New .NET architecture concepts

Question

I posted this community wiki in the hopes of creating a thread of expertise. My question is thus ... "Where do the experts go to learn about the newest .NET coding techniques?".

I'm basically looking for the leading/bleeding edge of .NET architecture, design, development and theory.

I know conferences and trade shows are probably the best venues to see the latest and greatest, but for those on a limited budget (of both time and money) such as myself, I'm looking for websites that I can read in the evenings that will keep me current on what's new in the .NET world.

I program mostly in C# but the websites need not be geared towards C#.

Answer 1

Serverside.net

Answer 2

For free - I would recommend MSDN, particularly keep an eye on the C# and .NET technology pages. Lots of blogs, and nearly every announcements about what's up and coming is put there.

Answer 3

Blogs

• Martin Fowler, the best starting point I think. (http://martinfowler.com/)
  • articles like "Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern", "Mocks Aren't Stubs", "Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern" (http://martinfowler.com/articles.html)
• David Hayden (http://www.davidhayden.com/)
• Reflective Perspective, a good daily feed (http://blog.cwa.me.uk/tags/morning-brew/)
• Ayende (http://ayende.com/Blog/)
• Eric Lippert - Works on the language. Sometimes read about new C# features before they're announced elsewhere.
• Scott Hanselman

Journals

• The Architecture Journal (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx) And what's a great option - you can order free, paper based copies!
• MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx)

Community

• Codeproject.com, short and large articles
• pnpguidance.com, tutorials, blogs and articles

Real applications and devteams

• pattern&practices home: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx, and P&P products
• SCSF, the Smart Client Software Factory home. Learn about desktop enterprise systems. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480482.aspx)
• WCSF, the Web Client Software Factory home. Learn about busines(process) oriented web architecures. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264518.aspx)
• Enterprise Library

Answer 4

The ondemand(previously recorded) webcasts from Microsoft are normally really good, but it's a painful number of clicks to actually get to the point where you can download the file, and sometimes you find that it is not available.

Also sometimes you can find a .NET User Group locally that will have speakers/sessions occasionally. These are also great ways to network and find out what kind of work is going on in your area.

Answer 5

I never get to go to PDC, but I do love to watch the videos.

Answer 6

As a previous post mentioned the MS PDC videos are on online. Same with Mix which has good MS Web development related content. Also, for general MS videos there is Channel 9, it's not all technical content, but it's worth searching if you are looking for something in particular.

Someone already mentioned blogs, here are a few more:

Scott Hansleman - lots of stuff on there, a lot of ASP, MVC stuff.

Phil Haack - another good MVC guy.

Rob Connery - again a lot of focus on MVC.

ScottGu - according to his blog he "builds a few products for Microsoft", which has to be the understatment of the year - he is in charge of ASP, IIS, SIlverlight and much more besides at MS.

Answer 7

Check out Sharp Architecture, it's very promising.

Answer 8

Books, books, books! Good books are written by subject matter expects, involve input from many sources, are peer reviewed, well structured and go orders of magnitude deeper than trade shows, and most online material. When you buy a book, you get the experience of an expert for a very reasonable price.

Answer 9

NDepend documentation comes with some pretty cool online blog posts, articles and white books concerning architecture of .NET code:

Advices on partitioning code through .NET assemblies

Control Components Dependencies to gain Clean Architecture

Re-factoring, Re-Structuring and the cost of Levelizing

Evolutionary Design and Acyclic componentization

Layering, the Level metric and the Discourse of Method

Fighting Fabricated Complexity