I'm starting a new project now, and I thought it might be worth while to blog how I'm starting out.

I started with the initial requirements, and then just let them sit in my head for a day or two. Just thinking about the abstract concepts and trying things out without actually having to put something on paper or keyboard.

Then I created a new project in VS, and started with the class diagram. I just put down a single class and several interfaces, and a few methods. I am using this to focus my thoughts, and there isn't any code that I have written there. Then I opened a word document and start putting down the assumptions.

Those can be high level stuff like "The service will have its own dedicate database" to low level things like "A task will not hold a thread for an extended periods of time". I don't write why those are important, it is not important now. What is important is to figure out the constraints that I am going to work with, and what I assumptions I decide will drive the architecture.

Then I usualy either walk and mutter to myself, or blog about it ( :-) ) about something, and let things fall into shape. I find that putting things to words, either via texts or speaking them out loud helps me organize my thoughts into coherent structures. This is part of the reason that I blog. It keeps me organize.

I usually consider what tools I need to do the work, and what tools I can bend to make my job easier. Active Record is an awesome rule processor, if you know look at it just right. And Windsor is the ultimate configuration manager that you can want.

The next step is to create a test project, and write the first test. This can take a while. I'm futzing with ideas, and I am never sure what direction I will take the project. This is usually one of the hardest part for the project, because there are too many possiblities. I can spend quite a bit of time trying things out, either in code or in diagrams.

At that point I then start coupling my design, so it would actually be usable. This means that I go from things like ICommand to IFileCommand, because that needs the file it works on, etc. Once I reach this point, I have no more reasons to procrascinate and I need to start writing the actual application :-) 

It looks like this causes an issue. I have a folder that I SUBSTed to another drive, and when I tried to set it up as a virtual directory, IIS just laughed at me, saying that I have no permissions to do that. When I tried it using the real path, it worked like a charm. The permissions were the same in both cases, of course.

After reading Oren's post about naming interfaces, I started to notice how I name my interfaces.

My own contribution to the "interface names that give me a chuckle" is IHaveNameAndId and IDecideWhenToStartTask, which I just created. I am probably going to rename that one, though.

And, as long as we are dealing with naming. I got an outstanding bug that read like this: "Rename Fetch class to something that actually have a meaning." This class has a single method (well, one mehtod, several overloads) that looks like this:

Together with the method name, it actually makes sense, but I am not sure if this is a good practice. Then again, I can't really think of a good name for that one.

Leon is talking about what a new programmer should learn first, and I can't agree more.

Learn what fails, and how, and why. Don't call someone more experiance unless you already spent some time on this already.

I made some updates to my commons library. It is just a set of utility classes that I find useful. At the moment it contains:

• Static Reflection
• Bulk Deleter
• Collection Actions - Find, Select All, Select All Not, etc
• Date Range with operations - For Each Day, For Each Week, For Each Month, etc.
• Disposable Action
• EventArgs <T> - Which should have been in the BCL.
• Property Indexers
• Validation - mostly trivial stuff
• Abortable Thread Pool - slightly modified from the MSDN version.
• WaitForConsumersEvent
• Local Data - See below

The thing that I use more than anything, though, is local data handling. I am pretty sure that I blog about this before, but I can't find it now.  The idea is to give you a simple hashtable of values that you can rely throughout your code. If you are working in Web context, it is using the Context.Items hash, and if you are working in a non-web context, you use a thread static hashtable.

This allows me to ignore where I am, and put stuff there that I know are private to my current logical thread of excutions.

You can find the bits here

Eber Irigoyen has a post about what should I hide?, based on advice from Code Complete 2. Eber is making the statement that the question should be reversed. What should I expose?

On the face of it, it looks like a reasonable suggestion, after all, I assume that we all accept that encapsulation is a good thing. The problem is that this completely ignore the notion of extensibility. It only give you the extensibility that you think of ahead of time. For examples of where this approach fail, just look at caching & batching in .Net. In both cases, the approach of show just what you must is used, and this make both completely useless for any scenario that you didn't think when creating the code.

Ten Neward has posted a long post about OR/M - The Vietnam of Computer Science. The first part of this post is a Vietnam war history lesson, and I kind of missed the point, then he goes on to point at various issues with OR/M.

I don't quite get the point of the post, to tell the truth,  and I am tempted to raise Godwin's Law in this matter

He raises some valid points, but each of those issues are already mostly solved issues.

To give some examples:

• Entity identity vs. Row Identity – Identity maps and Unit Of Work handle this issue.
• Concurrency  - Last Write Win, Optimistic Concurrency, Explicit locking.
• Caching across a web farm – Use a distribute cache.

I the last week I was asked multiply times about using Rhino Mocks to mock interfaces with generic methods.

