March 11, 2011 by Lars Corneliussen

NPanday 1.3-incubating released under Apache Incubator (Maven + .NET)

UPDATE: 1.3-incubating was removed from our main npanday site again! We forgot to ask the Incubator PMC for a vote, so we had to withdraw the official release.

The direct links provided in this post still work though.

Stay tuned for 1.3.1-incubating to be released soon! This will then be moved to group id ‘org.apache.npanday’ and deployed into Maven Central.

We are pleased to announce our first release of NPanday under Apache Incubator! NPanday moved from Codeplex to Apache Incubator last year.

Don’t mind the “incubator” in the version. NPanday is stable, allthough we hope to move from incubator into a full Apache project as soon as possible.

What is NPanday?

NPanday brings Maven to .NET (and Mono). It offers a set of plugins to build and test projects, and it defines all the necessary packaging types for deploying and resolving .NET artifacts.

Apache Maven comes with a great infrastructure for dependency management, artifact transport, artifact repositories, release flows with scm-integration, and much more. If you don’t know Maven, go read here. Maven is great!

There is also a Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 Integration for English Visual Studio installations.

Why NPanday, now there is NuGet

Wrong question. Competition is great. Sad though, that at least some of the originators for NuGet didn’t even know about Maven and NPanday.

Maven is an ecosystem grown over almost 10 years. It has much more to offer than auto-download of dependencies. Still I think we need to integrate the dependency-resolving and deployment part with nuget and nuget-gallery (See future plans).

What is new in this release?

NPanday now supports .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. There has also been major internal improvements. The PAB and UAC directories where removed. Now NPanday uses a clean maven local repository. This also removed the necessity for custom additions to the install and deploy phases – which where duplications of the corresponding maven plugins.

Read the full Release Notes for NPanday 1.3-incubating

What are the future plans?

On short notice we will release 1.3.1-incubating, which already has 9 resolved issues and only one left to be fixed.

At the same time we are working on version 2.0, which is a huge internal change. NPanday uses a internal RDF database where it keeps additional information for artifacts and dependencies. This is obsolete, but lots of work to remove.

We also want to lead NPanday to more .NET-like conventions for directory structures i.e., while still maintaining the Maven-influenced layout. Of course we also try to improve stability, ease of use and documentation.

My agenda for NPanday:

We are 4-5 active committers from which 2 work full-time on NPanday as of today. We would really like to get more committers involved. Find out on how to develop NPanday in the NPanday Developer’s Guide.

Where do I get it?

You’ll find everything you need here: NPanday – NPanday Overview

Downloads: NPanday – Download

Current Docs: NPanday – Documentation

May 13, 2009 by Lars Corneliussen

Architecture.NET Open Space 2009 (Germany)

Am 5. und 6. Juni 2009 veranstaltet mein Arbeitgeber itemis zusammen mit Die Software-Architekten und SOPTIM einen Open Space mit dem Thema “Erprobte Konzepte für Unternehmensanwendungen in .NET”.

Die Zielgruppe sind erfahrene und angehende Softwarearchitekten.

Mehr Informationen und das Anmeldeformular gibts auf der Webseite zum Event: Architecture.NET @ mixxt

Die Idee zu diesem Event ist auf dem .NET Open Space 2008 in Leipzig entstanden.

Wir freuen uns Dein Erscheinen!

October 27, 2008 by Lars Corneliussen

Microsoft Buzzword-bingo with Oslo, M, Quadrant, Dublin and some facts about .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 (October 2008, Pre-PDC)

Update: Post-PDC: Again, what is “Oslo”? M, MGrammar, Quadrant, Repository, textual DSLs, DSL Tools, UML-Modeling (November 2008)

One month ago I posted on Microsoft and their heavily discussed facts and rumors about the “Oslo” modeling initiative. Since then VS2010 and .NET Framework 4 has officially been released. But still “Oslo” isn’t totally unveiled!

Oslo Facts and Rumors

Microsoft will be showing a lot of new technologies on PDC. Many topics that were mentioned in context to “Oslo” are not that related anymore. Have a look at the Microsoft PDC Session Calendar in order to get an overview over all the new buzzwords.

In my last post about Oslo I cited David Chappell and Douglas Purdy saying what Oslo is about. Now Steve Martin took Douglas’ list and just decorated it with some nice code names.

