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Archive for the ‘Dependency Injection’ Category



NServiceBus Saga Tips

Monday, February 27th, 2012

As NServiceBus comes closer to it’s official 3.0 release, I thought I’d share some small tips.

This one’s about sagas.

When you have a time-bound process that you are using a saga to manage, often you’ll request a timeout passing in the specific amount of time to wait like so:

RequestUtcTimeout(TimeSpan.FromHours(2), someState);

In order to make the timeout period configurable, don’t have your saga code call out to some configuration infrastructure directly. Instead, declare the timeout period as a property on your saga – say, TimeToWait, and then define the value that should be injected into that property with some custom initialization like so:

    public class MySagaConfig : IWantCustomInitialization        
    {
        public void Init()
        {            
            NServiceBus.Configure.Instance.Configurer
                .ConfigureProperty<MySaga>(s => s.TimeToWait, TimeSpan.FromHours(2));
        }
    }

Finally, instead of hard coding the TimeSpan in code, you can get the value from a config file or a database or wherever. This can enable you to take your time-bound long-running processes and make them data-driven as well.

Keep in mind, though, how changes to this data may influence processes already in-flight. Do you want the changes to affect them or not? How would your answer change for sagas which took weeks or months to complete rather than those finishing in a day or less? What about sagas that (potentially) never end?

Food for thought.



Evolving Loosely-Coupled Frameworks & Apps

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

This post will be less of a big-concept type posts I usually do, and more of a tip for people building and maintaining infrastructure and frameworks either open-source or internally for their companies. I’m going to illustrate this with NServiceBus as it is a large enough code base to have significant complexity and open so that you can go and take a look yourself. Trying to include some example in here would be just too small to be useful or for the point to come across.

Some background

As a cohesive framework, NServiceBus makes it quite easy for developers to pick and choose which settings they want turned on and off. Being built as a loosely-coupled set of components that don’t know about each other has always kept the internal complexity low. But as the NServiceBus API has been evolving over the years, and the functionality offered has increased, some interesting challenges have popped up as the codebase has been refactored.

The challenge

The UnicastBus class has grown too large and it’s time to refactor something out. Coincidentally, users have been asking for a better “header” story for messages – the ability to specify static headers that will be appended to all messages being sent (useful for things like security tokens), as well as per message headers. So, we want to refactor all the header management out to its own component independent of the UnicastBus class.

So, here’s the issue. So far, users have specified “.UnicastBus()” as a part of the fluent code-configuration, and shouldn’t have to change that – they shouldn’t need to know that header management is now a separate component. But then how can the new component bootstrap itself into the startup, such that it gets all the dependency injection facilities of the rest of the framework? Remember that the component doesn’t know which container technology is being used (since the user can swap it out) or when the container has been set.

The solution

The only part of the framework that knows about when all DI configuration is set is the configuration component, thus it will have to be the one that invokes the new component (without knowing about it). Introduce an interface (say INeedInitialization) and scan all the types loaded looking for classes which implement that type, register them into the container, and invoke them. Have the new component implement that interface, and in its initialization have it hook into the events and/or pipelines of other parts of the system.

Other uses

One historically problematic area in NServiceBus has been people forgetting to call “.LoadMessageHandlers()”. This can now be wired in automatically by a class in the UnicastBus component via the same mechanism.

A new feature coming in the next version is the “data bus”, a component which will allow sending large quantities of data through the bus without going through the messaging pipelines. This will help people get around the 4MB limit of MSMQ and, even more importantly, the much smaller 8KB limit of Azure. We will be able to introduce the functionality transparently with the same mechanism.

As an extension point, developers can now enrich the NServiceBus framework with their own capabilities and make those available via the contrib project to the community at large. This is better than the IWantToRunAtStartup interface that was only available for those using the generic host (which excluded web apps) and gives a consistent extensibility story for all uses.

Summary

Extensibility has always been a challenge when writing object-oriented code and dependency injection techniques have helped, but sometimes you need a bit more to take things to the next level while maintaining a backwards-compatible API.

Like I said, not a ground-shaking topic but something quite necessary in creating loosely-coupled frameworks and applications. Once you know it’s there, it isn’t really a big deal. If you didn’t know to do it, you may have been contorting your codebase in all kinds of ways to try to achieve similar things.

If you want to take a look at the code, you can find the SVN repository here: https://nservicebus.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nservicebus/trunk/



External Value Configuration with IoC

Friday, June 13th, 2008

One of the things I haven’t like about using IoC containers, AKA dependency injection frameworks, was the string-based configuration model they exposed. In order to set these values, developers had 2 options: either use XML config (usually without the benefit of intellisense or refactoring support), or use code (still quoting property names – again, no intellisense or refactoring support).

In short, there seemed to be a hole in the development model.

Here’s an example from how nServiceBus used to do this:

builder.ConfigureComponent(typeof(HttpTransport), ComponentCallModelEnum.Singleton)
  .ConfigureProperty(“DefaultNumberOfWorkerThreads”, 10)
  .ConfigureProperty(“DefaultNumberOfSenderThreads”, 10);

The problem was that if a developer got the case of the property wrong, misspelled it in some way, or somebody later refactored/renamed that property, the system would break. It would also be very difficult to figure out why.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, it dawned on me.

