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Dominic Burford - Professional Profile



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I am a professional software engineer and technical architect with over twenty years commercial development experience with a strong focus on the design and development of web and mobile applications.

I have experience of architecting scalable, distributed, high volume web applications that are accessible from multiple devices due to their responsive web design, including architecting enterprise service-oriented solutions. I have also developed enterprise mobile applications using Xamarin and Telerik Platform.

I have extensive experience using .NET, ASP.NET, Windows and Web Services, WCF, SQL Server, LINQ and other Microsoft technologies. I am also familiar with HTML, Bootstrap, Javascript (inc. JQuery and Node.js), CSS, XML, JSON, Apache Cordova, KendoUI and many other web and mobile related technologies.

I am enthusiastic about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Application Life-cycle Management having configured such environments using CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity and Team Foundation Services. I enjoy working in Agile and Test Driven Development (TDD) environments.

Outside of work I have two beautiful daughters. I am also an avid cyclist who enjoys reading, listening to music and travelling.

 

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GeneralShould software architects write code? Pin
Dominic Burford16-Jun-17 4:22
professionalDominic Burford16-Jun-17 4:22 
GeneralEnsuring your data is safe with Azure SQL Database Pin
Dominic Burford2-Jun-17 2:24
professionalDominic Burford2-Jun-17 2:24 
GeneralWhat makes a Senior Software Engineer? Pin
Dominic Burford30-May-17 21:53
professionalDominic Burford30-May-17 21:53 
GeneralMore Software Interview Skills 101 Pin
Dominic Burford25-May-17 6:03
professionalDominic Burford25-May-17 6:03 
GeneralSoftware Interview Skills 101 Pin
Dominic Burford12-May-17 5:44
professionalDominic Burford12-May-17 5:44 
GeneralBeat the Thrashing Pin
Dominic Burford5-May-17 6:03
professionalDominic Burford5-May-17 6:03 
GeneralWorking with Azure Blob Storage Pin
Dominic Burford27-Apr-17 2:29
professionalDominic Burford27-Apr-17 2:29 
GeneralWrestling with Apple Pin
Dominic Burford20-Apr-17 3:37
professionalDominic Burford20-Apr-17 3:37 
GeneralTwo unit tests, zero integration tests Pin
Dominic Burford10-Apr-17 22:39
professionalDominic Burford10-Apr-17 22:39 
GeneralThe Mediocre Mindset Pin
Dominic Burford29-Mar-17 1:10
professionalDominic Burford29-Mar-17 1:10 
GeneralHow much code coverage is enough? Pin
Dominic Burford21-Mar-17 5:14
professionalDominic Burford21-Mar-17 5:14 
GeneralThe Mythical Full Stack Developer Pin
Dominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18
professionalDominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18 
GeneralCreating your own private NuGet server Pin
Dominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36
professionalDominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36 
GeneralConsuming a dependency using NuGet Pin
Dominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05
professionalDominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05 
GeneralCoding Standards Pin
Dominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02
professionalDominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02 
GeneralSoftware Architecture Challenges Pin
Dominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31
professionalDominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31 
GeneralGetting the Most Out of Your Unit Tests Pin
Dominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21
professionalDominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21 
GeneralBuilding a strong development team Pin
Dominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31
professionalDominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31 
GeneralLast pieces of the mobile app in the Web API puzzle Pin
Dominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03
professionalDominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03 
GeneralSerializing .NET types that contain DateTime Pin
Dominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53
professionalDominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53 
GeneralClearing the Dead Letter Queue on an Azure Service Bus Queue Pin
Dominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57
professionalDominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57 
GeneralMigrating ASP.NET Web API services to the Azure platform Pin
Dominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45
professionalDominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45 
GeneralProcessing Azure Service Bus messages using an Azure Function Pin
Dominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10
professionalDominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10 
GeneralThe Structure of an Azure Service Bus message Pin
Dominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11
professionalDominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11 
There are obviously many different ways you could design the messages intended to be sent to / from your Azure Service Bus queue. So after some consideration I came up with the following design for a service bus message.
/// <summary>
/// POCO class used for message exchange with the Azure Service Bus
/// </summary>
[DataContract]
[KnownType(typeof(MessageObjectEntity))]
public class MessageObjectEntity
{
    [DataMember]
    public string MessageType { get; set; }
    [DataMember]
    public object MessageContent { get; set; }
}
The MessageType property defines the type of the object that is contained within the message. MessageContent defines the actual object itself. This will be a serialised instance of the class which can then be deserialized when it is received by the receiving application. To allow different types of classes to be added to the message you need to add it as a KnownType().

For example to add instances of MyNewClass to your message you will need to add the following to your class declaration.
[KnownType(typeof(MyNewClass))]
Here's a function that uses the MessageObjectEntity class to send messages to the service bus.
/// <summary>
/// Creates a message for the service bus
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
/// <param name="message"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
private static MessageObjectEntity CreateMessageForServiceBus<T>(T message)
{
    return new MessageObjectEntity
    {
        MessageType = message.GetType().AssemblyQualifiedName,
        MessageContent = message
    };
}
The method uses Generics enabling the function to work with any object type, therefore allowing our code to send messages of any type to the service bus. We have basically wrapped our message inside another class, and it is this class that we send / receive from the service bus. So as far as our service bus code is concerned, the messages are always of the same type i.e. MessageObjectEntity. It's down to the receiving application to know what class is wrapped inside MessageObjectEntity so that it can deserialise it. And it knows what the type is as this is defined by the property MessageType from earlier.

And finally here's the calling code that invokes our method and adds our message to the service bus.
using Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging;

MessageObjectEntity messageToSend = CreateMessageForServiceBus(message);
BrokeredMessage brokeredMessage = new BrokeredMessage(messageToSend);
await this._client.SendAsync(brokeredMessage);
N.B. you will need to ensure you have downloaded the Nuget package for Azure Service Bus messaging before you can instantiate the BrokeredMessage class.

The instance property _client is an instance of the QueueClient class, which is the agent that communicates with your service bus queue.
private QueueClient GetServiceBusClient(string connection, string queuename)
{
    return this._client ??
           (this._client = QueueClient.CreateFromConnectionString(connection, queuename, ReceiveMode.PeekLock));
}
Sending messages to your service bus is straight-forward. Of course, you can implement something completely different to what I am proposing here. This is the design I have come up with that meets our requirements and fits into our existing architecture.

I'll discuss how I process messages on the Azure Service Bus in a future article.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare

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GeneralMy Introduction into Service Bus Architecture Pin
Dominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40
professionalDominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40 

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