Skip to main content

Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

  • No Dogma Podcast with Adam Ralph

    I’d like to share some highlights from a recent chat I had with Bryan Hogan on his No Dogma Podcast.

    We kicked off with NServiceBus and how it helps building distributed systems and microservices. We talked about the general challenges such as coupling, communication, and fault tolerance. We also investigated some of the patterns that help, such as events, retries, and long running processes. We wrapped up with the importance of system monitoring, and what’s next for NServiceBus.

    Read more
  • 10X faster execution with compiled expression trees

    By building expression trees at startup and then dynamically compiling them, we were able to achieve 10X faster pipeline execution and a 94% reduction in Gen 0 garbage creation. In this post, I'll explain the secret to getting these kinds of performance boosts from expression tree compilation.

    Read more
  • Break that big ball of mud!

    This post is part of the NServiceBus Learning Path.

    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.

    Read more
  • A new Azure Service Bus transport—but not just yet

    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.

    Read more
  • NServiceBus for .NET Core beta

    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.

    Read more
  • Decisions without managers

    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.

    Read more
  • Evolving NServiceBus persistence

    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.

    Read more
  • Minivans and marathons

    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.

    Read more
  • The challenges of monitoring a distributed system

    This post is part of the NServiceBus Learning Path.

    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

    Read more