Particular Software Blog

Break that big ball of mud!

Written by Indu Alagarsamy on October 3, 2017

Have you ever had to deal with a function that had hundreds and hundreds of lines? Code that had duplication all over the place? Chances are you were dealing with legacy code that was written years ago. If you're a Star Wars fan like I am, it's like dealing with the Force. As Yoda would say, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” In my 15+ years of coding, every single time I've dealt with legacy code, fear, anger, hate, and suffering were pretty common.
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A new Azure Service Bus transport—but not just yet

Written by Sean Feldman on September 20, 2017

If you've been looking forward to using .NET Core with NServiceBus on Azure, I'm afraid we've got some bad news. Instead of making their existing Azure Service Bus client library support .NET Core, Microsoft has released a brand-new incompatible client. This makes it impossible for us to upgrade the NServiceBus Azure Service Bus transport you know and love to support .NET Core as is, and forces us to write a brand-new transport as well. Here's the full story.
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NServiceBus for .NET Core beta

Written by Particular Team on September 7, 2017

Today we're happy to announce that you can start building production-grade NServiceBus systems on .NET Core. Although the bits are currently marked as beta, a release candidate with a go-live license is coming soon.
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Decisions without managers

Written by Karen Fruchtman on August 24, 2017

Decision making is tricky business. Decisions often move up and down the chain of command without the input of those best equipped to make those decisions. In smaller companies, there's often too much reliance on the CEO, and that doesn't scale as the company grows. Ultimately, we can easily end up in a situation where the input of those most knowledgeable is not considered.
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Evolving NServiceBus persistence

Written by David Boike on August 8, 2017

While we've been working hard on supporting .NET Core lately, you may have noticed that we also released a brand new (and dare we say better?) persistence library for NServiceBus called SQL Persistence. The new persister supports multiple database engines and uses raw ADO.NET and native SQL queries, without the need for an intermediate ORM. We dreamed up some powerful new features that would take NServiceBus persistence to the next level. Up until now, our primary method of persisting data in relational databases used NHibernate, which was making it impossible to realize those dreams. We decided it was time for NServiceBus to make an evolutionary leap forward in its persistence capability.
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Minivans and marathons

Written by Karen Fruchtman on July 25, 2017

I read the script and performed my lines well. College, good jobs with increasing responsibility in corporate America, marriage and kids. When suburbia beckoned, it wasn't too hard to swap my briefcase for the diaper bag. At least for some period of time, home was a lot more interesting than my work experience had been. Children have a charming way, though, of exposing the insecurities we don't even know we have. My revelation came during the first opportunity to meet our five-year-old's teachers.
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The challenges of monitoring a distributed system

Written by Mike Minutillo on July 18, 2017

I remember the first time I deployed a system into production. We built a custom content management website backed by a single SQL Server database. It was a typical two-tier application with a web application and a database. Once the system was deployed, I wanted to see if everything was working properly, so I ran through a simple checklist
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Asynchronously unload the dishwasher

Written by Daniel Marbach on June 27, 2017

In a previous blog post, I discussed a very complex and intricate process: how my family unloads our dishwasher using a chain of responsibility. We examined a happy-path scenario in which each person hands a dish to the next. Every step takes the same amount of time, and the process hums along like clockwork. You can almost hear us singing “Whistle While You Work” while we gleefully put away dishes.
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Putting your events on a diet

Written by David Boike on June 7, 2017

Anybody can write code that will work for a few weeks or months, but what happens when that code is no longer your daily focus and the cobwebs of time start to sneak in? What if it's someone else's code? How do you add new features when you need to relearn the entire codebase each time? How can you be sure that making a small change in one corner won't break something elsewhere? Complexity and coupling in your code can suck you into a slow death spiral toward the eventual Major Rewrite. You can attempt to avoid this bitter fate by using architectural patterns like event-driven architecture. When you build a system of discrete services that communicate via events, you limit the complexity of each service by reducing coupling. Each service can be maintained without having to touch all the other services for every change in business requirements.
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NServiceBus on .NET Core - It's time

Written by Particular Team on May 30, 2017

During Build 2017, Microsoft released .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1. While we previously determined it was too early to seriously consider adopting .NET Core, with this release we now believe that the current platform can support a comprehensive, reliable, and production-ready version of NServiceBus. As a result, we are happy to say NServiceBus 7 will support .NET Core 2.0 running on any of the supported platforms.
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