At the moment, this is not working, the code needed to generate generic methods on runtime is not trivial, and I tried fixing it several times, without success. Currently, Dynamic Proxy 2 is being worked on, which will have support for generic methods, so I expect to have this feature soon.

The following hack will get you by for now, it is not ideal, but it is what I have at the moment.

The ISession interface from NHibernate contains a generic Load<T>(object id) method, which measn that Rhino Mocks can't mock it. Here is how we solve the issue:

We basically disable the mocking of this specific method, and now we mock this class, and continue life as usual.

This is not only one of the nicest logos that I have seen, it is also the logo of Rhino Mocks Boo Macros, which is a language extension for Boo that integrate Rhino Mocks directly into the language.

Andrew Davey released it today, and it completely blew me away.

I did some Boo hacking, and I have a fully appreciation of the scale of the task that Andrew had.

Check out how simple it looks:

The above example creates an expectation for a call on foo.Dog(anything, not-null,  between 0 and 10), and then make the call. There is a lot more documentation here.

Very nice and simple to work with.

Congratulations, Andrew, and very good work.

Mike has an excellent rant on "No Code, just a bit of XML here and there" approach. Check it out. I wholeheartedly agree.

What we need is a lightwieght script for configuration.

Download: XmlDataType2003.zip

I am trying to play Black & White 2, and I'm running into a lot of issues with my graphic card (ABIT R9600XT) the default drivers crash often when playing the game, and trying to update the drivers resulted in crashing the computer itself when playing. This is a fairly old card, and it is only capable of displaying B&W in the lowest level of detials, but I am still blown away by the game.

My requirements are:

• Stable Drivers - I'm not a top notch gamer. I want stable drivers.
• Dual head support - not something that I'm willing to give up ever.
• Support the things that B&W 2 needs.
• Not a big, noisy monsster.

Any recommendations?

For the past week I have been doing quite a bit of work in unmanaged C++. It is mainly a set of small utilities that we need, and they can't have a dependency on anything.

I used to be a big bigot for C++. I understood RAII and shared_ptr, I could read templated code without a hitch and I occationaly even managed to write a program where pointer chasing was optional :-)

Now that I am working in C++ again, I am amazed to find out just how much I forgot, and just how much stuff is just not there.It was so bad that I actually had to do a search for "Hello World C++" just to find the correct syntax to get the application to compile.

I spent a several minutes searching for std::string.split() method. I knew that it had one, but I could find it (never mind the intelli sense story for C++). I slowly dawned on me that I was actually thinking about System::String, and that C++ really does have more than a single string type.

I still remember the high level concepts, but I lost a lot of the instincts that I had for C++.

For instnace, should a method have a return value of std::string, or std::string* ? What is the meaning of each? I had to actually consider the implications of those decisions before I could go on. And don't get me started about having to worry about releasing memory. I need to write some mutli threaded safe code in C++, and just making sure that all the threads are releasing memory appropriately is going to be a huge headache.

But even beyond that, there is the not small issue of needing to remember all the API that I need. It is not just shared_ptr vs auto_ptr, it is simple things like reading a file or consuming XML.

I feel so lonely without the BCL...

After my last post about the ADO.Net Entity Framework, I got a long comment from Pablo Castro, the ADO.NET Technical Lead. I took the time answerring it, mainly because I wanted to consider my words carefully. Again, I'm probably not a partial side in this matter, with my strong NHibernate bias, but I do have quite a bit of experiance with Object Relational Mapping and how they map to real world applications.

My previous post was mainly about extensibility in the framework, and how much I can extend it to fit the needs of the applications. So, without further ado :-), let me get to the points Pablo brought up:

I read this paragraph several times, and I am afraid that I'm lacking the background to understand exactly what he means here. The Provider model, as I understand it, will allow to use Oracle, MySQL, etc as the database engine underlying the technology. The services is something I'm puzzled about, I'm not sure what is a service in this particual instance. Is the LINQ wrapper on the EDM a service? Or does it mean application level service?

This worries me. Many to many is a very common idiom in databases and in domain models. Users and groups is a very simple example of this, but in any model there are many such relationships. I am aware of the amount of work that this feature require, but that is the reason we get those frameworks in the first place, so the developers wouldn't have to handle this.

Sets match the database model very nicely, but as a developer, I often has other need from collections. For instance, a set of filtering rules where the orderring of the rules is important match very nicely to a list (indexed by the position). A set of attributes that can related to an object is modeled as a index collection of key and value pairs. Frankly, I don't see much of a difference between dictionaries and indexed collections at a high level.

Those are the simple things, by the way. What about cases where the collection's key has a valid business meaning. A good example is checking valid date ranges. My house' lease have a contract for a specific period only, this naturally maps to an object model that has the relation between the house and the current leaser is a dictionary of date ranges and customers. Add a couple more freakish requirements, and you have to have support for those issues. As much as I would like it to be, using simple sets is often just not possible, too much information goes away this way.

