ALT.NET Conference Sessions: Architecture

I rummaged Technorati and looks like a lot of people already put up their summaries / impressions of the sessions at the ALT.NET Conference in Austin, TX. Here's some more about some of the sessions that I'm not seeing much discussion about: Architecture (Trends and Observations) The architecture chat started off a little sparse, but fattened up nicely fairly quickly. Aaron Armstrong was driving the conversation to see what people were seeing in architectures. There were a lot of familiar terms on the whiteboard (I can't really remember them all, did anyone write this down?) I stood up and talked about the Model-View-Presenter architecture of the WinForms application I'm working on at work (picture 1, picture 2). I have a post about it that I'm planning to turn into a series of posts with some code and stuff. There was some interest in the data binding work I was doing, too. I'll talk more about that later. The main point that I was trying to make was that you can have multiple Models that don't know anything about the Views and are tied together using the Presenters. You can have multiple Models aggregated (in whole or partially) into one or more Views. Aaron asked how someone would handle the scenario where you have a composite View in a WinForms application. The approach I would use would be to expose the different sub-Views on the composite View as properties and use an Inversion of Control framework to tie it all together. In the application I'm working on, I'm using Spring.NET to tie everything together (coincidentally, Mark Pollack was in the back of the room). My property data binding would then keep everything in sync. The conversation then moved to more distributed architectures and web-related systems. There was some mention of the technique of using commodity hardware and/or software to create cheaply replaceable systems. On a similar note, Amazon released a white paper (papers?) on "Dynamo", their network architecture. It is designed with the simple fact that hardware will fail and needs to be easily (and cheaply) replaceable. We also talked about Service-Oriented Architecture and what to do about data. Some people feel compelled to integrate all the databases and data sources into one unified database. This leads to some friction as the different functions of the system move forward. When the data stores are properly separated, then the needs of the different applications (or services) can be met without affecting other applications (or services) that may be using the same data store. Everyone agreed that the database should not be used as an integration tool. Someone (I forget who) also explained the idea of thinking of the data flowing through the distributed system as a "document" instead of just messages going back and forth. We also talked a little about how to have a good architecture while still doing agile development. Agile development is against "Big Design Up Front", but sometimes you will need to have a vision and an architecture to scale properly. The main idea is to keep the architecture simple at first, get the project working, then make refinements as needed. Don't optimize too early, otherwise you may end up debugging strange issues that would not have risen from a simpler design. Also, you can more easily optimize when you start from a simple design and you can do small steps at a time to keep the system stable as you try to improve performance. That's all I can remember off the top of my head. I'm sure others will fill in the gaps and make corrections. All in all, it was a very interesting talk. Software Architecture is one of the subjects that I am very interested in and I found it very invigorating to hear from others and their thoughts on architecture. altnetconf