For the last 2 days I’ve been attending the Software Architect 2009 conference located at the iconic Royal College of Physicians building opposite Regent's Park in central London. Overall the events have been interesting, that said, the content has not in general been particularly new or ground breaking, but that is probably the nature of the discipline. It has however been good to be reminded of key principles, to listen to the views of others, and as always I’ve found it quite thought provoking. For each talk I attended I’ve created an entry on Twitter @ptrelford:
Tim Ewald on Saving Software Architecture: "When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen" Joel on Architecture Astronauts
Kevin Seal on MorganDirect's client-side architecture: Swing app with Eclipse IDE look, blackboard pattern, detailed logs & takes screenshots
Kevlin Henney on Slicing design over time: take time estimate & half it, coding is performance art so practice, test cases are propositions.
Dave Wheeler on Coding a solid UI: "WPF is great", dependency properties are cool, do MVVM pattern, get an HCI expert & use Expression Blend
Richard Blewett on What's New in WF 4.0: Everything. Complete API rewrite. 3.5 favoured code based workflow. 4.0 declarative XAML is king.
Dino Esposito asks "How good are you at .NET software design?" Separation of concerns, OOD principles - prefer composition to inheritance etc
Kevlin Henney on Modelling in the age of agility: Most important aspect of modelling is the -ing, i.e. the social and collaborative aspects.
Simon Brown on "Documenting your software architecture - why and how?" Start with a context and set the scene. Put yourself in others shoes.
Most popular analogy: Construction (Tim Ewald & Kevlin Henney)
Favourite example: Fast-Track Construction of the Empire State Building (Kevlin Henney)
Best term usage: idempotent (Simon Brown)
Best vocabularly usage: pontificate (Kevlin Henney)
Only search term suggestion: Death by UML Fever (Kevlin Henney again)