Mark Groves' Weblog: Software Development

Threat Analysis & Modeling v2.0 beta 2

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 23:54:44 GMT

The Microsoft ACE Team has just released beta 2 of their Threat Analysis & Modeling Tool, Download Here. I have been working with Talhah Mir, and team, on some integrations between Team Architect and their tool that hopefully will show up in the RTM version in the coming month.

I am not a security expert, but that's exactly why I like the approach this tool takes, you are not expected to be a subject matter expert on Threat Analysis. You just need to understand the use cases of your application and the tool takes that data and calculates the risks based on known threats. Then you can decide based on business impact which threats are high priority for your business.

There is a great video that helps explain the approach.

First set of Power Toys for Visual Studio released by the Developer Solutions team

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:50:50 GMT

Check out the new Power Toys from the Developer Solutions Team. From having to admin TFS during some early betas, I am sure the TFS Admin Tool will be very valuable.

Check out the Developer Solutions team's blog for the latest information on Power Toys for Visual Studio.
MSBee
MSBee is an addition to MSBuild that allows you to build managed apps in VS 2005 that target .NET 1.1.
Download MSBuild Extras - Toolkit for .NET 1.1 "MSBee" Beta 1
Managed Stack Explorer
MSE is a lightweight tool for monitoring .NET 2.0 processes and stack traces. Just copy and run. No installation required.
Download Managed Stack Explorer v1.1
TFS Administration Tool
The TFS Administration Tool allows you to manage users on TFS, Sharepoint, and SQL RS through one common UI.
Download TFS Admin Tool Beta 1

[Via Powertoys WebLog]

New MSDN Architecture Forums

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 21:34:11 GMT

Check out the new MSDN Architecture Forums that just launched today. Right now there are two forums, one focused on General Architecture, and another focused on Modeling and Tools. Of course the Modeling and Tools has a special interest for me.

Each has a RSS Feed of course:

Architecture General

Modeling and Tools

Tools to Design Software

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 19:32:09 GMT

So now that I am on the other side of the fence, working on the Whitehorse team. I am interested in what tools people use to help them design software, and why? In my past life as an architect, I used various sets of tools to help me break down the problem that I was trying to solve, along with communicating the solutions to others. The communication of the intent was always a challenge, but also the long term accuracy of the artifacts was more challenging.

So, software developers, architects, team leads, what do you use to both design and communicate the software you are planning to build? More importantly why? How successful has it been? What do you want out of a tool? What don't you want in a tool?

Going back to Mecca

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 23:06:17 GMT

Just got my trip all setup to visit Microsoft in Redmond, WA again. I've been out there at least a half dozen times now, and it is always a great trip. This time is for a Visual Studio Team Systems Lab, Aug. 1st - 4th. I have not mentioned it here yet, but my company is one of the very early adopters of VSTS, actually in the Technical Adoption Program (TAP). I believe there are only, something like 10 Microsoft customers invited to the TAP program. I am the main contact with the team in Redmond, it will be great to meet a bunch of the guys I have only talked to over the phone.

VSTS is killer product, I have been evaluating it since last July and been in the TAP program since this February. I guess I should be posting more about VSTS, but I always forget since I have been under NDA for so long never know what you can't say. Now of course most of the information is very public, I still can't talk about some of the extra super secret stuff.

Architectural Frameworks

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 02:46:03 GMT

In continuing with my updates on what I have been doing at the office, I thought I would explain a little bit about the architecture we are working on for our new framework.

The overall architecture is broken down into three main logical layers. The presentation layer, the business layer and the data access (abstraction) layer. I say these are logical layers since they are not required to be represented exactly in this manor as a physical representation. Now in most realist implementations, the logical architecture and it physical counterpart end up being very similar, if not exact. But it is important, especially for design, to say in the logical world to keep from inducing physical restrictions too early on in the design process.