This was the same problem we used to have with testing using mock objects – before we had today’s more advanced frameworks. So, the solution must be to use the same techniques. The container should give the developer an object that looks just like their class, but that would intercept all calls. Then, that interceptor could turn those into the config calls shown above. Here’s what the new config model looks like: 

HttpTransport transport = builder.ConfigureComponent<HttpTransport>
                                                   (ComponentCallModelEnum.Singleton);

transport.DefaultNumberOfSenderThreads = 10;
transport.DefaultNumberOfWorkerThreads = 10; 

Granted, you’re not going to have tons of code like this. However, for all those parameters which are factory-configured and that customers/integrators shouldn’t tinker with, it makes a difference. The biggest difference is during that time of development where you’ve gotten into preliminary integration tests but the systems components are still being “polished”.

Aside: On the current project that has adopted this model, we’ve probably saved (conservatively) about 3 months of effort with this tiny (?) thing, and this isn’t a huge project. If that’s more than you would’ve thought, well, I was surprised myself. First, understand that in the old config model, everything still compiles and unit tests pass, even though its broken.

Just consider what happens in the lab when this occurs. You have N testers that can’t test the new version, waiting. You have the person who installed the version, trying to figure out what’s wrong. They then call in one of the developers where most of the new development occurred since the previous version. They fiddle around with it, looking at exception traces and whatnot. In the best case, we’re talking about 2 hours from noticing its broken until a new version comes out fixed. Multiply that by N+3 people. Then multiply by the number of versions you do integration tests on in the lab.

Caveat: In the current version, properties must be virtual in order for this to work.

For those of you who want just this feature without nServiceBus, I’ve put up all the binaries here. For the source, you’ll need to go to here.

Let me know what you think – especially if you can take the implementation to the point where it won’t need virtual properties to work 🙂



Eureka! AOP is the final piece of the multi-threaded smart client puzzle

Friday, December 7th, 2007

If you’ve read my recent post on the threading issues I’ve been dealing with in Smart Client Applications, then you’re probably beginning to get the picture that its fairly complex. To tell you the truth, it is. And up until this point I haven’t been able to find anything that’ll help – and that includes the CAB/SCSF. But yesterday I had my epiphany. The answer was in AOP.

You see, the main problem that I hadn’t been able to solve was that in order for the code to be thread-safe, you had to make sure that no code in the views would/could change entity data. One solution is not to use data-binding, which sucks, but isn’t enough to be sure. Another solution is to have all supervising-controllers clone an entity before they give it to a view. Even if you could possibly code review every line of those classes, the new guy (or old guy who forgot) will, by accident, write one new line of code that could pass an entity to a view without cloning it first. That’s not a very sustainable solution.

This thing has been bothering me for a couple of months now and I hadn’t found a way around it. Until yesterday, like I said. I was talking to somebody about threading stuff, and somehow my unconscience lobbed me this thought about AOP. Now I’m not the sharpest pencil in the pack, but I know to listen when my unconscience “speaks”.

So I set about going over what I knew about AOP – interceptors, advisors, advice, introductions, etc, etc. And then it dawned on me. I could intercept all calls to any object that implemented IView, check the parameters of those calls, and if they implemented IEntity, to clone them before passing them through.

<Homer-style WOOHOO />

The great thing is that developers don’t need to remember to clone entities – it happens automatically. The even greater thing is that this will lead developers to writing the correct kind of interaction between their views and supervising controllers.

Together with nServiceBus, this is going to make the extremely difficult problem of writing thread-safe smart clients possible.

I’ve never made use of AOP in a framework before so I’d like to get the broader community’s feedback on this before incorporating this in production. I’ve spoken with some serious AOP folks who have allayed most of my uncertainties, but I’d like to hear more. Anyway, here’s the proof of concept (that makes use of Spring).

If this turns out to be a viable solution, I think we’ll have a solid environment for building a software factory on top of. That is something that I’m really excited about. In this multi-core future (present) that is upon us, multi-threading on the client is pretty much a necessity. We need a way to get things safe and stable by default without requiring a member of the CLR team to hold our hand.

Anybody who’s interested in helping, drop a comment below.



ObjectBuilder synchronization features needed for pub/sub-ing Smart Clients

Friday, September 28th, 2007

I’ve been getting some questions from the Dependency Injection folks out there as to why I have my own Object Builder wrapping the framework. There are two very good reasons why I do this:

The first is to insulate the framework and application code that I write from the choice of one dependency injection technology or another. I want the ability to switch easily from one to the other – not so much that projects go back and forth. Updating those config files is definitely not easy. However, it allows me to have “portable” framework code that is applicable to all the projects I consult on, regardless of their choice of technology.

The second has to do with NServiceBus specifically. In order to make use of duplex communication on smart clients, you need a background thread. That thread will be updating the same (model) objects as the UI thread. That means we need synchronization. I prefer to use .NET’s built-in synchronization domains in order to solve this rather thorny problem.

The only thing is that message handlers need to be in the synchronization domain so that they can easily update those objects. However, the Bus object must not be in the synchronization domain so that if we’ve received a large update from the server, we won’t be locking out the UI thread from interacting with data on the client.

Since the bus makes use of a dependency injection framework to create message handlers, this was the best place to put the code which causes message handlers to run within the synchronization domain.

