February 2009 - Posts
This month we take a look at design and architecture, rather than specific technologies.
Konstantin Triger, a Senior Consultant at Sela, will take a look at the deadly sins of performance, particularly from the design perspective. It is important to remember that low-level implementation details are irrelevant if the high-end design accounts for 90% of the bottlenecks in the final product. This session will help to make correct performance related decisions during design phase and will demonstrate profiling tools to perform simple diagnosis of performance issues to fine-tune the design.
The key topics of this session include:
- Performance and scalability: the difference.
- Understanding performance and scalability tradeoffs.
- Relation between design for performance and optimizations.
- Optimizing: fine-tuning design.
- Using profilers to identify and optimize the performance.
As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.
See you there !!
The March meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group
http://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug:
March 4, 2009
Location:
Microsoft Israel
2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana
(09) 7625-100
Floor 0 , Dekel Room
It is the building across from Amdocs.
Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking on the left.
17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:15 “Performance Design Pitfalls – Part 1”
Konstantin Triger, Senior Consultant, Sela Group
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 “Performance Design Pitfalls – Part 2”
Konstantin Triger, Senior Consultant, Sela Group
About the Speaker:
Konstantin Triger is one of the largest contributors to the open-source mono project (http://www.mono-project.com), which is an open development initiative to develop an open source, UNIX version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. His team contributed major parts to the implementation of System.Web (ASP.NET 2.0), System.Web.Extensions (AJAX.NET), System.Data, System.Web.Services, System.DirectoryServices and other core assemblies in the .Net framework.
In his free time he develops an open-source implementation of LINQ and LINQ to Entities for Java platform (http://code.google.com/p/jaque/).
Soon after yesterday’s post with a link to our new case studies, I came across a very informative report that I must share with you. At the start of every year, the law firm Morrison & Foerster, which tracks the global outsourcing industry, conducts a survey regarding the current state of the world’s outsourcing market and emerging trends likely to shape that market over the next twelve months. There are a lot of interesting ideas in the report, which can be found at http://www.mofo.com/news/updates/bulletins/15129.html. However, one point in particular really caught my attention:
“…and the recent high-profile Satyam scandal in the Indian service provider market may prompt a ‘flight to quality’ by outsourcing customers.”
What the report suggests is that companies are starting to come to the realization that what seems to be the cheaper alternative is not always the better or least expensive alternative. “Flight to quality” is something we have been promoting at Renaissance for many years now – and we have many clients that agree. We have never competed on the basis of hourly rates (which in the end is pretty meaningless) – we have always advocated that companies should evaluate software companies on the basis of end results. These end results are derived from a combination of experience, expertise, and development process. As I described in Outsourcing Software Development During a Recession, paying attention to end results and qualitative benefits are particularly important in these difficult economic times.
Do you still evaluate software vendors on the basis of hourly rates? Or do you consider the longer term benefits of time to market, quality, flexibility and expertise?
The MSDN team over in the UK has put together a huge collection (279 at the time of this post) of short screencasts for .NET developers. Each video is only about 10-15 minutes long, but packs a lot of useful information.
Here is the full List of Screencasts.
From the home page:
Don't have the time to read a 10-page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN screencast, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. View them online now or download for later reference.
A few weeks ago, The Renaissance Computer Systems web site was updated with a set of case studies describing our roles in several recent projects. Check out Renaissance Case Studies and let me know if you have any comments.
Usually when we talk about comparing VB and C#, it is in the context of trying to show which language is better. However, here is a different approach – a pair of articles that explain nuances of one language for developers who normally program in the other language. A great first step towards understanding and “playing nicely together” :-)
What C# Devs Should Know About VB
What VB Devs Should Know About C#
Infragistics has just launched an interesting site for UI designers at http://quince.infragistics.com
Now that that the concept and need of design patterns for software architects and programmers is pretty much mainstream, it is time to develop a similar body of knowledge for the UI designer and developer.
Infragistics’ Quince site is a very informative and visual collection of different UI/UX design patterns that can be browsed and filtered in various ways. It is a good tool to help you focus your thinking on UI design – check it out.
This month we return to take a look at some of the web development technologies from Microsoft - Dynamic Data Controls (DDC) and Model View Controller (MVC).
The new technology of ASP.NET DDC (Dynamic Data Controls) help us to build a presentation layer based on a data scheme in just a few minutes, and helps the developer and the architect to build a model based application that is scalable and easy to maintain.
In the second session, we will build an ASP.NET applications based on the new MVC Framework, and we’ll also see how DDC can save us a lot of working hours.
The new ASP.NET platform enforce the developers to separate between the data model, the presentation layer and the controller that sits between them, and is letting, among a lot of other cool features, to perform Red/Green tests with TDD (Test Driven Development) in an easy and quick way. In addition to that, we’ll look at the latest versions, and to the future ahead.
As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.
See you there !!
The February meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group
http://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug:
February 4, 2009
Location:
Microsoft Israel
2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana
(09) 7625-100
Floor 0 , Dekel Room
It is the building across from Amdocs.
Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking on the left.
17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:15 “Developing Web Applications with DDC & MVC – Part 1”
Noam King, Sela College
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 “Developing Web Applications with DDC & MVC – Part 2”
Noam King, Sela College
About the Speaker:
Noam King is the CTO of Sela College, and the manager of the Web Developers Community (WDC) in Microsoft Israel, spending his time mostly with investigating new technologies, consulting, lecturing and helping software companies reach their goals. Over the years Noam was a technology manger on other companies, consulting for Microsoft ,Oracle, and lecturing in many Microsoft conferences, including Tech-Ed, Developer Academy, Software launches, User Groups, and much more.
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