I ran a variant of my talk When Good Architecture Went Bad at the Embedded Masterclass recently. This is a free, one day event with technical talks and a small exhibition aimed at embedded engineers.

This year there were actually two Masterclasses, one in London and one in Bristol and the combined attendance was around 140 - despite problems on the London railways conspiring to keep a few people away.

A couple of questions that came up during my sessions:

• Do real-time software systems suffer from architectural decay less than other types of software? - I have a gut feel that no, they decayed just like other software systems despite more rigourous verification methods being used in many cases. This is because architectural decay comes from change - change in functionality, change in staffing, change in tools and technologies and I don’t feel that in general real-time systems are less prone to these types of changes.
• Does UML help? - Not being a big fan of UML I passed this one onto Kevlin Henney who happened to be attending the Bristol Masterclass. His view - yes and no. Yes if you use UML to document what you have implemented (and so communicate the architecture), no if you rely on a UML document to act as a guide for implementation. (apologies to Kevlin if I misremembered this)

Being in Bristol also gave me the chance to meet up with some of the local ACCU members. We went to the Old India restaurant in the city’s former stock exchange - great food in a great setting with great company. Thanks to Tony Barrett-Powell for arranging this at short notice.

With just 5 weeks to go until Code Generation 2008 we’ve been pretty busy tying down the final details…

Early-bird booking period closed at the end of March with bookings up 150% on last year’s levels - looks like word is spreading about the conference.

The event programme is now complete. We added details of the two remaining sessions a few weeks ago. Jean-Marc Prieur of Microsoft will run a tutorial on “Bidirectional DSLs : Synchronizing Model and code in Visual Studio” and Jos Warmer of Ordina will lead a goldfish bowl session entitled “Microsoft DSL Tools: User Experiences”.  Our Thursday night social event will see us take a trip to Cambridge Arts Picturehouse for a mystery movie and some time in the bar.

Places on our hands-on session ‘Using openArchitectureWare for M2M and M2T’ are limited and are going fast so if you do want to take part in that specific session please book as soon as possible and let us know you want to take part in that session. We have added an extra speaker to this session but that only increase capacity to 18.

Peter Bell is doing good work collating suggestions for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. I’ve seen 5 Birds-of-a-Feather session ideas so far and Peter tells me that more are on the way.

We also have a couple more event supporters. InfoQ.com have joined as a Media Partner for CG2008. In case you didn’t know it’s an independent online community focused on change and innovation in enterprise software development. JPMorgan have also joined as a supporting partner.

Homerton College have also made some bedrooms available in case you haven’t yet booked your accommodation. See here for details on how to book these with the college.

More news on the event as time permits…

I’ve just published my interview with NT/e’s Matthew Fowler on the Code Generation Network.

Matthew talks about his background in CG, NT/e’s JeeWiz toolset and MDA vs. Domain-Specific Languages.

The interview is available here:

http://www.codegeneration.net/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=87