As a developer, my passion is figuring out how things work and how to bend code to my will. I admittedly sometimes think about architecture much later in the game.This is often a necessity, especially in a world where our coding tools are ever-changing. Entity Framework is a good example here since I've had to spend a lot of time just figuring out how it works. Now I can sit back and look at the bigger picture, with my new knowledge, and think about how to architect solutions using EF.

At the user group I run, Vermont.NET, most of the meetings over our nearly seven years, have been focused on how to perform a particular task or use a particular tool.

However our upcoming meeting this Monday will have a session that is about architecture. Mario Cardinal, a Microsoft Architect MVP from Montreal (and a pal), is going to do a presentation called "Best Practices to Design a Modular Architecture."

When I send out the meeting annoucement for our monthly meetings, I request that people RSVP so that we can have a clue about how much pizza to order for the meeting. Normally by the weekend prior to the meeting, I receive only a handful of RSVPs, then I get a lot on the day of the meeting and then others show up who didn't RSVP. Our meetings tend to range in attendance from 25-35 with the occasional meeting that gets 40 or even 50 attendees.

However, for this meeting, the RSVPs have been flying in. Granted, I began the email to members with:

Our next meeting is this Monday, January 12th and is one that no developer should miss. Mario Cardinal, an Microsoft MVP Architect, will give us insights on building layered applications. Many of us spend so much time trying to figure out how to get the code to do what we want that we sometimes over look the architecture of our software.

Clearly, by the response I have received already for this meeting, developers are starved for this information. Not that it is unavailable, but I think it's a matter of how much time there is in the day. Everyone's under the gun to produce and often we don't have the privelege of taking the time to just ponder.

Years ago, I had my first experience working with an architect named Dave Dapkiewicz. Dave would go home at night and read yet another book on development patterns or arhitecture. Then, when he would come to work in the morning, he would bring me into his office, shut the door and we'd spend a few hours at the white board restructuring the app we were building, yet again. It was so much fun to just take the time to think and debate and work out these ideas. Of course, I got plenty of crap from the person who was responsible for delivering the application because each architecture revision forced me to go back and break apart my code and rework it again. And that is the reason that many developers don't get the opportunity to spend time thinking, even dreaming, about architecture.

So, I am really looking forward to Monday's meeting and Mario's talk, but more so to the impact it will have on the meeting's attendees.

He's also doing a full day workshop on the same topic in late February in Montreal (devteach.com/SpecialEvent.aspx) and I have a feeling there will be a road trip from Burlington heading up there.