Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

• Beyond ServiceMatrix

  Written by Udi Dahan on December 21, 2015

  When we originally started developing ServiceMatrix, our vision was to develop a tool that could help design distributed systems. One of our main goals was to enable architects to graphically design an immediately executable solution so they could quickly iterate on their designs. We also wanted to help developers who were new to NServiceBus to get started more quickly and avoid many common pitfalls with messaging. Unfortunately, even after years of effort, we just could not find the right balance between the "it just works" code generation experience and leaving developers enough control over how their solution was built. Although we were aware of many other companies who had struggled with this very issue, we also fell into that well-worn trap of thinking "this time will be different". We haven't given up though, and have started down a different path instead - one that doesn't rely on code generation and is more integrated with the rest of the platform.

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• The dangers of ThreadLocal

  Written by Daniel Marbach on December 1, 2015

  Languages and frameworks evolve. We as developers have to learn new things constantly and unlearn already-learned knowledge. Speaking for myself, unlearning is the most difficult part of continuous learning. When I first came into contact with multi-threaded applications in .NET, I stumbled over the ThreadStatic attribute. I made a mental note that this attribute is particularly helpful when you have static fields that should not be shared between threads. At the time that the .NET Framework 4.0 was released, I discovered the ThreadLocal class and how it does a better job assigning default values to thread-specific data. So I unlearned the ThreadStaticAttribute, favoring instead ThreadLocal. Fast forward to some time later, when I started digging into async/await. I fell victim to a belief that thread-specific data still worked. So I was wrong, again, and had to unlearn, again! If only I had known about AsyncLocal earlier. Let's learn and unlearn together!

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• The day I tried to make cookies and learned something about writing documentation

  Written by Peter Giles on November 18, 2015

  

  Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to read product documentation without the benefit of being an expert in the product? It’s a frustrating exercise, but it's usually something I can work around once I figure out the gap between what I know and what the reader knows. It’s never been brought home so completely as it was the other day. I had a hankering for some home-baked cookies and, perhaps stupidly, I figured I’d cook them myself. After all, how hard can it be to follow a bunch of simple instructions to bake some cookies, right?

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• An organization deconstructed

  Written by Karen Fruchtman on November 9, 2015

  It’s safe to say I knew next to nothing about the challenges of a software development company when I joined the Operations department at Particular Software two years ago. My background is in Human Resources, and that part of me was intrigued by the little I knew about the company – just past the start-up stage, 100% dispersed, flexible hours, growing fast. As a passionate planner, it rocked my boat a bit that there was no master plan for the company. Three things were clear, though. One, I was part of a team passionate about our culture, organization, and products. Two, we wanted to build tools that developers were equally passionate about. And three, we wanted to build the kind of company where we all wanted to work.

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• Encouraging an "I don't know" culture

  Written by Colin Higgins on October 26, 2015

  I recently started as a software engineer with Particular. Being new means I've had plenty of opportunities to realize what I know and what I don't know. With every new role, project, or technology, I've always found there is a lot to learn. I look at the team around me and see their good qualities, how they have it all together, and I realize how far I have to grow. They are experts, and I am supposed to know what I'm doing as well. You respect the knowledge of your peers, and you want them to respect yours, too. Admitting that you don't know something is scary. Will you lose a bit of that respect? What if you admit not knowing something that was obvious to everyone else?

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• Goodbye microservices, hello right-sized services

  Written by Weronika Łabaj on September 28, 2015

  If you follow industry news, you have probably heard about microservices. They are everywhere. More and more companies are exploring this architectural style, sharing their successes and their failures. The landscape is changing and advancing rapidly. Much has been learned recently from these real-life implementations. However, one of the most frequent and controversial questions remains the same: so how big should each microservice be?

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• Productivity power-ups in the August Platform release

  Written by Weronika Łabaj, Mike Minutillo, and John Simons on August 31, 2015

  This month, we released an update to our platform, designed primarily to give you a much better user experience. If you have been frustrated by having to deal with large numbers of failed messages, or if you routinely deal with relatively large messages, we have included new features specifically to address your pain points. We've also added multiple productivity enhancements across the platform, so there's sure to be something in it for everybody.

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• TransactionScope and Async/Await. Be one with the flow!

  Written by Daniel Marbach on August 6, 2015

  You might not know this, but the 4.5.0 version of the .NET Framework contains a serious bug regarding System.Transactions.TransactionScope and how it behaves with async/await. Because of this bug, a TransactionScope can't flow through into your asynchronous continuations. This potentially changes the threading context of the transaction, causing exceptions to be thrown when the transaction scope is disposed. This is a big problem, as it makes writing asynchronous code involving transactions extremely error-prone.

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• On the importance of auditing

  Written by Mauro Servienti on July 27, 2015

  Any good accountant will tell you how important it is to keep receipts. I never imagined that advice was applicable outside of accounting and finance. For example, I once worked on an ordering system, and one day, it was clear that something was broken. Orders that were expected to come from a well-known region on the globe weren’t coming in as usual. The incoming rate was exactly zero; definitely not the same rate as the week before. Read more →

• Async/Await: It’s time!

  Written by Daniel Marbach on July 14, 2015

  Async/Await is a language feature introduced in C# 5.0 together with Visual Studio 2012 and the .NET 4.5 runtime. With Visual Studio 2015 almost ready to be shipped to end-users, we can see that async/await has been around for quite some time now. Yet NServiceBus hasn’t been exposing asynchronous APIs to its users. Why the await? We have been carefully observing the adoption of async/await in the market and weighing its benefits against its perceived complexity. Over the years async/await… Read more →