Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

• 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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• 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 →

• Death to the batch job

  Written by David Boike on June 16, 2015

  This post is part of the NServiceBus Learning Path.

  

  There’s something dangerous lurking in your software. Not just the general lurking, murky, ickiness you might expect. Something big…something ugly. There might even be more than one. It can’t decide if it’s angry or hungry or both. All it knows is it’s having a very bad day. And it’s going to eat you… Ok, maybe it won’t literally eat you, but it will come after your family time, your sleep, and your sanity. Only the things you really care about. Read more →

• Mining for gold in your log files

  Written by Daniel Marbach on June 10, 2015

  Once you’ve already learned the ins and outs of a library, it may seem obvious how it should be used (and which parts should be avoided). The thing is that, from one project to the next, we often make use of new and different libraries and frameworks and may not appreciate some of the more subtle differences among those technologies. The better frameworks out there will log all kinds of information, often telling you when you’re using them incorrectly. So… Read more →

• Empires fall: Decentralize your code to avoid total collapse

  Written by David Boike on June 4, 2015

  

  Ruling the world is hard. Alexander the Great1 may arguably have been the person to come closest to being “Emperor of the World”. In 334 BC, his armies left his home in Macedon (modern-day Greece) and conquered a swath of territory to Egypt and halfway across Asia to northwest India - most of the known world at that point, but ultimately failed in ruling all of humanity when he died at the age of 32 under somewhat suspicious circumstances2. Of… Read more →