21 April 2014
Structured and Hackable URIs are a staple part of SEO-friendly websites. Although developers generically expect to see them in HTTP-based APIs, they should be irrelevant to consumers of a fully RESTful API that leverages HATEOAS.
27 March 2014
A lot of hot air is wasted on CMS selection. Having lived through many implementations, it’s not the platform decision that determines whether or not you will be successful.
12 March 2014
Agile principals encourage self-organising teams to take ownership of solutions. This doesn’t leave architects out in the cold, but it does require a more engaged role based on influence rather than governance.
21 February 2014
Deferring decisions to the “last responsible moment” can help you to adapt to the inevitable uncertainty that comes with agile development. The risk is that it can become an excuse for uncertainty that undermines development velocity.
19 October 2013
Given how important APIs have become in driving the reach of applications and services, it’s surprising how little investment is made in the usability of APIs as opposed to UIs. Perhaps the principals and techniques used by UX should be applied to developing more effective APIs…
23 September 2013
The promise of garbage collection can lull .Net developers into a false sense of security. They are still vulnerable to memory leaks and have a responsibility to keep an eye on what’s going on under the hood.
12 August 2013
Agile does not necessarily lend itself to management reporting. The few metrics it exposes are designed to support internal planning rather than external measurement. It can be tempting to re-purpose velocity as a measure of productivity, though this will only distort team planning without saying anything meaningful.
16 July 2013
Change is an inevitable and even desirable part of distributed development. Managing the impact of that change is the difficult part, particularly when change affects the service interfaces that bind a distributed platform together.
17 June 2013
Netflix have closed their OData catalogue and EBay seem to have quietly put their implementation out to grass. With a shrinking ecosystem and no marquee services, does Microsoft’s data standard have a future?
4 June 2013
Sharing services and APIs can appeal to a desire to reduce duplication and improve development efficiency. It’s a worthy ambition though the journey there can be littered with costly traps for the unwary.
21 May 2013
A generic repository is often used with the entity framework to speed up the process of creating a data layer. In most cases this is a generalization too far and it can be a trap for lazy developers.
22 April 2013
Azure’s Brokered Message API provides a basic set of methods that make it easy to start sending and receiving messages through the Azure Service Bus. The problem is that it doesn’t do much to provide some of the basic scaffolding required by a serviceable messaging client.
16 March 2013
Log4net provides decent logging performance out of the box, but you’ll need to consider asynchronous appending if you want more serious throughput or logging to a shared resource.
22 February 2013
Shared databases risk turning into performance bottlenecks that encourage close-coupling and create a single point of failure. There’s no justification for using them to integrate processes and applications.
15 January 2013
Large-scale development increasingly involves distributed teams as organizations seek to manage costs and leverage resources on a global scale. However, sharing code between distant development teams gives rise to problems that can only be addressed in part by processes and tools. You also need teams to communicate directly and build trust.