You’ve been there, working on a large or small project. Discovering things, learning new things, applying your new knowledge to get further and surpass your previous achievements. And it’s that brilliant, thunderous, and blinding bolt of inspiration that gives way to that beautiful and elegant piece of knowledge, simplistic yet profound, that keeps you moving.

How does this tie into working on a large ‘SOA’ based project at a major financial institution using .NET technologies like WCF (Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation) and ASP.NET? Most of these services just provide lookup information based on a set of criteria supplied to them, so they don’t contain anything more than simplified domain objects, no frills, no rules, no update functionality. Hardly anything interesting…

But yet these services being created are responsible for wading through distributed systems from Unix, to dozens of Windows SQL Server Databases, to CGI calls to mainframe pathways. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to provide an ‘enterprise’ domain model of the organization’s business, and also provide a new web application to be created to provide clients some information about their accounts. (Think Bank Of America, Charles Swabb).

On the surface hardly anything of the above seems interesting, or fun to code, but then, diving deeper we find the patterns, the ability to expand our technical skill set while improving the quality of our delivered code.

With that, this post starts long running series on ‘Explorations in Code’, and ‘Explorations in the Software Business’. Two parallel long running commentaries about my work and the insights I get through the project.

To wet the appetite the following posts will be made in due time:

  • Parallel and Distributed Processing using commodity PC’s in .NET (MapReduce and F(x) algorithms)
  • WCF Tips and Tricks
  • .NET Reflection, Deep Dive
  • Add-In / Plug-In Framework
  • AVP Design Pattern (Assembled-View-Pattern) - Eat your heart out MVP
  • JavaScript, How I Heart Thee
  • Practical REST
  • CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, and the new web.