If you pick up the masterpiece, "A Pattern Language", by Christopher Alexander et. al, you will discover a book filled with engaging photographs, hand-drawn sketches, big bold, hard-to-miss text, memorable stories and scholarly notes for the academically minded. One can quickly "surf" this book by focusing only on pattern titles, images and headlines or one can dive deep into the book by reading the detailed text of each pattern. In short, A Pattern Language uses a timeless way of communicating, a form that engages people and provides numerous pathways for accessing the knowledge. As authors of software-related pattern languages, we must understand what it takes to make our own works endure.

In this talk, we will analyze the form and content of real-world software patterns/pattern languages, looking for what makes them succeed or fail at engaging the reader and providing knowledge pathways. If you are interested in crafting great pattern languages, this talk will help you discover some essential ingredients.

Joshua Kerievsky is an entrepreneur, author, programmer and globally recognized Agile coach. After writing software on Wall Street for 7 years, he founded Industrial Logic in 1996 to share the "light and magic" of software development. Since the late 1990s, Joshua has led successful Agile transitions at globally recognized companies in advertising, media, telecom, biotech, healthcare and finance. He has created over 10 multimedia eLearning albums that have helped thousands of people practice and gain Agile skills. His 2004 bestselling book, Refactoring to Patterns, won a Jolt Cola award and has been translated to 8 languages. Joshua is passionate about discovering better ways to produce extremely useful software.

Christopher Alexander believes that human creations are more "habitable"(comfortable to use and experience) if they share certain properties of natural things. In the Nature of Order he identifies 15 such properties and the processes for creating such habitable constructs that have those properties.

In this talk we will make some obvious connections between good design, code, and architectures that exhibit these properties and the processes we use to create software. For example, good shape can be a simple matter of using consistent indentation in a method. Nice idea. But so what? Pursuing good shape more deeply can lead you to decompose a method into helper methods, keeping every step in the original method at a similar level of abstraction. But still. Nice ideas, but do they add up to truly habitable software. Or are there even more profound acts we can take to bring life to software? Can we draw inspiration from Alexander's work, or should we stop all this fretting and realize that good software is the result of good programmers simply paying attention to details?

Framework is a piece of software that provides reuse at larger granularity, enabling not only code reuse but also design reuse. It uses techniques that allow applications to specialize its logic to solve a more specific problem. These techniques evolved over time, starting in the use of inheritance and composition and passing through the use of reflection, aspect-orientation and custom metadata. This talk provides an evolutionary perspective of these techniques, explaining how the most recent frameworks combine them to provide both productivity and flexibility for the applications.

Patterns play a critical role in helping our industry both capture proven practices and establish a common vocabulary for practitioners.

However, there is also a need to recognize the need to establish "end-to-end" solution oriented architectural guidance.

This focus group will present an overview of how Microsoft is using Reference Models and Reference Architectures to help establish a bridge between business and IT. The panel will include:

• High-level overview demonstrating how capability maps, business dependency networks and reference architectures can be used together as the basis for the bridge between business and IT
• In-depth discussion around exactly what requirements reference models and reference architectures should fulfill, the state of our industry and the practices we are implementing to ensure consistency across multiple instances of these assets
• Overview of reference models and reference architectures created to support the BI domain

There are several recurring PLoP events happening around the world each year. Each event has its own style, which is a variation over the main theme with workshops and games. The organizers are volunteers from the patterns community.

In this focus group, we will discuss the applicability of patterns to capture some of the knowledge needed for the organizers, and proceed to explore the knowledge area. Specifically we will discuss around conference quality and conference sustainability, paper process, logistics, and any other theme that the participants may bring up.

All PLoP participants are of course welcome - and we especially hope for participants with experience in organizing smaller conferences!