Be aware that in order to enjoy this feature, you need to split up those large server updates into multiple, logical objects (that implement IMessage), but you can still publish them all in one go using the method:

void Publish(params IMessage[] messages);

And, of course, you need to set the JoinSynchronizationDomain property of the Object Builder.

I’ll have a podcast coming out on this topic soon.

You can get the code here:

Object Builder.zip

But you’ll have to get the Spring Framework code from the official site. Make sure you download RC 1.1. Then, take the binaries and copy them to the “BIN” folder of the Object Builder solution. If you’re looking to save on some “weight”, you only need “Spring.Core.dll”, “Common.Logging.dll” and “antlr.runtime.dll” for the solution to compile. You will need one of the logging implementations DLLs to get anything written to a log, obviously.



Fetching Strategy NHibernate Implementation Available

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

A couple of months ago I put out a post discussing one way to implement custom fetching strategies. Anyway, I finally got around to putting my money where my mouth was…

So, I’ve implemented the pattern in NHibernate, adding the following method to ISession:

T Create<T>();

As well as adding the following interface to the NHibernate package:

public interface IFetchingStrategy<T>
{
ICriteria AddFetchJoinTo(ICriteria criteria);
}

All this enables you to have a stronger separation between your service layer classes and your domain model class, as well as for you to express each service-level use case as a domain concept – an interface.

Once you have such an interface, you can create a fetching strategy for that use case and define exactly how deep of an object graph you want to load so that you only hit the DB once for that use case.

The nice thing is that its all configured with Spring. In other words, if you the entry for your fetching strategy class exists, you get the improved performance, if it doesn’t, you don’t. All without touching your service layer classes.

Just as an example, when I’m in the use case modeled by “ICustomer”, I want to get all the customer’s orders, and their orderlines. This would be done by having a class like this:

public class CustomerFetchingStrategy : IFetchingStrategy<ICustomer>
{
public ICriteria AddFetchJoinTo(ICriteria criteria)
{
criteria.SetFetchMode(“orders”, FetchMode.Eager).
SetFetchMode(“orders.orderLines”, FetchMode.Eager);

return criteria;
}
}

And the configuration would look like this (as a part of the regular spring template):

<object id=”CustomerFetchingStrategy” type=”Domain.Persistence.CustomerFetchingStrategy, Domain.Persistence” />

If you want to take a look at the full solution, you can find it here. For some reason, the combined file was too big for the upload on my blog so it’s split into two. Unzip both packages into the same directory. You’ll find a file called “db_scripts.sql” which contains the schema for the DB. Don’t forget to update your connection string in the “hibernate.cfg.xml”. If you’re looking for the changes I made to the NHibernate source, you can find it in the “Updated NHibernate Files” directory. The only real change is to the “SessionImpl.cs” file.

Relevant NHibernate and Spring binaries.

Source code of example.

BTW, there is some intelligent thread-safe caching going on in SessionImpl now so that you get a much smaller performance hit (in terms of code that uses reflection) on subsequent usages of the same interfaces.

Let me know what you think.



NServiceBus Distributed Topology Q&A

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

I’ve been receiving more and more questions about how NServiceBus fits in distributed systems and wanted to share them:

My question is about distributed topology.

The EAI-hub-and-spoke model is all about the central server. It’s useful sometimes, but there are a lot of reasons why I’m not gung-ho on using a hub as the center of the integration universe.

The ESB distributed model puts code on the endpoints. That code solves some of the messaging problems that apps face, so that apps don’t have to face them. It also solves some of the messaging problems that enterprises face, so that enterprises don’t have to face them. (I need both).

Those problems include simple coding and deployment model, pub-sub routing, reliable transport, simple transformation, and orchestration. I wonder which of these you can do in your tool, and which you are planning to do.

I’m also interested in management. How do you insure that the endpoints are correctly configured? Do you have a central configuration store? How do you propagate changes from the center to the messaging endpoints?

And here’s my response:

The important parts of NServiceBus that are independent of the distributed topology are the API and the connection to long-running workflow. This code is indeed on the endpoint. However, if you wanted to you could easily connect to something like BizTalk and do whatever you wanted there. This general idea though is to support the ESB distributed model since there’s no such things as a centralized ESB.

In terms of the capabilities you’ve mentioned, I’ve seen developers pick up the coding model in a day or two. The deployment model is just a bunch of DLLs you deploy with each endpoint. Dependency Injection is supported by www.SpringFramework.net but you can replace that with something else easily as another implementation of the ObjectBuilder interfaces.

Currently pub/sub routing is supported over regular point-to-point transports in a transport agnostic way. You also have the ability to have subscriptions be persisted so that even if a server restarts (and clients don’t, and can’t know about that) all the subscriptions will be remembered.

The reliable transport that is currently supported is MSMQ, with the option of defining per-message type if you want durable messaging (using the [Recoverable] attribute).

In terms of orchestration you get a nice model for long-running workflow that gets kicked off by messages decorated with the [StartsWorkflow] attribute, and messages that implement the IWorkflowMessage interface get automatically routed to the persistent workflow instance. You have the ability to change the storage of workflow instances easily as well. Workflows are simple classes which are easily unit-testable in that they expose a “void Handle(T message);” method for every message type (T) that is involved in the workflow.

I haven’t done anything in terms of simple transformation yet but am currently looking for the right place in the message processing pipeline to put it. I also haven’t done anything yet in terms of management.

