Pages to watch/research

Every serious practitioner keeps a list of things they mean to go deeper on. Here is what was on mine in late 2007—not as a recommendation but as a record of what felt worth attention at the time.

On the tooling side: Castle Project (castleproject.org) for .NET infrastructure, NCover for code coverage, and MbUnit as a testing framework alternative. The .NET ecosystem in 2007 was still finding its mature testing culture, and tools like these were part of the community filling the gaps that the framework did not.

On architecture: TOGAF, Zachman, and Gartner’s frameworks for enterprise architecture methodology. These were the dominant intellectual frameworks for thinking about IT at organizational scale—useful for anyone who wanted to move beyond ad hoc system design into something more principled. The Zachman Framework in particular offered a structured way to think about the different concerns (what, how, where, who, when, why) across different stakeholder perspectives. Worth understanding even if you eventually conclude it is more framework than you need.

Several MSDN resources on software architecture and design patterns were in the queue—the Microsoft patterns and practices team was publishing genuinely useful material during this period.

From the Infosys technology blogs, there was ongoing exploration of software factories and domain-specific architectures. Microsoft had been pushing the software factory concept for a few years by then, and the industry was still working out what was genuinely useful in the framework versus what was marketing.

SAP Mobile Development Kit documentation rounded out the list—enterprise mobile was an emerging concern, and understanding the SDK-level constraints of that platform was becoming relevant to the work.

Lists like this date quickly. Half these URLs are gone. But the underlying questions—how to test well, how to structure architecture thinking, how to build reusable domain patterns—remain as live as they were in 2007.