One of the overwhelming design goals through out the architecture is to keep anything a application developer needs to write separated from the Framework. It may be more correct to say, that we want to keep any part of the Framework from bleeding into the applications. The main reason for this is long term supportability. Architectures like this need to have a long lifespan on them (say ten years), to justify the upfront investment. As we know technology will change during that time frame we want to make sure we keep most of those technology changes from directly effecting the application. Unfortunately one of effects of have a large application, like ours, is if a technology (say ADO) is spread throughout application, the effort required to remove that technology is monumental. And in many cases does not get done, since the business value does not justify the investment. Now if we can keep specific technologies segregated to the Framework, and ideally individual layers of the Framework, and abstract the details from the applications themselves, replacement or upgrade of a given technology is much easier to accomplish since it will be very centralized.

The three logical layers I mentioned before are the Presentation Layer, the Business Layer and the Data Access Layer (DAL). Each layer has it's own set of requirement, but they share one very important requirement: that they are abstract from each other. So what do I mean by "they are abstract from each other", well it is very important it this type of framework to insure that one areas responsibility does not bleed into another area. This is pretty easy to do, when you sit down to start develop the application. Since it is much easier to bind things together. By keeping each layer abstract from the other, we legitimate boundaries and enforceable interfaces.

I won't go into much detail on the three layers today, since this post is getting a little long. But we have chosen a Model View Controller with an Observer, based framework for the Presentation layer, this of course is rather overkill for you basic user screens, but provided great features when talking about an enterprise application. The business layer is basically an Aspect oriented architecture, with a configurable pipeline controller and crosscutting logic. The Data Access Layer is basically an object to relational mapper with specific logic for our application.

Till next time...

PDC 2005 Sessions Posted

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 22:16:39 GMT

http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com/content/sessions.aspx

Now I just have to figure out what sessions I want to go to for this week long geek-fest!

What have I been doing at work?

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 03:27:08 GMT

Well I decided I need to start blogging more about what I do for a living. Since I say this blog is about technology, I think I really have been falling short. So hopefully this is the first post of many.

So I guess it would make sense to explain what my job is first. My current official title is Director of Platform Engineering. That not exactly what I do anymore, since we went through a restructuring in my company several months ago we re-organized the Platform team. That team was originally made up of two basic groups, the Software Architects and Core Developers. Since the Re-Org the core developers have moved into the software development teams, and the Architects stayed where they are. And I got to focus much more on Software Architecture and less on project management, etc. I still do some project management, but mostly from a planning and estimating duty to my peers.

So right now I'm not exactly sure what my title is, need to work with my boss on that one, but basically I am Lead Architect. That works for me, not too hung up on titles, just need something that explains my role.

So what have we been working on? Our major, and in my opinion the most interesting, project has been designing out the next generation framework for our application. A little background is important. The company I work at have a very large enterprise application focused in the Financial Services world. To date the application has been built over the last 7ish years, and it's is mostly developed in Visual Basic 6 and Visual C++ 6. Now moving to a new architecture is no simple task since the current code base is made up of over 15 million lines of code.

We have several goals for this new architecture, most of them boil down to the utilization of a framework. Our current architecture has areas where it uses common code and leverages other existing parts of the system, but in general each part of the application does a lot of infrastructure building. This of course leads more maintenance work then we would want. Utilization of a framework, if done correctly, will vastly reduce the number of lines of code needed to produce a business application.

So there is my intro, hope your interested, if not, oh well, my blog, too bad. Will get more into framework design, our design decisions and where we are going, next time.

Visual Basic 6 Backers Revolt

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:56:58 GMT

No.. Please let it die. There also has not really be a major patch for VB 6 in some time, so it is very stable, people really don't need support on their current application. And another thing, don't migrate to VB.Net, please, please write your applications in C#. Don't bring your bad habits over to managed code.

Microsoft Watch:

Visual Basic 6 Backers Revolt
When developers balk, Microsoft sometimes listens. But when 100 of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are up in arms, one has to figure Microsoft will sit up and take notice. Microsoft is on tap to phase out support for its Visual Basic 6 language on March 31. But there is still a sizeable number of developers who have not upgraded to the current version of VB (the VB.Net release), mainly because the upgrade is quite painful. Those in favor of Microsoft extending VB 6 support have signed the petition here.