Workflow 4.0 in not very good claim shocker

Windows Workflow is one piece of the Microsoft .NET stack that has interested me in terms of being able to build workflow based projects based on built in .NET technology however the 3.0 version had too much of a steep learning curve for my patience threshold to spend much of my time on.

So I thought I would wait for the 3.5 version, then I heard rumours that it would be completely re-written for the 4.0 version so I would wait for the 4.0 version.

So this morning I read my first review of the 4.0 version and it seems it’s not shaping up to be that good.

Selenium Internals – New eBook coming

The author of a new e-Book on Selenium works for Thought Works it seems and is looking to post a new chapter every day!

ASP.NET MVC – View Models

This morning I read a very interesting blog post about view model design within the context of building an application with the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework.

The concept of the view model isn't baked into the Microsoft MVC framework. In fact the entire model part of model view controller is left entirely up to the developer.

This isn't a criticism at all as the ASP.NET MVC framework is still at version 1.0 and is one the best web based things to come out of Microsoft for ages.

Anyhoo. Its worth a read.

Firefox 3.5 released today?

Firefox 3.5 could be being released today?

FireQuery 0.3 – A FireBug plugin for jQuery

The excellent FireBug web developer plug-in for Firefox has itself got a plug-in called FireQuery that targets and helps debug  jQuery with some additional functionality.

Could be worth a look.

Catharsis 1.2 – Best Practise ASP.NET MVC & NHibernate

When I have time I will look at the Catharsis project based on an article that I read on code project.

Initial thoughts are that there are similarities to the sharp-architecture project by Billy McCafferty  that I’ve blogged about previously.

UI Design Patterns

While I am more of a developer than a designer, I do care about the user interface to applications as quite often it does not matter how clever or beautiful you business logic, data access layer and database schema are if the end user does not like using your application or does not like the look of it then the whole project can be deemed a failure.

The UI layer is just as important as the rest of the application if not more so.

Quite often I use design patterns in my code to solve problems and it’s nice to know that there are common UI design patterns as well.

Today I read a great article that lists some common UI patterns, I especially like the Lazy Registration pattern.

Improving performance and scalability with DDD

Domain Driven Design or DDD is something that I have been reading a lot about recently and trying to practise in some of my pet projects and today I came across an excellent post that discusses improving performance ,scalability and distributed systems.

Well worth a read if you have the time.

Velocity Administration Console

Microsoft have been working on a scalable in-memory application cache project called Velocity. It is similar to the popular open source memcached project and the commercial ScaleOut StateServer Software product.

I have taken a quick look at ScaleOut StateServer and have been very impressed with it’s ease of use, performance and the administration tools that it provides.

Today I noticed that Gil Fink has written a cool velocity administration console that adds a nice windows forms front end over the powershell scripts that seem to drive Velocity.

It looks worth taking a look