This short article by Fabrice Marguerie gives a pragmatic definition of what the software architect role is, in the context of small teams. Enjoy and comment it !

AspectDNG 0.5 is a nearly stable release of our .NET aspect weaver. Its documentation has just been translated into English, so don't hesitate to read it, to download AspectDNG from SourceForge, and to play with this weaver. We already love it.

We experience many debates around Aspect Oriented Programming in the .NET world, some of them associating Custom Attributes and AOP. In those two articles/us, the authors come back on those features and explain why method invocation interception isn't 100% compatible with AOP's paradigm (since some concepts such as pointcuts don't exist in .NET).
Ted Neward's article has an excellent pedagogy and is a "must read" (even if not very recent).

Ted Neward comes back from the last MVP summit that took place in Redmond, and unveils a feature of C# v2 that seems to have passed unnoticed till now : Nullable Types. Have a look, and tell us what you think about them !

UIP is an MVC presentation framework proposed by Microsoft as an Application Block. Most of the architects and developers have a negative feeling about the previous version. But version 2.0 offers some new features that could make UIP an equivalent for Struts in J2EE. This article perfectly sums up UIP V2.0 features, the new ones and the others.

Here is an original way of desiging data-oriented application. This article examines the relationships between the DataSet, XML and XSLT, and proposes a new way to reduce the coupling between different data models using XSLT.
Originally posted on DNG-FR in November 2002, this approach is still current in 2004. A special thank to Luc Texier, a newcomer in the translation team of DotNetGuru-US (he will also be a new writer very soon) : as you'll see in this article, his English is far better than mine, I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy it.

You have several API to dynamically generate code in the .NET world : Reflection.Emit and the CodeDom parser. Unfortunately, they aren't enough to generate a whole application. Hence we can say that .NET lacks a real code instrumentation framework. The RAIL project (Runtime Assembly Instrumentation Library) is co-written by Microsoft and MS-Research and aims at filling this gap.

We'll have to get accustomed to words like DSD, DSL ou DSM. Those technologies constitute the basis of Whitehorse, a very promising tool in VisualStudio 2005 suite.Here are the addresses of their architects blogs. Among other things, you'll see several snapshots of the Distributed Service Designer and of the Class Designer (which has a very nice look) and you'll read that a book on those topics is in the writing phase.

There are many persistence frameworks in the .NET world. But few of them are GPL or LGPL. Gentle.NET puts an end to this situation and becomes a serious competitor to Sysiphus and Norphème. As for Nausicaa, it stands for the .NET equivalent for the famous iBatis framework in Java. Both tools target non strategic and small projects (sources : Gilles and TheServerSide.NET)

This is a huge file that becomes the absolute reference for DNG on InfoPath. If you don't know this tool yet, it is the right time to have a look at it. Sébastien Bouchet tells us everything about publishing XML forms using InfoPath in some 30 pages ! Everything you look for is here, from the development environment for VisualStudio to the scripting technology or to security. This is definitively a "hip" article to print and to read on the beach (or still in the mountains for some of you maybe ?)...