year for .NETwork group, which started December 2007. The day was pretty much different than usual, maybe similar to the very first gathering in organization, and some other days in topic, but the style and taste was a bit different. Pretty much concentrated, although on a variety of topics.

The day was just a couple of sessions. Love it or hate it, no parallelism there. The sessions were given by a single speaker, Omar Besiso, a half Egyptian senior Architect living in Australia, a consultant, Tech Ed presenter, book editor and reviewer – a very great guy as I’ll explain later :).

Actually I really enjoyed the first session. Really want to attend / give many similar sessions in the future.

Warning:

I have not been very honest while writing this! Since I have a similar interest in the topics discussed during the session, I have written some parts of the post that were not said during the presentation the same way,a and provided some examples and such that represent my own understanding which may or may not be the same as Omar’s.

The Useless Introduction You Used To :)

This post has taken so long to be started in writing. I’ve been busy with many events in my life lately. Suffering from frequent limited internet access lately, and, all this moving between companies thing has been eating me. And yes, I admit, I’ have been as tired and more honestly lazy as you expected me to be!

Hey, there’s a little warning. This post is not exactly for my usual audience. I’m sorry, but introducing Domain Driven Design is not one of the goals for this post. There’re many interesting resources and books (even FREE: InfoQ, Domain Driven Design Quickly) on the topic. However, if you leave me a comment telling me to make a write-up on the topic, of course I will :) :).

One more thing. Another reason I’m working on this is that I’m preparing for an internal session here in Raya about Practical Lightweight Domain Driven Design. This session is truly internal yet. It should be recorded though but I’m not sure whether it’ll be possible to publish the videos (Yeah, I will see how we can have our public sessions of possible sure!). If you have a user group and would like me to give this session in a group meeting, I’ll be glad to do.

So, it has been exactly a week since I have been to dotNETwork 5th gathering. This is yet one of my too late events coverage (maybe I should write a long boring post about why that happens lately in as much annoying details as possible!). Let’s  hope we have something worth the wait this time …

Intro (No tech – you can skip)

This time I’m talking about the second session in the last gathering. The 1st session was already covered earlier. This session is special to me for two reasons: It was delivered by my of my dearest friends in the field, Mohamed Samy. I know Mohamed four years ago, since He was moving from VB 6 to C#, until he became one of the super guys in the field of enterprise computing and architecture in the .NET in Egypt, being a technical architect in ITWorx, one of the top posters in MSDN forums, and finally getting his Solution Architecture MVP lately (which he tells us a story about). The second reason is that I had the pleasure to see the latest part of his preparations for the session, and it was very interesting to see “the making” as well as “the show”.

The 5th dotNETwork gathering will be: Saturday, June 28, 2008.

The agenda is as follows:

12:00 AM – 01:30: Delivering Rich User Experience Applications using Silverlight 2 by Yasser Makram

01:30 PM – 2:00 PM: Coffee Break

02:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Patterns and antipatterns of SOA by Mohamed Samy

03:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Lunch

It’ll be in: Canadian International College - Busses will be available at: Nady El-Sekka (11:00 AM – 11:30 AM).

The gathering being on Sunday not Saturday as usual makes it harder to attend it The gathering facebook event said by mistake it’ll be on Sunday, but it’ll be on Saturday normally like all other dotNETwork events.

Regarding the sessions

I do not know about Yasser, but Silverlight 2.0 is a fairly new topic and it’ll sure be interesting to come and see it. I think Yasser will bring us a lot of amazement!

For the SOA topic, I want you all to set high expectations starting now. Mohamed Samy is a Solution Architecture (VSTS) MVP who has worked in and talked about SOA patterns more than most people I have met in person as both a personal passion and a job responsibility as a Technical Architect in ITWorx. I know Mohamed in person and believe he’ll be delivering a rocking session. Do not miss that.

I have been working lately with a big group of fellow developers here in SilverKey on the architecture and design of a relatively big project that required much services and messaging work. We thought that we should implement our public services the REST way using WCF for .NET 3.5, with so many customizations, and that we’ll use a library called nServiceBus for internal messaging. Mohammed Nour wrote a little about thinking in REST.

nServiceBus is a framework for handling publisher/subscriber (pub/sub) model of messaging. It provides reliable messaging via the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) pattern, and uses MSMQ as the physical bus.

It’s an interesting piece of work to look at actually; of course free, open source. I have been involved in evaluating it for our project, and wrote a document about it as part of my work, so that it’s easier for the rest of the team to use it later. As the documentation for nServiceBus is very limited at this stage of the project, I and my boss Dody decided to share the document with the community.