I finally got around to finishing The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander (most well known in software for being the source of the patterns movement).  The last part of the book is called "The Way" to build things.  His focus is physical architecture, but it is interesting how closely it resembles agile software development.

There are a few similarities that I see.  First…

[Those who follow my personal blog can ignore this.]

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.  I learned a lot and met some good folks.  While I was there, I published a series of daily summaries/reports about my experiences both for my own sake and also in case others might find something of value in my recaps and thoughts. 

Since it was first and foremost my personal mental…

When searching recently so as to provide further reading for "domain model" in a recent post, I was quite surprised to find that there seemed to be no good definition readily available (at least not by Googling "domain model").  Since I tend to use this term a lot, I figured I'd try to fill this gap and, at the very least, provide a reference for me to use when I talk about it.

So What is a Domain…

As I sit here on my deck, enjoying the cool autumn breeze¹, I thought, what better thing to write about than Web services!  Well, no, actually I am just recalling some stuff that's happened lately.  On the MSDN Architecture forums and in some coding and design discussions we had this week, both of which involve the question of best practices for Web services.

Before we talk about Web services best practices, it seems…

I wasn't going to post about it, but after reading Don's post, I realized that I should so that I can thank those involved in presenting me with this honor.  I was surprised when I was contacted about being nominated to be an INETA speaker, and I was even more surprised when I heard that I'd been voted in.  Looking over the folks on the list, I feel hardly qualified to be named among them.

So without further ado…