The second day of NDC2010 did not leave me disappointed. This was the day where my schedule was a clear path, room 3 almost all day, and where I had the chance to pick the brain of some of the smartest people in the DDD-space. Listening to Greg Young and Eric Evans talk about what’s important in DDD it struck me that most of what they think is important will be valid in any type of project.
Is this because DDD is the silver bullet, or is it just that no matter what type of method you abide to there are fundamental things in the process of creating software that won’t change. Like access to real business experts (not proxies), caring about making it fast to add features in all the releases beyond the first and understanding that behavior and data only makes sense in certain context.
Domain Driven Design have counters for this, does your method of development?
Entity Framework
I also spent some time sitting in on Julie Lerman’s Entity Framework 4 sessions as well as sitting down with her for an hour talking about what EF can bring to Domain Driven developers. Julie showed me an email from Jimmy that summarized how we /should/ think about EF in DDD context; “It’s only a persistence framework”. Unfortunately as it turns out EF 4, even with persistence ignorance and code-first, is still a bit in the way for “Pure” domain models. The biggest hinder is that it doesn’t support ValueObjects in all shapes and forms, just a limited set of scenarios. We agreed to try to rebuild the NDDD sample together to find out just how much Entity Framework will stand in our way.
The party
This kicked of with the DotNet Rocks! guys hosting the 64-bit game show. Where a couple of people got to answer questions about .NET, it was multiple answers type of questions and, well, it was hard to miss with all the help Richard and Carl offered.
After the game show the real party kicked of with two Norwegian bands playing, pictures and videos below;
Summary
As anticipated, the second day was better then the first, not that the first was bad, but the second was just brilliant.
#1 by Rad on July 16th, 2010
Is there a chance at sharing the source code on a public version control system: Codeplex, Google code etc?
I would recommend considering 2 great DDD samples in C#:
1. C# port of Java DDD sample: with this technology stack:
- NHibernate and Sql Lite
- Windsor Container
- Windsor WCF Facility
- WCF and
- Asp.NET MVC
2. There is yet another great architectural reference sample Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): http://microsoftnlayerapp.codeplex.com/
Since this one is very robust I think it would be a great starting point for building NDDD sample including latest EF4 CTP4 features.
Thanks,
Rad
#2 by Patrik Löwendahl on July 22nd, 2010
It will be made publicly avaible when there is something to show :)
#3 by Rad on August 24th, 2010
Thank you. I hope we can closely follow how this project evolves.