What is currently being done management-wise on the projects that use it are the commercial options for managing configuration files in distributed environments coupled with the regular ability to restart windows services and IIS applications. I haven’t seen anything lacking in that solution yet.


If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to send them my way – NServiceBus@UdiDahan.com.



Are fewer assemblies really better?

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

If you’ve read Scott Hanselman’s great post Some guiding principles for Software Development, you’ve probably seen his point about “Fewer assemblies is better”, and might be thinking that you’ve seen me write about this before. If so, you’re absolutely right.

Here are some choice quotes:

In the end, you should see bunches of projects/dlls which go together, while between the bunches there is almost no dependence whatsoever. The boundaries between bunches will almost always be an interface project/dll.

This will have the pleasant side-effect of enabling concurrent development of bunches with developers hardly ever stepping on each other’s toes. Actually, the number of projects in a given developer’s solution will probably decrease, since they no longer have to deal with all parts of the system.

Taken from So many Dlls, so little time.

And from a more recent post, One wrong DLL = 3 months gone:

Obviously, if there is less source to go through, the programmer will, on average, find the origin of the defect faster. And, as we all know, it usually takes longer to find the bug than to actually fix it.

So, by splitting up different classes and interfaces into different DLLs, we can manage dependencies in the system so that less source needs to be examined.

However, if you did want to roll up all these DLLs into fewer physical files, you could do just that using the tool ILMerge. This might make sense as a part of getting your software ready for installation. Also, access to client computers that are having problems might make you consider this.

Bottom Line

I’d say more assemblies is generally better, and merge when necessary – but don’t change your design on that account.



Performant and Explicit Domain Models

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Some Technical Difficulties

Ayende and I had an email conversation that started with me asking what would happen if I added an Order to a Customer’s “Orders” collection, when that collection was lazy loaded. My question was whether the addition of an element would result in NHibernate hitting the database to fill that collection. His answer was a simple “yes”. In the case where a customer can have many (millions) of Orders, that’s just not a feasible solution. The technical solution was simple – just define the Orders collection on the Customer as “inverse=true”, and then to save a new Order, just write:

session.Save( new Order(myCustomer) );

Although it works, it’s not “DDD compliant” 🙂

In Ayende’s post Architecting for Performance he quoted a part of our email conversation. The conclusion I reached was that in order to design performant domain models, you need to know the kinds of data volumes you’re dealing with. It affects both internals and the API of the model – when can you assume cascade, and when not. It’s important to make these kinds of things explicit in the Domain Model’s API.

How do you make “transparent persistence” explicit?

The problem occurs around “transparent persistence”. If we were to assume that the Customer object added the Order object to its Orders collection, then we wouldn’t have to explicitly save orders it creates, so we would write service layer code like this:

using (IDBScope scope = this.DbServices.GetScope(TransactionOption.On))
{
IOrderCreatingCustomer c = this.DbServices.Get<IOrderCreatingCustomer>(msg.CustomerId);
c.CreateOrder(message.OrderAmount);

scope.Complete();
}

On the other hand, if we designed our Domain Model around the million orders constraint, we would need to explicitly save the order, so we would write service layer code like this:

using (IDBScope scope = this.DbServices.GetScope(TransactionOption.On))
{
IOrderCreatingCustomer c = this.DbServices.Get<IOrderCreatingCustomer>(msg.CustomerId);
IOrder o = c.CreateOrder(message.OrderAmount);
this.DbServices.Save(o);

scope.Complete();
}

But the question remains, how do we communicate these guidelines to service layer developers from the Domain Model? There are a number of ways, but it’s important to decide on one and use it consistently. Performance and correctness require it.

Solution 1: Explicitness via Return Type

The first way is a little subtle, but you can do it with the return type of the “CreateOrder” method call. In the case where the Domain Model wishes to communicate that it handles transparent persistence by itself, have the method return “void”. Where the Domain Model wishes to communicate that it will not handle transparent persistence, have the method return the Order object created.

Another way to communicate the fact that an Order has been created that needs to be saved is with events. There are two sub-ways to do so:

Solution 2: Explicitness via Events on Domain Objects

The first is to just define the event on the customer object and have the service layer subscribe to it. It’s pretty clear that when the service layer receives a “OrderCreatedThatRequiresSaving” event, it should save the order passed in the event arguments.

The second realizes that the call to the customer object may come from some other domain object and that the service layer doesn’t necessarily know what can happen as the result of calling some method on the aggregate root. The change of state as the result of that method call may permeate the entire object graph. If each object in the graph raises its own events, its calling object will have to propagate that event to its parent – resulting in defining the same events in multiple places, and each object being aware of all things possible with its great-grandchild objects. That is clearly bad.

What [ThreadStatic] is for

So, the solution is to use thread-static events.

[Sidebar] Thread-static events are just static events defined on a static class, where each event has the ThreadStaticAttribute applied to it. This attribute is important for server-side scenarios where multiple threads will be running through the Domain Model at the same time. The easiest thread-safe way to use static data is to apply the ThreadStaticAttribute.

