12 June 2015
As with any deployment automation, there’s a fair amount of duct tape and chicken wire involved in deploying a Windows Service remotely.
5 May 2015
Large scale rewrites of systems are loaded with risk. You can address this by preparing the ground in advance and adopting an incremental approach, but a willingness to be pragmatic is essential.
20 April 2015
The “big ball of mud” describes a system architecture that is sprawling, sloppy and haphazard. That’s precisely how you’d describe some emerging microservice architectures.
9 March 2015
We know that micro services are small and focused by design – just how small is this in practice?
4 January 2015
REST is sometimes described as the next evolutionary step in service integration. The problem is that REST provides too much of a dumb pipe to support genuinely decoupled, fault-tolerant service integration.
16 December 2014
Azure Service Bus can provide first-in-first-out messaging in theory, but this is not the same as guaranteeing the order in which your messages are processed.
22 November 2014
Debates on the finer points of REST can bring out the worst in people as they seek to define what is and is not “RESTful”. In most cases the debate is unlikely to make the difference between success and failure for an API.
3 November 2014
Many developers confuse asynchronous operations with parallel execution. The essential difference is that an asynchronous operation is concerned with which resources you consume while parallel execution is more concerned with how many.
3 October 2014
GUIDs do solve an important problem. It’s just rarely the problem that developers are trying to address…
21 August 2014
When developers first start using messaging they can be tempted to use it as a brand new hammer for every nail. Messaging brings a lot to the party, but it isn’t necessarily a suitable transport for fast, synchronous query processing.
22 July 2014
Using version tolerant readers can help you to cope with changes to service contracts though this does come at the expense of a weaker contract. The approach is more appropriate for fluid services that are prone to frequent change.
9 July 2014
An architecture based on tiers or layers is too inflexible to deal with the more flexible demands of modern systems, particularly when you working with high-volume systems that require distributed processing.
26 June 2014
There are some techniques for improving the performance of bulk inserts in the entity framework, but the most optimal approach will always be to use a different library altogether.
12 June 2014
There’s nothing really new about many of the ideas that underpin microservices. Are they just an agile re-branding of SOA?
4 May 2014
Developers who have been brought up on the certainties of ACID transactions often have a problem trusting eventual consistency. Once you start exploring the requirements in more depth this really so much of a handicap.