Gojko Adzic

In the last week of November, Dave de Florinier and I did a talk on Asynchronous .NET architectures and NServiceBus. The sound of the recording was not that good so some readers asked for a transcript. The following is a transcript of my introduction to the talk, encouraging developers to investigate messaging architectures for mid-size and smaller projects. I’ll try to get the rest of the talk published here soon as well.

Today, we use web and web-related services for content distribution, for remoting, for application partitioning and distribution. It seems that HTTP calls have become a default way to think about distributed systems. HTTP and Web services definitely have a lot to offer, but they are not the only way to do things and there are definitely cases where web is not the right choice. HTTP calls are synchronous, stateless (although there is a state simulation with cookie-based sessions) and generally not that reliable. They are also often one-way, which means that any kind of continuous notification always comes down to polling. When you need asynchronous actions, proper state and reliability or event driven behaviour, Web is not the right choice. Unfortunately, lots of people just stick with web services and hack on, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In cases such as these, a different distribution paradigm can save us quite a lot of time and effort both in development and later in maintenance. One of those different paradigms is messaging.

I’m not sure why, but I got the impression that lots of people think that messaging is only for huge systems in investment banks, not something that a small or a mid-size project should consider at all. This is false and now I’ll try to convince you. Continue Reading »

Here is the video from the talk that Dave de Florinier and I did last week on NServiceBus and asynchronous .NET applications. At the start, I talk about the fact that messaging and asynchronous applications are not just for investment banks and large enterprise systems and how lots of smaller projects can also benefit from messaging. Dave then presents NServiceBus as a nice tool to help develop asynchronous applications in .NET, talks about publish-subscribe, full duplex, saga and distributor patterns and explains sample implementations. On the end, we had an open discussion on deployment and alternatives.

Here are the downloads and links:

• source code
• powerpoint slides
• NService bus main site
• Udi Dahan’s blog (author of NServiceBus)
• Ayende’s review of NServiceBus

I just got the e-mail that my proposal for a session on Enterprise .NET Development with Opensource .NET tools was accepted for the Software practice advancement 2009 conference. The conference will take place in London in April 2009.

This session will be presented as an experience report from several enteprise .NET projects I have been involved in over the course of the last two years, which all included extensive use of opensource tools. Most of the innovation today in software happens in the opensource community and it is driven by opensource tools, but the attitude of software companies in the .NET market towards opensource tools is a lot worse then in the Java world. Using opensource tools on .NET project allows us to harness the innovation years before equivalent commercial tools appear. It also causes a lot more political and personal opposition, from lawyers that are concerned about licensing to contractors who refuse to do it because “it’s not .NET”. In this session, I will present the benefits that my teams got from the Castle project stack, NServiceBus, NHibernate and the like, what problems we faced on the way, how we solved them, how to shorten the learning curve for people with a more traditional .NET background and how to convince managers and lawyers that this is not a danger for them.

We have worked out the schedule for opensource .NET talks at Skills Matter in London for the next few months. Here are the dates to note in your calendar – more detail on sessions will follow:

• 25th September: Script #, .NET response to Google Web Toolkit.
  Registration is now open
• 23rd October: Dependency injection with Castle Windsor
• 27th November: Asynchronous enterprise .NET applications with NServiceBus
• 17th December: Test driven development in .NET

We will probably do another Alt.NET evening in January like the one this July. This time we’ll have more time and hopefully a bigger venue. At the moment, we have a slot on 13th Jan available for this. If you attended the July talks, please let me know what you thought of the way that we organised it, what you liked, what you disliked, and what we could do to make it better next time.

We are organising a gathering of Alt.Net enthusiasts on the 31st this month at Skills Matter offices. We’ll do seven talks in total with beer and pizza during the break, and then go out for beers and socialising. Here’s the programme for the talks:

NHibernate – Ian Cooper
PowerShell – Zi Makki
OpenRasta – Sebastian Lambla
Castle Windsor – Mike Hadlow
Rhino Mocks – Chris Roff
NServiceBus – David De Florinier
Subversion – Gojko Adzic

The event is free but the number of places is limited. Apparently about half of the places are already taken and Skills Matter have not yet started to advertise it seriously, so if you were planning to come to the event make sure to register soon. For more info and to register click here.

See you on 31st.