The second day of the UK OT 2004 conference dawned bright and sunny with Martin Fowler’s keynote, well the day was sunny, not Martins keynote. Martin talked about two main areas; MVC and the uses and types of MVC in use, in particular how MVC...

I am at the UK OT 2004 conference this week near Cambridge (England!) so will be blogging about what is going on here. First of all this isn’t a standard presentation style conference, it’s very much about participation and interaction so...

Many techies are wary of mainframes because of the myths and mystique surrounding them. There are three main myths about mainframes: 1 They are hugely powerful. 2 They are very complicated. 3 They are ultra reliable. None of these...

A customer who wanted to discuss mainframe interop phoned up one of the MS Business Managers yesterday and the query got routed through to me. Most of the technical people in Microsoft are nervous about mainframes but I love them which is I guess why...

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Modelling is seen as a key area for complexity management, enhanced communication, improved productivity and enhanced agility. This page has links to information about modelling. Model Driven Architecture The OMG’s site, basis for MDA:...

I have signed up to do a Dynamic Systems Initiative talk in about a months time and so have been doing some more in depth research into this area. DSI is all about system operation and administration and effectively has three levels, a base metamodel...

A couple of weeks ago I put up a quiz on some of the latest technologies to see how cutting edge people were. I thought I would share the results with everyone as they are quite interesting. Firstly the test was used 348 times, some 270 times in the first...

A few days ago I talked about transactions and last night I was reviewing a new integration pattern whitepaper which also talked about transactions. It was clear from both my blog discussion and the integration pattern that the term transaction is being...

I’m not much of a Language sort of guy (either real or computer, I failed French 3 times at school) so when I was asked to participate in a workshop at the upcoming OT2004 conference on generics I said 'no way'. I always have problems in translating...

I commented briefly yesterday about how the same things come up time after time with different names. One of the best examples of this is Transactions; that is distributed 2 phase commit type transactions. I was first told about transactions in 1972 sitting...

One of the advantages of being old is that you get to see the same mistakes time and time again which means that you don’t have to think so hard, you just have to remember what happened last time! In my case I normally remember my mistakes fairly...

So how leading edge are you? Do you know all the latest TLA's? Have you spent hours on the phone to a vendor trying to get the latest alpha code to work? Have you been up all night chasing that bug only to be told by the support line that it's a "known...

My third law is not so much of a law as a principle and is about architectural modelling. Models are all about complexity simplification and communication and so architectural models should be based around differing levels of abstraction for simplification...

Following on from my first law (see http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_platt/archive/2004/02/03/66690.aspx ) I have been thinking about what other general purpose architectural principles I use and have come up with a Platt’s Second Architectural Law...

A few years ago I built a big extension on my house. First of all I had to get the plans for the extension drawn up showing what the extension would look like and where the rooms would be. This outline plan I showed to my wife and friends to explain what...