Thursday 26 November 2009

Follow-up - Recording of Mark Nijhof on CQRS @ E-VAN 18 November 2009

We have to admit that the quality of the recording we uploaded last week wasn’t that great. Apparently, Office Live Meeting did trick us in the end with the resolution Mark used during the presentation. Thankfully, Mark Jennes who is a colleague of mine, patiently recorded last week’s session using Camtasia. We had some issues getting it uploaded on Vimeo this time. The quality of the recording you can watch online is better than last week’s but it isn’t that great either. But you can download the original file used for uploading by just logging in.

Mark Nijhof on CQRS Sample @ E-VAN 18 November 2009

The trick is to download the original file that we used for uploading. So you just have to log on (or register if you don’t have an account) and download the original recording in the right down corner. The quality of the original recording is way better.

So, enjoy!

Thursday 19 November 2009

Recording of Mark Nijhof on CQRS @ E-VAN 18 November 2009

Update 26 November 2009: Also check out this follow-up post.

Mark Nijhof talked about the concepts behind the Command Query Responsibility Segregation while walking through the code of his CQRS sample application. It was good to finally see a concrete implementation on the architectural styles that Greg Young and Udi Dahan talked about in the previous sessions. The people who attended were able to ask their questions during the presentation. We hope that this helped them a lot in getting a better understanding of CQRS principles. We believe that Mark did a tremendous job and went into a great deal of effort to make this all more understandable.

For those who missed the presentation, the recording is now available on Vimeo:

Mark Nijhof on CQRS Sample @ E-VAN 18 November 2009

Unfortunately, the quality of the recording is not that good so you can also have a look at the original OLM recordings as well.

Details of the next E-VAN presentation will be posted shortly, so stay tuned.

Thursday 29 October 2009

Next European VAN on 18 November 2009

We just couldn't resist to get Mark Nijhof back after he announced his CQRS sample application on the DDD user group. The sample application that he developed is completely based on DDD à la Greg Young. The great thing about Mark's initiative is that the DDD/CQRS/SOA principles evangelized by Greg and Udi become more concrete and accessible to a wider audience of architects and developers. Therefore, the focus of this session is to take a deep dive into the code as Mark did before during his FubuMVC presentation.

Here are the details:

Start Time: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 07:00 PM GMT*

End Time: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 08:30 PM GMT

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

VAN Calendar: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar

(*) 07:00 PM UK, 08:00 PM Brussels, 02:00 PM EST and 11:00 AM PST. For time zone arithmetic, you can consult the world clock site or use this time zone converter.

Take a look at the source code and please provide your questions or feedback on the E-VAN Google Group. You can also ask your questions during or after the session, but it would be nice if we could consolidate some input in advance. So don't be afraid to get your questions out there :-). Again, this should be a very learningful experience. Hope to see you there.

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Recording of Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz on SOA Patterns @ E-VAN 05 October 2009

If you missed last night's presentation, then we have some good news. The recording of Arnon's excellent presentation is now available:

Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz on SOA Patterns @ E-VAN 05 October 2009

We had some annoying issues with the slides from time to time (I guess the Office Live Meetings gods were still not entirely in our favor), but everything worked out fine in the end. Both Colin and myself really enjoyed this presentation and we hope you will so too. We'll be posting the details for the next E-VAN presentation, so keep an eye out.  

Monday 7 September 2009

Next European VAN on 05 October 2009

This time, Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz will enlighten us with a presentation about the xsights architecture, talking about a real-world SOA architecture as well as balancing up-front design and evolving an architecture, etc. Definitely check out his blog, which also contains a number of insightful papers on SOA and architecture in general. Arnon is also the author of an upcoming book on SOA Patterns, which both Colin and myself really enjoyed reading. 

Here are the details:

Start Time: Monday, October 05, 2009 07:00 PM GMT*

End Time: Monday, October 05, 2009 08:30 PM GMT

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

VAN Calendar: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar

(*) 08:00 PM UK, 09:00 PM Brussels, 02:00 PM EST and 11:00 AM PST

So this presentation will definitely be a learningful experience. Don't miss out on this opportunity. Hope to see you there.

Friday 24 July 2009

Recording of Discussion on REST @ E-VAN 20 July 2009

Our initial plan was to get Ian Robinson and Jim Webber to appear for this session, but due to some technical difficulties with Office Live Meeting that plan was flushed down the drain. Despite having done a successful dry run, who would have guessed that Office Live Meeting causes so many problems when used on the new Windows 7?

