Monat: Dezember 2009

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

In this truly unique technical book, today’s leading software architects present valuable principles on key development issues that go way beyond technology. More than four dozen architects — including Neal Ford, Michael Nygard, and Bill de h ra — offer advice for communicating with stakeholders, eliminating complexity, empowering developers, and many more practical lessons they’ve learned from years of experience. Among the 97 principles in this book, you’ll find useful advice such as:

  • Don’t Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements (Nitin Borwankar)
  • Chances Are, Your Biggest Problem Isn’t Technical (Mark Ramm)
  • Communication Is King; Clarity and Leadership, Its Humble Servants (Mark Richards)
  • Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse (Kevlin Henney)
  • For the End User, the Interface Is the System (Vinayak Hegde)
  • It’s Never Too Early to Think About Performance (Rebecca Parsons)

To be successful as a software architect, you need to master both business and technology. This book tells you what top software architects think is important and how they approach a project.

You can find the 97 things for free here.

Android Fragmentation

Google announced on its Android Developers Blog that they are now providing a device dashboard showing the distribution of the Android version accessing the Android Market (later on also including hardware characteristics of devices).

As a developer, I often wonder which Android platforms my applications should support,especially as the number of Android-powered devices grows. Should my application only focus on the latest version of the platform or should it support older ones as well?

To help with this kind of decision, I am excited to announce the new device dashboard. It provides information about deployed Android-powered devices that is helpful to developers as they build and update their apps. The dashboard provides the relative distribution of Android platform versions on devices running Android Market.

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In summary, Android 1.5, 1.6, and 2.0.1 are the 3 versions of the platform that are deployed in volume. Our goal is to provide you with the tools and information to make it easy for you to target specific versions of the platform or all the versions that are deployed in volume.

We plan to update the dashboard regularly to reflect deployment of new Android platforms. We also plan to expand the dashboard to include other information like devices per screen size and so on.

Don’t get me wrong: the data is very interesting. However, it strongly reminds me on the situation on Windows, where still about 30% of the users use Windows XP. Having such a big fragmentation of OS versions really forces you to either make big compromises and build your application only using the features of the lowest OS version or to make your application adapt to the OS version it is running on. The later one adds a lot of trouble in development efforts, testing and bug fixing.

Still, it will be interesting to see how the fragmentation of Android devices evolve and how this will influence the attraction of developers providing Apps for the Android OS. Of course, having developers focusing only on certain Android OS versions and/or hardware characteristics could also make the hardware vendors streamline their hardware specs and OS versions. Selling Android devices which show only very few apps on the Android Market might not sell so well after all.

Links for Software Architects

Over the time, I have collected some links to websites and articles with topics interesting for Software Architects. Since they might be of interest for others, too, I am providing them here for you. If you also have some links which you think are interesting for other Software Architects, please let me know.

Links for Software Architects weiterlesen

How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applications

MSDN features an article covering reasons why and how managed applications can suffer from memory leaks, how you can find them and get rid of them:

Despite what a lot of people believe, it’s easy to introduce memory and resources leaks in .NET applications. The Garbage Collector, or GC for close friends, is not a magician who would completely relieve you from taking care of your memory and resources consumption.

I’ll explain in this article why memory leaks exist in .NET and how to avoid them. Don’t worry, I won’t focus here on the inner workings of the garbage collector and other advanced characteristics of memory and resources management in .NET.

It’s important to understand leaks and how to avoid them, especially since they are not the kind of things that is easy to detect automatically. Unit tests won’t help here. And when your application crashes in production, you’ll be in a rush looking for solutions. So, relax and take the time to learn more about this subject before it’s too late.

How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applications weiterlesen