Solution 3: Explicitness via Static Events

Each object raises the appropriate static event according to its logic. In our example, Customer would call:

DomainModelEvents.RaiseOrderCreatedThatRequiresSavingEvent(newOrder);

And the service layer would write:

DomainModelEvents.OrderCreatedThatRequiresSaving +=
delegate(object sender, OrderEventArgs e) { this.DbServices.Save(e.Order); };

The advantage of this solution is that it requires minimal knowledge of the Domain Model for the Service Layer to correctly work with it. It also communicates that anything that doesn’t raise an event will be persisted transparently behind the appropriate root object.

Statics and Testability

I know that many of you are wondering if I am really advocating the use of statics. The problem with most static classes is that they hurt testability because they are difficult to mock out. Often statics are used as Facades to hide some technological implementation detail. In this case, the static class is an inherent part of the Domain Model and does not serve as a Facade for anything.

When it comes to testing the Domain Model, we don’t have to mock anything out since the Domain Model is independent of all other concerns. This leaves us with unit testing at the single Domain Class level, which is pretty useless unless we’re TDD-ing the design of the Domain Model, in which case we’ll still be fiddling around with a bunch of classes at a time. Domain Models are best tested using State-Based Testing; get the objects into a given state, call a method on one of them, assert the resulting state. The static events don’t impede that kind of testing at all.

What if we used Injection instead of Statics?

Also, you’ll find that each Service Layer class will need to subscribe to all the Domain Model’s events, something that is easily handled by a base class. I will state that I have tried doing this without a static class, and injecting that singleton object into the Service Layer classes, and in that setter having them subscribe to its events. This was also pulled into a base class. The main difference was that the Dependency Injection solution required injecting that object into Domain Objects as well. Personally, I’m against injection for domain objects. So all in all, the static solution comes with less overhead than that based on injection.

Summary

In summary, beyond the “technical basics” of being aware of your data volumes and designing your Domain Model to handle each use case performantly, I’ve found these techniques useful for designing its API as well as communicating my intent around persistence transparency. So give it a try. I’d be grateful to hear your thoughts on the matter as well as what else you’ve found that works.

Related posts:



Interfaces solve visibility and testing issues

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Jimmy’s recent post called out some of the insights on the advantages of Ruby from Niclas’ keynote at DevSummit 2007. Jimmy writes:

In Ruby it’s easy to redefine the visibility of a method from private to public for testing purposes. This was just one small detail in his talk of course, but I started to think about how much pain I quite often go through regarding this in legacy code.

Let me just start out by saying that dealing with legacy code is far from easy. However, when writing new code, or as a part of refactoring that legacy, adding interfaces to your design can help you get around those visibility and testing issues.

For instance, if you only let “client” code access the interface, and not the implementation (probably using some kind of dependency injection), then you could leave all sorts of methods public on your concrete class without worry that the client will call them since the interface doesn’t expose them. Now that the methods on the concrete class are public, you can easily test that class.

The way to package your code to make sure this occurs follows a very simple design principle. This is much easier to put in practice on new development, but you’ll find that it isn’t that hard for legacy either. Since legacy code often doesn’t make use of interfaces, and the implementation is already packaged, and your new client code will already be separately packaged, you’re 90% there!

If you can change the legacy code, you’re actually 95% there. Just create a new package for the interface that the client code will use. Then change the legacy code to implement that interface – since the methods will be pretty much the same, it’s not that much work.

If you can’t change the legacy code, create a “wrapper” class that implements the interface and delegates the calls to the legacy code.

Finally, let me sum up by saying that I think Ruby is great. However, I think that often many advantages are attributed to anything new that may have already been possible/easy with what we already have today. Sometimes, the new stuff helps raise awareness on important issues – and then we can have great discussions on how to solve those issues with today’s (yesterday’s ?) technology 🙂



   


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Karl Wannenmacher Karl Wannenmacher, Senior Lead Expert at Frequentis AG
“I have been following Udi’s blog and podcasts since 2007. I’m convinced that he is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the field of SOA, EDA and large scale systems.
Udi helped Frequentis to design a major subsystem of a large mission critical system with a nationwide deployment based on NServiceBus. It was impressive to see how he took the initial architecture and turned it upside down leading to a very flexible and scalable yet simple system without knowing the details of the business domain. I highly recommend consulting with Udi when it comes to large scale mission critical systems in any domain.”

Simon Segal Simon Segal, Independent Consultant
“Udi is one of the outstanding software development minds in the world today, his vast insights into Service Oriented Architectures and Smart Clients in particular are indeed a rare commodity. Udi is also an exceptional teacher and can help lead teams to fall into the pit of success. I would recommend Udi to anyone considering some Architecural guidance and support in their next project.”

Ohad Israeli Ohad Israeli, Chief Architect at Hewlett-Packard, Indigo Division
“When you need a man to do the job Udi is your man! No matter if you are facing near deadline deadlock or at the early stages of your development, if you have a problem Udi is the one who will probably be able to solve it, with his large experience at the industry and his widely horizons of thinking , he is always full of just in place great architectural ideas.
I am honored to have Udi as a colleague and a friend (plus having his cell phone on my speed dial).”

Ward Bell Ward Bell, VP Product Development at IdeaBlade
“Everyone will tell you how smart and knowledgable Udi is ... and they are oh-so-right. Let me add that Udi is a smart LISTENER. He's always calibrating what he has to offer with your needs and your experience ... looking for the fit. He has strongly held views ... and the ability to temper them with the nuances of the situation.
I trust Udi to tell me what I need to hear, even if I don't want to hear it, ... in a way that I can hear it. That's a rare skill to go along with his command and intelligence.”

