vasters.com - page 9 of 170

I just got prompted to write this in an email reply and I think it's worth sharing.

My personal definition for ACID's Durability tenet is as follows:

"The outcome of the transaction outlasts the transaction, meaning that the result of the transaction is published to other consumers as the transaction completes. ‘I’ resolves into ‘D’."

People seem to think that there’s an implied guarantee on the outcome of the transaction lasting forever. I...

as I thumb through some people's code on Github, I see a fairly large number of "catch all" exception handling cases. It's difficult to blame folks for that, since there's generally (and sadly) very little discipline about exception contracts and exception masking, i.e. wrapping exceptions to avoid bubbling through failure conditions of underlying implementation details.

If you're calling a function and that sits on a mountain of dependencies and folks don't care about masking...

After just over six years in the United States, our family is going to relocate back to Germany sometime in the second half of this month.

Thanks to a lot of effort by our management and HR teams at Microsoft, including our VP Scott Guthrie, I will be staying with the Windows Azure engineering group and with the Service Bus feature team and will come back to the mothership fairly frequently, likely 5-6 times...

Today has been a lively day in some parts of the Twitterverse debating the Saga pattern. As it stands, there are a few frameworks for .NET out there that use the term "Saga" for some framework implementation of a state machine or workflow. Trouble is, that's not what a Saga is. A Saga is a failure management pattern.

Sagas come out of the realization that particularly long-lived transactions (originally even just inside databases), but also...