Pre-Conference Workshops

Tuesday 19 October 2010

The following workshops run for a full day (from 09.30 to 17.30), with a short break in the morning and afternoon, and a lunch break at 13.00.

	Lean Software Architecture WORKSHOP REF: SA01 Jim Coplien The misguided, CASE-heavy practices of the 1980s fueled the proto-Agile rhetoric of the 1990s and survived full-force into the advent of Agile practices such as Scrum and XP in the past decade. Part of that rhetoric has been to avoid the sins of the 1980s as much as possible by discarding up-front requirements (instead we have a promise for a future conversation between a developer and a customer) and architecture (instead, we have had a succession of short-lived ideas including “metaphor” and TDD). Experience and recent research have both borne out the value of architecture in software development in general, as well as its value in sustaining high velocity and change resiliency in Agile projects. In this talk, Agile expert Jim Coplien will provide tips for putting architecture back into your Agile project without dragging it back into the dark ages – and all within the framework of the Agile Manifesto. This talk will show a specific approach to architecture based on domain-driven design and Trygve Reenskaug’s new DCI architecture that fulfil the original vision of object-oriented programming, allowing us to write software as if people mattered.
	Building Web Applications the .NET 4.0 Way WORKSHOP REF: SA02 Richard Blewett & Andy Clymer .NET 4.0 introduces a number of technologies into the .NET world. This workshop looks not only at these technologies but, more importantly, how they can be combined into compelling applications. We will cover ASP.NET MVC2, WCF 4.0, Workflow 4.0 and Entity Framework 4.0 along the way, and show you not only the benefits of these technologies but also where they can cause problems. During the workshop we will build a functional n-tier application that demonstrates the technologies “in-situ” and shows patterns that you can use to keep your architecture clean.
	Software Architecture in a Day WORKSHOP REF: SA03 Simon Brown This one-day workshop is an interactive introduction to software architecture and what it means to be a software architect. It’s aimed at software developers who are looking towards their first software architect role, developers who want to become more architecturally aware and software architects that are new to the role. We’ll be asking and answering the following questions: 1. What is software architecture? 2. What is the role of a software architect? 3. How do you define software architecture? 4. How do you share software architecture? 5. How do you deliver software architecture?
	Silverlight 4 for Architects WORKSHOP REF: SA04 David Wheeler Silverlight 4 is a line-of-business-ready, Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform from Microsoft. This one-day workshop will get you ready and primed for using Silverlight for your next-generation business applications. We’ll focus on what it can, and can’t do; we’ll look at its many deployment options and security features; we’ll compare it to WPF and ASP.NET; and we’ll examine its performance, architectural solidity and maturity. And along the way you’ll gain a solid understanding of just how great Silverlight 4 is at addressing common business requirements; how productive development teams can be when using Silverlight; and how you (and your teams) might need to re-evaluate their thinking in the face of technologies such as WCF RIA Services, Expression Suite, and Windows 7 Phone. If you thought that Silverlight was about media, or that it wasn’t ready for prime-time then it’s time to think again. The mixture of conceptual and hard-core discussions in this workshop will prepare you for those tough discussions around your next UI platform.
	Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture WORKSHOP REF: SA05 Kevlin Henney Patterns offer a successful way of exploring, reasoning about, describing and proposing design ideas. There are many valuable aspects of pattern-based thinking that are overlooked in the common perception of design patterns. The original vision of patterns embodies a notion of incremental, feedback-based design – something that may come as a revelation to anyone who had mentally pigeonholed patterns together with heavier-weight design approaches. They are also somewhat broader in application than just OO design, although that remains one of their most popular domains. This session will start off with basic pattern concepts and practices, with examples, and work through a number of more sophisticated ideas, such as the relationship between pattern-oriented thinking and incremental development, patterns and software architecture, and how you can mine patterns in your own systems.
	The OO Design Process, from Requirements to UML WORKSHOP REF: SA06 Allen Holub Many people who think that they’re doing OO actually aren’t, and many designs suffer from being put together in the wrong way. For example, a dynamic model (that shows the objects at run time and how they interact with one another) should drive the design process; the static model (the class diagram) is really just a reflection of things you discover while doing the dynamic model, and is assembled in the course of modeling the dynamics of the program. Most programmers, however, attempt to create a class diagram out of context, with no dynamic modeling at all, and the resulting system tends to be unwieldy as a consequence. The process that you use influences the quality of the product. This full-day class goes through the entire OO-Design process, with an emphasis on how to arrive at an optimal design. We’ll look at every major stage of the process. In particular, we’ll look at requirements gathering and problem-statement definition, use-case analysis, and the simultaneous construction of the dynamic and static models using UML. Over the course of the day, we’ll construct a model for a small program, so that you can see how each step plays out in a practical context. No prior knowledge of either OO design or UML is assumed.

Return to Sessions introduction

Software Architect Tuesday: Jim Coplien on Lean Software Architecture
View Programme

Software Architect Wednesday: Jesus Rodriguez on Making integration easy: introducing REST-based integration
View Programme

Software Architect Thursday: Eoin Woods on Using design principles to unify software architecture and design
View Programme

Software Architect Thursday: Dino Esposito on Cross-tier data exchange: old problem, new solutions
View Programme

Sponsors