About fourteen months ago, David Trowbridge of patterns & practices introduced me to a guy working in their testing group named Larry Brader. David is one of the primary authors of p&p’s Enterprise Solution Patterns and Integration Patterns books. I wanted to talk to David about building a pattern repository and he handed me off to Larry. Little did I know that Larry is an information theorist and was one of the key authors of Testing Software Patterns. Frankly, when Larry gets rolling on info theory, I only understood a fraction of what he’s saying. But the parts I do understand about how patterns relate to each other blows my mind.

Then p&p hired this guy…what’s his name?…Oh yeah, Ward Cunningham. I hear he knows a bit about pattern repositories. 😄

Anyway, around this time last year I was having regular meetings with Larry and Ward to talk about this repository stuff. Then stuff got crazy on my end – primarily being the acting marketing director for my team as well as the ARC track owner for last years TechEd. The regular meetings became more irregular and then stopped altogether. That is to say, my involvement stopped – Ward, Larry et.al. kept forging ahead. I heard about how things were going from time to time, but that was the extent of my involvement.

Last summer, Larry, Ward and David (plus others I’ve never met) published an article called Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space. (They also did a webcast on the topic.) In it, they laid out a way of thinking about how patterns relate to each other and they introduced the Enterprise Architectural Space Organizing Table (EASOT for short). That was just the first step. PatternShare is next one.

PatternShare is a community site that brings together the patterns from popular authors – Fowler, Evans, Hohpe & Wolfe, GoF, POSA and p&p - into a single repository. Furthermore, it provides a dynamically generated EASOT showing all the patterns in the repository and how they relate to each other. Finally, it provides a way to add new patterns to the repository so that they show up in the EASOT.

Major congrats to Ward, Larry, David and the rest of the p&p folks for pulling this off. I can’t wait to see where the site goes from here.

One of the reasons blogging has been a little light around here recently is because I was prepping for the TechEd Session Triage. Basically, all the track owners figure out what sessions they want on their own then come together for an entire afternoon to present their sessions to each other. Turns out there is often overlap with other sessions in other tracks that need to be worked out, suggesting changes to titles and abstracts and other wise cutting up. For example. I’m sitting next to Becky who owns the Connected Systems Infrastructure track. We had several sessions in both the CSI and ARC tracks that have caused changes and cuts. We actually got the ARC, CSI and DEV tracks got together earlier this week for a “pre-iage” which means today went pretty smooth for the ARC track. Not that it felt like things were going to go smooth running around this morning. Typically, the last 24 hours before triage are a flurry of emails with last minute suggestions. This year – no exception. But now, at least it’s done.

Speaking of DSL Tools, Software Factories co-author Jack Greenfield just started blogging. He has jumped into the running debate between IBM’s Grady Booch and a variety of MS folks including Steve, Alan and myself. He does a good job summarizing the argument including pointing out where he and Booch agree:

In particular, we share the conviction that packaging knowledge for reuse in patterns, languages, frameworks, tools and other form factors is “the right next stage in cutting the Gordian knot of software”.

Jack rightly points out that while we all agree on these mechanisms for packaging knowledge that the devil is in the details. I look forward to seeing more on these details from Jack in the future.

PDC 2005. ’nuff said.

BTW, speaking of TechEd 2005, we’re currently inviting potential presenters to submit proposals to speak. Norman is taking over ownership of the Architecture track, but I’m still responsible for technical content and community for the track. If you’re interested in presenting at TechEd on any topic, head over to the TechEd 2005 Call For Papers website. Proposals are due by the end of December.