Another great blog to follow, AKF Partners

If like me you have been in the IT/development game long enough you will realise that the software/technology is sometimes the bit part player in a scenario - often commercial and business aspects overshadow things by a long way. Along with that is the soft skills side of the equation - thankfully something I picked up well enough when I was with Conchango (now EMC consulting)...

A brilliant blog I stumbled upon, again via High Scalability is AKF Partners. These guys specialise in consulting around site and application scalability and have a great blog on a variety of topics associated with building software including team composition, hiring and management, security, hardware, vendor negotiations, SOA, deployments, how to be a CTO!

If you find that you need to up to date on IT concerns not directly technology related then this blog is a must read - they have some great thought provoking posts.

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Walk-Thru: Using Wolfpack to automatically deploy and smoke test your system

First, some history... The advent of NuGet has revolutionised many many aspects of the .Net ecosystem; MyGet, Chocolatey & OctopusDeploy to name a few solutions building upon its success bring even more features to the table. I also spotted that NuGet could solve a problem I was having with my OSS System Monitoring software Wolfpack ; essentially this is a core application framework that uses plugins for extension ( Wolfpack Contrib ) but how to unify, standardise and streamline how these plugins are made available? NuGet to the rescue again - I wrapped the NuGet infrastructure (I deem NuGet to be so ubiquitous and stable that is has transcended into the software "infrastrucuture" hall of fame) with a new OSS project called Sidewinder . Sidewinder allows me to wrap all my little extension and plugins in NuGet packages and deploy them directly from the Wolfpack application - it even allows me to issue a new version of Wolfpack and have Wolfpack update itself, sweet huh

Configuration in .Net 2.0

11-Dec-2007 Update I've updated this post to fix the broken images and replaced them with inline text for the example xml and accompanying C# code. This post has been by far the most hit on this blog and along with the comments about the missing images I thought it was time to update it! Whilst recreating the examples below I zipped up the working source code and xml file and loaded this onto my Project Distributor site - please download it to get a full working custom configuration to play with! Just click on the CustomConfigExampleSource link on the right hand side, then the "Source" link to get the zip. We are in the process of converting our codebase to .Net 2.0. We've used Enterprise Library to great effect so decided that we should continue with this in the form of the Jan 2006 release which targets 2.0 and I've got the job of porting our Logging, Data Access etc wrappers to EntLib 2.0. ...And so far so good - the EntLib docs aren't bad and the migrati

Castle/Windsor schema enables Visual Studio intellisense

There has been a lot of noise recently about Inversion of Control (IoC) with .Net recently (stop sniggering at the back java guys!).... I've been using IoC via the Spring.NET framework for over 2 years now - it's a completely different approach to coding and once you get your head around it everything just falls into place and development is a real joy again. As I mention, Spring.NET is my framework of choice but a recent change in employer has seen me bump up against Castle/Windsor . First impressions are that I like it - it's not as powerful or feature rich as Spring but that's not always a bad thing! The one thing I did miss though was Visual Studio intellisense when editing the configurations - Spring has an online schema that can be associated with a Spring configuration. This got me thinking - if the VS intellisense can be hooked into that easily why not create one for Windsor configuration? So I did...you can download it from my new google code site here . Remem

James Simmonds

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