M and Quadrant – Modeling Language, Tools and Repository and Oslo

We got new code names! M and Quadrant.

A language – codenamed “M” – that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and data models
A relational repository – that makes models available to both tools and platform components
A tool – codenamed “Quadrant” – that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner

Steve Martin, Introducing “M” and “Quadrant”

As I understand, M textually defines models, while Quadrant can be used to view and build those graphically. Where textual DSLs comes in here, and wether M defines meta models, represent models, or both is still not clear to me.

Don Box, Oslo – Don Box’s Spoutlet – Pluralsight Blogs

With Oslo, we’re doing two things:

We’re making it easier for people to write things down in ways that make sense for the domain they are working in – the common term for this in the wild is modeling.
We’re making the things people wrote down accessible to platform components during program execution.

… so we’ve built a design tool for working with the same information our text-centric friends produce and consume….

…Our goal is to make it possible to build real apps purely out of data. For some apps, we’ll succeed – for others, the goal is to make the transition to traditional code as natural as possible…

I can’t yet figure out what he means by saying “out of data”. I hope, Microsoft does not try to make the world even worse with their data-centric viewpoint.

“The language was designed with an RDBMS [relational DBMS] as very, very, very much top-of-mind, so that we have a very clean mapping,” Lovering said. “But the language is not hard-wired to an RDBMS or relational model. And the language is actually built against an abstract data model. We represent the program itself also in that same abstract data model, which is a very LISP-ish idea—you know, where the whole program itself is the same data structure on which it operates.”

The Oslo language also is partially based on TLA+, a language developed by Microsoft researcher Leslie Lamport, Lovering said.

Page 2 – The Origins of Microsoft’s Oslo Software Modeling Platform

I’m really looking forward to see some samples written in this language!

It’s been tried before and it’s never worked – I have to admit that was my first thought…

…So it’s going to really interesting to see where this all goes. I hope Microsoft pulls it off.

Some Thoughts on Oslo by Andrew Tokely

Windows Workflow Foundation and Oslo

The new WF comes with a new designer and a new runtime which most likely will be a part of the .NET Framework 4.0. The relation to Oslo seem to be the ability to define workflows using the new Oslo Language and to store them in the Oslo Model Repository.

WF 4 is announced to be 10 times faster and will contain a lot new built-in activities and workflow types.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/archive/2008/10/01/more-details-on-wf-wcf-in-net-4-0.aspx

Dublin – The Process Server and Oslo

The process server David mentioned got a own code name, too: Dublin!

Dublin will be extending the IIS Information Services with a more managed way to host distributed WCF and WF Services. Firstly it will be available as an extension to Windows Server 2008, but it is planned to become a part of new Windows Server releases.

Is this the Application Server we have been waiting for so long time?

The fun doesn’t stop here. Next week, you’ll hear more from us on how “Oslo” fits into the picture…

Steve Martin, http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar

Visual Studio 2010 (formerly Rosario) + .NET Framework 4.0

Visual Studio Codename “Rosario”, has now officially been dubbed Visual Studio 2010 and was announced at September 29th.

General Information

Some general information links VS2010. But what I’m interested in more, is the Architecture Section below 🙂

Microsoft Unveils Next Version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework
Reveals extensive enhancements for simplified application life-cycle management, provides sneak peek at all key focus areas for Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview
Visual Studio Team System 2010 Week on Channel 9! | VisualStudio | Channel 9

Architecture with VS2010

David Skinner talks about the features VS2010 leverages for .NET Architects. Generally VS2010 suppose to support both Top-down and Bottom-up modeling approaches. One of the key features is the linking between the models at all different abstraction layers.

All the diagrams were built with a improved version of the the DSL Toolkit. The six main diagrams shipped are:

The Layer Diagram
UML 2.1 Use Case Diagram
UML 2.1 Component Diagram
UML 2.1 Activity Diagram
UML 2.1 Class Diagram (Logical Class Diagram)
UNL 2.1 Sequence Diagram

Model = Code?

The diagrams shipped in VS2010 are not just other views on code, they are real abstractions. But still, there is a connection. One feature I really like is to validate code against models. This validation can even be ran within the build process. Using the Layer Diagram for example, it is possible to enforce that developers don’t violate the relation constraints. If someone then would code a call from business to data layer, the build just fails.