Eli Brin, Program Manager at RISCO Group
“We hired Udi as a SOA specialist for a large scale project. The development is outsourced to India. SOA is a buzzword used almost for anything today. We wanted to understand what SOA really is, and what is the meaning and practice to develop a SOA based system.
We identified Udi as the one that can put some sense and order in our minds. We started with a private customized SOA training for the entire team in Israel. After that I had several focused sessions regarding our architecture and design.
I will summarize it simply (as he is the software simplist): We are very happy to have Udi in our project. It has a great benefit. We feel good and assured with the knowledge and practice he brings. He doesn’t talk over our heads. We assimilated nServicebus as the ESB of the project. I highly recommend you to bring Udi into your project.”

Catherine Hole Catherine Hole, Senior Project Manager at the Norwegian Health Network
“My colleagues and I have spent five interesting days with Udi - diving into the many aspects of SOA. Udi has shown impressive abilities of understanding organizational challenges, and has brought the business perspective into our way of looking at services. He has an excellent understanding of the many layers from business at the top to the technical infrstructure at the bottom. He is a great listener, and manages to simplify challenges in a way that is understandable both for developers and CEOs, and all the specialists in between.”

Yoel Arnon Yoel Arnon, MSMQ Expert
“Udi has a unique, in depth understanding of service oriented architecture and how it should be used in the real world, combined with excellent presentation skills. I think Udi should be a premier choice for a consultant or architect of distributed systems.”

Vadim Mesonzhnik, Development Project Lead at Polycom
“When we were faced with a task of creating a high performance server for a video-tele conferencing domain we decided to opt for a stateless cluster with SQL server approach. In order to confirm our decision we invited Udi.

After carefully listening for 2 hours he said: "With your kind of high availability and performance requirements you don’t want to go with stateless architecture."

One simple sentence saved us from implementing a wrong product and finding that out after years of development. No matter whether our former decisions were confirmed or altered, it gave us great confidence to move forward relying on the experience, industry best-practices and time-proven techniques that Udi shared with us.
It was a distinct pleasure and a unique opportunity to learn from someone who is among the best at what he does.”

Jack Van Hoof Jack Van Hoof, Enterprise Integration Architect at Dutch Railways
“Udi is a respected visionary on SOA and EDA, whose opinion I most of the time (if not always) highly agree with. The nice thing about Udi is that he is able to explain architectural concepts in terms of practical code-level examples.”

Neil Robbins Neil Robbins, Applications Architect at Brit Insurance
“Having followed Udi's blog and other writings for a number of years I attended Udi's two day course on 'Loosely Coupled Messaging with NServiceBus' at SkillsMatter, London.

I would strongly recommend this course to anyone with an interest in how to develop IT systems which provide immediate and future fitness for purpose. An influential and innovative thought leader and practitioner in his field, Udi demonstrates and shares a phenomenally in depth knowledge that proves his position as one of the premier experts in his field globally.

The course has enhanced my knowledge and skills in ways that I am able to immediately apply to provide benefits to my employer. Additionally though I will be able to build upon what I learned in my 2 days with Udi and have no doubt that it will only enhance my future career.

I cannot recommend Udi, and his courses, highly enough.”

Nick Malik Nick Malik, Enterprise Architect at Microsoft Corporation
“You are an excellent speaker and trainer, Udi, and I've had the fortunate experience of having attended one of your presentations. I believe that you are a knowledgable and intelligent man.”

Sean Farmar Sean Farmar, Chief Technical Architect at Candidate Manager Ltd
“Udi has provided us with guidance in system architecture and supports our implementation of NServiceBus in our core business application.

He accompanied us in all stages of our development cycle and helped us put vision into real life distributed scalable software. He brought fresh thinking, great in depth of understanding software, and ongoing support that proved as valuable and cost effective.

Udi has the unique ability to analyze the business problem and come up with a simple and elegant solution for the code and the business alike.
With Udi's attention to details, and knowledge we avoided pit falls that would cost us dearly.”

Børge Hansen Børge Hansen, Architect Advisor at Microsoft
“Udi delivered a 5 hour long workshop on SOA for aspiring architects in Norway. While keeping everyone awake and excited Udi gave us some great insights and really delivered on making complex software challenges simple. Truly the software simplist.”

Motty Cohen, SW Manager at KorenTec Technologies
“I know Udi very well from our mutual work at KorenTec. During the analysis and design of a complex, distributed C4I system - where the basic concepts of NServiceBus start to emerge - I gained a lot of "Udi's hours" so I can surely say that he is a professional, skilled architect with fresh ideas and unique perspective for solving complex architecture challenges. His ideas, concepts and parts of the artifacts are the basis of several state-of-the-art C4I systems that I was involved in their architecture design.”

Aaron Jensen Aaron Jensen, VP of Engineering at Eleutian Technology
“Awesome. Just awesome.

We’d been meaning to delve into messaging at Eleutian after multiple discussions with and blog posts from Greg Young and Udi Dahan in the past. We weren’t entirely sure where to start, how to start, what tools to use, how to use them, etc. Being able to sit in a room with Udi for an entire week while he described exactly how, why and what he does to tackle a massive enterprise system was invaluable to say the least.

We now have a much better direction and, more importantly, have the confidence we need to start introducing these powerful concepts into production at Eleutian.”