Gladly Colin Jack, Alan Dean, Sebastien Lambla and Udi Dahan chimed in to have an alternative discussion on REST which worked out pretty well actually. You can listen (rather than watch) to this discussion at the usual backlog:

Discussion on REST @ E-VAN 20 July 2009

Rest assured that the discussion with Ian Robinson and Jim Webber will be rescheduled to a later date. We will post the details on this blog soon.

Tuesday 14 July 2009

Online Book Club - Time to vote

As part of the E-VAN we're planning to have an online book club, probably using Skype.

Thanks to Jimmy Bogard's advice we're going to do it fortnightly and we know we need a small core group of people who can be relied upon to attend and in addition a strong motivated moderator to keep the conversation on topic. Other than that its open, we'll make the decisions on the first session and can refine them as we go.

However that brings us to the first big decision, which book to cover, so get voting.

We'll also need to identify the core of people, if you want to be a part of it get hold of one of us or add a comment here.

Wednesday 8 July 2009

Recording of Alan Dean on REST @ E-VAN 06 July 2009

Great presentation performed by Alan Dean on Separating REST Facts from Fallacies for last night's European VAN. You simply can't afford to miss this presentation if you want to get your REST facts straight. You can watch the recording from the E-VAN gold collection:

Alan Dean on REST @ E-VAN 06 July 2009

Keeping in touch with the spirit of REST, Colin already posted the details for the next E-VAN meeting. Ian Robinson and Jim Webber were kind enough to answer all your questions about REST.

Sunday 5 July 2009

Ian Robinson and Jim Webber on 20th July

As part of our series of session REST we've been lucky enough to get Ian Robinson and Jim Webber to agree to appear on the E-VAN on the 20th and we're looking for your input to help shape their session. The more views/questions the better so add them as comments or e-mail them to us and we'll aggregate them for Ian/Jim.

As you may know they are writing a book on REST, along with Savas Parastatidis and have also written one of the best articles on REST that you'll find. However there are a range of other related topics that are worth discussing including MEST, Guerilla SOA, ESB's, consumer driven contracts, and business service design so feel free to submit as many questions as you can on these or any other topics by adding comments to the blog entry.

And don't worry if some of these are new to you I've added some links below so get learning :P

Session Details

Monday July 20th (6:00PM GMT)

In France/Germany/Belgium: 8:00PM
In UK is: 7:00PM
EST in the US is: 2:00PM (EST)
PST in the US is: 11:00AM

Attendee URL

http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

Links

Here's some great links you might want to look at before the session:

  • MEST - Jim has discussed why in many cases his default is now to consider Web-oriented style of architecture, but when/where is a MEST style (sans-SOAP) still a good choice?
  • Guerilla SOA - See Jim's session at InfoQ, definitely a topic worth discussing particularly as to do it successfully seems to involve bringing in a range of other interesting topics.
  • Consumer Driven Contracts - A very interesting topic and one its definitely worth spending some time familiarizing yourself with.
  • ESBs - This relevant given Martin Fowlers recent post which discusses the misuse of ESBs but you might also want to watch the presentation that Martin/Jim did at QCon called Does My Bus Look Big in This?
  • Service Design - As was discussed on the session with Udi there are some techniques you can use to define large scale business services. But how do we go about defining the boundaries of these business services? Is capability modelling the best approach? Ian has a great post on some of the subtleties involved but it's a great topic, as is taking the output of the capability modelling and building sensible services. You might also want to read this post by Ian and a related one by Jim.
  • Combining REST with Web Services - A topic that was also discussed in the Thoughtworks REST podcasts, so where are Web services still useful? Mixing REST, MEST and Web Services...are projects doing this successfully?

See you on the 20th.

Monday 29 June 2009

Alan Dean on REST (Monday 6th July 2009)

We've now planned the next couple of E-VANs which will focus on REST, the first will be with Alan Dean where he will cover facts and fallacies related to REST.

Alan is a real authority on REST and he's got a great talk ready so this is a great chance to find out more about REST. In addition if you have any particular questions for Alan, or topics you'd like to discuss in detail, then you can add them to the existing topic on the google group.

Start Time on Monday July 06 (7:00PM GMT)
In France/Germany/Belgium: 9:00PM
In UK is: 8:00PM
EST in the US is: 3:00PM (EST)
PST in the US is: 12:00PM (Midday)

The session will last around 90 minutes and on timings see this world clock site or more information.

Attendee URL
http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

Sunday 28 June 2009

Udi Dahan Video Online

First off if you didn't watch Udi Dahan talk on the SOA then you missed a treat, a real pro speaking on a topic that he and a very few others in the .NET space are way ahead of the rest of us on. Brilliant stuff and the video is now online at Vimeo.