Kent Beck and the XP guys have a lot to say about the ’the system metaphor’. In XP the metaphor replaces what most other methodologies call ’the architecture’. It’s a single, coherent, view of the system. It gives you a single story from which to choose the names of things in the system. It helps you communicate about the system in a consistent language that even your users can understand.

I’ve played fantasy role playing games since I was about 14. We used to play every weekend but now we’re lucky if we can get everyone together once a year. Most of the time we played AD&D, or our own “house rules” version of Rune Quest. We bought lots of other stuff, but never really got into playing them. This character sketch is from a Rifts scenario that I made notes for but never got around to running.

I have lots of stuff that I’ve been meaning to throw up onto the web for a while. Lots of stuff that’s been in my digital equivalent of an old cardboard box for several years. I’m going to be posting these old things from time to time and setting their publication date to the date that they were originally created. This is day 0. Entries before now were posted after now…

I’ve been meaning to put up a personal web site for a while now. This is it. Originally I had the usual ‘collection of random rubbish’ style of personal web site. This then grew to contain my technical ramblings and details of my consulting business. I decided that this mixture wasnt exactly professional and pulled all of the ‘sensible’ stuff out into a new web site for my consulting business. The remains of my personal pages were left to ecompose…

Len’s working with Barclays Capital to develop a real-time fixed income position server for them. The system integrates into the COM infrastructure, is written in C++, uses Test Driven Development and interface based programming techniques.

OpenSSL is an open source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols. Unfortunately it doesn’t play well with windows style asynchronous sockets. This article - previously published in Windows Developer Magazine and now available on the Dr. Dobbs site - provides a simple connector that enables you to use OpenSSL asynchronously. Note: If you need high performance SSL over TCP/IP then this is available as an optional part of The Server Framework; see here for details.

Sometimes it would be nice to be able to use a simple C++ object as a sink for Connection Point notifications. This article shows you how. Sinking connection points in C++ objects. Many COM objects provide events to their clients by means on Connection Points. A Connection Point is a generalised method of allowing clients to register a COM interface so that the object can notify them of things that they may be interested in.

This example COM component provides three COM objects for using the Win32 Mailslot IPC mechanism. The component may be useful if you need to communicate from VB using Mailslots. However, the reason I wrote it was to demonstrate creating a COM component in C++ that integrates well with VB and can fire asynchronous events. Overview The COM component consists of an object factory which is used to create instances of the Mailslot manipulation objects.

We’ve been engaged by PayPoint to look into refactoring and improving some of their existing C++ systems. We’re also developing a new ISO-8583 transaction server for them using The Server Framework

We have secured a contract with Commerzbank to work with their Summit Bonds IT department to help them provide data from their Summit system to their users via Microsoft Excel (using XLL addins written in C++) with backend servers in C++ using OmniORB and Java using JacORB.