Gad Rosenthal Gad Rosenthal, Department Manager at Retalix
“A thinking person. Brought fresh and valuable ideas that helped us in architecting our product. When recommending a solution he supports it with evidence and detail so you can successfully act based on it. Udi's support "comes on all levels" - As the solution architect through to the detailed class design. Trustworthy!”

Chris Bilson Chris Bilson, Developer at Russell Investment Group
“I had the pleasure of attending a workshop Udi led at the Seattle ALT.NET conference in February 2009. I have been reading Udi's articles and listening to his podcasts for a long time and have always looked to him as a source of advice on software architecture.
When I actually met him and talked to him I was even more impressed. Not only is Udi an extremely likable person, he's got that rare gift of being able to explain complex concepts and ideas in a way that is easy to understand.
All the attendees of the workshop greatly appreciate the time he spent with us and the amazing insights into service oriented architecture he shared with us.”

Alexey Shestialtynov Alexey Shestialtynov, Senior .Net Developer at Candidate Manager
“I met Udi at Candidate Manager where he was brought in part-time as a consultant to help the company make its flagship product more scalable. For me, even after 30 years in software development, working with Udi was a great learning experience. I simply love his fresh ideas and architecture insights.
As we all know it is not enough to be armed with best tools and technologies to be successful in software - there is still human factor involved. When, as it happens, the project got in trouble, management asked Udi to step into a leadership role and bring it back on track. This he did in the span of a month. I can only wish that things had been done this way from the very beginning.
I look forward to working with Udi again in the future.”

Christopher Bennage Christopher Bennage, President at Blue Spire Consulting, Inc.
“My company was hired to be the primary development team for a large scale and highly distributed application. Since these are not necessarily everyday requirements, we wanted to bring in some additional expertise. We chose Udi because of his blogging, podcasting, and speaking. We asked him to to review our architectural strategy as well as the overall viability of project.
I was very impressed, as Udi demonstrated a broad understanding of the sorts of problems we would face. His advice was honest and unbiased and very pragmatic. Whenever I questioned him on particular points, he was able to backup his opinion with real life examples. I was also impressed with his clarity and precision. He was very careful to untangle the meaning of words that might be overloaded or otherwise confusing. While Udi's hourly rate may not be the cheapest, the ROI is undoubtedly a deal. I would highly recommend consulting with Udi.”

Robert Lewkovich, Product / Development Manager at Eggs Overnight
“Udi's advice and consulting were a huge time saver for the project I'm responsible for. The $ spent were well worth it and provided me with a more complete understanding of nServiceBus and most importantly in helping make the correct architectural decisions earlier thereby reducing later, and more expensive, rework.”

Ray Houston Ray Houston, Director of Development at TOPAZ Technologies
“Udi's SOA class made me smart - it was awesome.

The class was very well put together. The materials were clear and concise and Udi did a fantastic job presenting it. It was a good mixture of lecture, coding, and question and answer. I fully expected that I would be taking notes like crazy, but it was so well laid out that the only thing I wrote down the entire course was what I wanted for lunch. Udi provided us with all the lecture materials and everyone has access to all of the samples which are in the nServiceBus trunk.

Now I know why Udi is the "Software Simplist." I was amazed to find that all the code and solutions were indeed very simple. The patterns that Udi presented keep things simple by isolating complexity so that it doesn't creep into your day to day code. The domain code looks the same if it's running in a single process or if it's running in 100 processes.”

Ian Cooper Ian Cooper, Team Lead at Beazley
“Udi is one of the leaders in the .Net development community, one of the truly smart guys who do not just get best architectural practice well enough to educate others but drives innovation. Udi consistently challenges my thinking in ways that make me better at what I do.”

Liron Levy, Team Leader at Rafael
“I've met Udi when I worked as a team leader in Rafael. One of the most senior managers there knew Udi because he was doing superb architecture job in another Rafael project and he recommended bringing him on board to help the project I was leading.
Udi brought with him fresh solutions and invaluable deep architecture insights. He is an authority on SOA (service oriented architecture) and this was a tremendous help in our project.
On the personal level - Udi is a great communicator and can persuade even the most difficult audiences (I was part of such an audience myself..) by bringing sound explanations that draw on his extensive knowledge in the software business. Working with Udi was a great learning experience for me, and I'll be happy to work with him again in the future.”

Adam Dymitruk Adam Dymitruk, Director of IT at Apara Systems
“I met Udi for the first time at DevTeach in Montreal back in early 2007. While Udi is usually involved in SOA subjects, his knowledge spans all of a software development company's concerns. I would not hesitate to recommend Udi for any company that needs excellent leadership, mentoring, problem solving, application of patterns, implementation of methodologies and straight out solution development.
There are very few people in the world that are as dedicated to their craft as Udi is to his. At ALT.NET Seattle, Udi explained many core ideas about SOA. The team that I brought with me found his workshop and other talks the highlight of the event and provided the most value to us and our organization. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to recommend him.”

Eytan Michaeli Eytan Michaeli, CTO Korentec
“Udi was responsible for a major project in the company, and as a chief architect designed a complex multi server C4I system with many innovations and excellent performance.”


Carl Kenne Carl Kenne, .Net Consultant at Dotway AB
“Udi's session "DDD in Enterprise apps" was truly an eye opener. Udi has a great ability to explain complex enterprise designs in a very comprehensive and inspiring way. I've seen several sessions on both DDD and SOA in the past, but Udi puts it in a completly new perspective and makes us understand what it's all really about. If you ever have a chance to see any of Udi's sessions in the future, take it!”

Avi Nehama, R&D Project Manager at Retalix
“Not only that Udi is a briliant software architecture consultant, he also has remarkable abilities to present complex ideas in a simple and concise manner, and...
always with a smile. Udi is indeed a top-league professional!”

Ben Scheirman Ben Scheirman, Lead Developer at CenterPoint Energy
“Udi is one of those rare people who not only deeply understands SOA and domain driven design, but also eloquently conveys that in an easy to grasp way. He is patient, polite, and easy to talk to. I'm extremely glad I came to his workshop on SOA.”

Scott C. Reynolds Scott C. Reynolds, Director of Software Engineering at CBLPath
“Udi is consistently advancing the state of thought in software architecture, service orientation, and domain modeling.
His mastery of the technologies and techniques is second to none, but he pairs that with a singular ability to listen and communicate effectively with all parties, technical and non, to help people arrive at context-appropriate solutions. Every time I have worked with Udi, or attended a talk of his, or just had a conversation with him I have come away from it enriched with new understanding about the ideas discussed.”

Evgeny-Hen Osipow, Head of R&D at PCLine
“Udi has helped PCLine on projects by implementing architectural blueprints demonstrating the value of simple design and code.”

Rhys Campbell Rhys Campbell, Owner at Artemis West
“For many years I have been following the works of Udi. His explanation of often complex design and architectural concepts are so cleanly broken down that even the most junior of architects can begin to understand these concepts. These concepts however tend to typify the "real world" problems we face daily so even the most experienced software expert will find himself in an "Aha!" moment when following Udi teachings.
It was a pleasure to finally meet Udi in Seattle Alt.Net OpenSpaces 2008, where I was pleasantly surprised at how down-to-earth and approachable he was. His depth and breadth of software knowledge also became apparent when discussion with his peers quickly dove deep in to the problems we current face. If given the opportunity to work with or recommend Udi I would quickly take that chance. When I think .Net Architecture, I think Udi.”

Sverre Hundeide Sverre Hundeide, Senior Consultant at Objectware
“Udi had been hired to present the third LEAP master class in Oslo. He is an well known international expert on enterprise software architecture and design, and is the author of the open source messaging framework nServiceBus. The entire class was based on discussion and interaction with the audience, and the only Power Point slide used was the one showing the agenda.
He started out with sketching a naive traditional n-tier application (big ball of mud), and based on suggestions from the audience we explored different solutions which might improve the solution. Whatever suggestions we threw at him, he always had a thoroughly considered answer describing pros and cons with the suggested solution. He obviously has a lot of experience with real world enterprise SOA applications.”

Raphaël Wouters Raphaël Wouters, Owner/Managing Partner at Medinternals
“I attended Udi's excellent course 'Advanced Distributed System Design with SOA and DDD' at Skillsmatter. Few people can truly claim such a high skill and expertise level, present it using a pragmatic, concrete no-nonsense approach and still stay reachable.”

Nimrod Peleg Nimrod Peleg, Lab Engineer at Technion IIT
“One of the best programmers and software engineer I've ever met, creative, knows how to design and implemet, very collaborative and finally - the applications he designed implemeted work for many years without any problems!”

Jose Manuel Beas
“When I attended Udi's SOA Workshop, then it suddenly changed my view of what Service Oriented Architectures were all about. Udi explained complex concepts very clearly and created a very productive discussion environment where all the attendees could learn a lot. I strongly recommend hiring Udi.”

Daniel Jin Daniel Jin, Senior Lead Developer at PJM Interconnection
“Udi is one of the top SOA guru in the .NET space. He is always eager to help others by sharing his knowledge and experiences. His blog articles often offer deep insights and is a invaluable resource. I highly recommend him.”

Pasi Taive Pasi Taive, Chief Architect at Tieto
“I attended both of Udi's "UI Composition Key to SOA Success" and "DDD in Enterprise Apps" sessions and they were exceptionally good. I will definitely participate in his sessions again. Udi is a great presenter and has the ability to explain complex issues in a manner that everyone understands.”

Eran Sagi, Software Architect at HP
“So far, I heard about Service Oriented architecture all over. Everyone mentions it – the big buzz word. But, when I actually asked someone for what does it really mean, no one managed to give me a complete satisfied answer. Finally in his excellent course “Advanced Distributed Systems”, I got the answers I was looking for. Udi went over the different motivations (principles) of Services Oriented, explained them well one by one, and showed how each one could be technically addressed using NService bus. In his course, Udi also explain the way of thinking when coming to design a Service Oriented system. What are the questions you need to ask yourself in order to shape your system, place the logic in the right places for best Service Oriented system.

I would recommend this course for any architect or developer who deals with distributed system, but not only. In my work we do not have a real distributed system, but one PC which host both the UI application and the different services inside, all communicating via WCF. I found that many of the architecture principles and motivations of SOA apply for our system as well. Enough that you have SW partitioned into components and most of the principles becomes relevant to you as well. Bottom line – an excellent course recommended to any SW Architect, or any developer dealing with distributed system.”

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