I wrote my own collection classes for NHibernate that will do the fixups for the relationships, so I fully understand the need and how nice it is to have this. That said, please don't try to protect me from myself. If writing a custom collection is something really hard, document it with big red giant letters, and let me feel the pain of doing it myself. I will need to do this, period.

I understand the issues with exploding test matrixes and scenarios that you can't support because while you may infinite supply of resources, you don't have infinite supply of time :-). But I would much rather a "Here Be Dragons" sign over a locked door.

For the specific scenario, you can take a look at this post, I discussed a bit how I solved the issue. Note that all the History collections are of IDictionary<DateRange, T> type.

It took me a moment to figure out what you meant here. To the readers who aren't versed in OR/M implementation details, the issue is this:

The OR/M nees to figure out what the Id of the currentCustomer is, so it can save it to the database. I'm not sure that I understand the problem here, though.

You have the instance of the related object, and you know the object model. It is very simple to get from those two pieces of information to the value that should go to the database. I understand that you are working slightly differently in your model, using EntityRef<T> to explicitly hold the ID value, but I don't see this as an unsolvable issue, or even a very hard one. The simplest issue here is to dictate that you need this value, and fail if it is not there. If I do my custom thing, I should play nice with the rest of the framework.

You'll probably regret saying this :-) but I will try.

First, the main assumtion that I am making here is that the ADO.Net Entity Framework is supposed to be used in both new projects and existing ones, and that it is supposed to be a fully featured package, and not one that is targeted at the simple scenarios. If I am wrong, than most of my comments are invalid by defination, but the way I see ADO.Net Entity Framework presented seems to support this assumtion.

• Legacy support
  This is a major issue if you decide that you want to support existing projects and not just new ones. In this case, you need to support some fairly crazy database schemas. From the sane to the fully de-normalized ones to the Let Us Put This Data Somehere approach that some peole prefer.
  To give you a few examples:
• A PK/FK relationship where the FK is found via substring(5, PK) in the parent table.
• A boolean flag that has null / not null mapped to true or false, with completely random values as the non null values.
• A table where each row contains several entities, and the relations between them.
• Inheritance model
  From the documentation that I have seen so far, the inheritance models supported are table per hierarchy (discriminator) and table per sub-class. It there support for table per class, and how well it plays with the rest of the system.
• Splitting a value from a table
  This is related to too much information in a row, but I may want to break a part of the row into a value object that is associated with the object.
• Caching
  What is the caching story? I know that you have Identity Map in place, but what about application wide caching? I assume that you will use ASP.Net's cache, but what happen on a web farm scenario?
• Master / slave scanerios
  What happen when I want to scale by making all my writes to a single server, and replicate from there?
• Connection Control
  What happens if I want to explicitly control the connection lifetime and behavior?
  For that matter, how much control do I have for where exactly the data goes? Can I decide to move to a different database for a save, and then move back?
• Change tracking
  Change tracking on entities is usually done by comparing them to their original values, when this is done on large object graphs, it can be a significant performance hit, especially if I'm only updating a few values, but I need to read a lot of data. Can I take action in this case?
• SQL Functionality
  What happens if I have some specific functionality in the database that I need to use? UDF is one example, but my SQL Functions come to mind as well. Is it possible? How well it integrates into the rest of the systems?
• Composite Keys
  Can I use them? How well do they play with relashions? What happen if the relation is based on only part of the compose key?
• Custom Types
  I mentioned the null bool scenario, but there are many other cases where I want to get involved with the way the framework is creating and persisting properties in my objects.

Customer scenarios - This is here because of a post by Clemens Vasters about how much less affective he became in influencing the direction of WCF since he joined the team. Now he doesn't have the justification of a customer need to do it.

Here a few examples of scenarios that I personally run into:

• Timed objects - I discussed how I used OR/M to make sense of a really complicated business model. This approach require customized collection and quite a bit flexibility on the side of the OR/M when defining the way the data is transformed from the database to the object graph.
• Xml Extended Attributes - I have got a customer who want to keep a list of extended attributes inside the table itself, and has decided to use XML Column in order to do so. The challange here is to get the data from the XML Column inot an object property and persist it back to the XML. This allows extending the table for child objects without modifying the object structure.
• Handling legacy schema such as this one, I know how I can map it cleanly so the object model has no idea how the database looks like.

I posted anoter list of features that I constant use in OR/M here.

The issue that I have with this approach is that it targets the simple scenarios, those who probably wouldn't get that much benefit from this. The amount of effort that Microsoft is putting into OR/M efforts is proof that the DataSet model doesn't really scale for complex applications. The decision to make this accessible only via DataAdapter punishes anyone who decide that they can do better by going lower in the stack and build from there. I am used to having more options the lower I go, not the other way around.

In ASP.Net, for instance, I may not be able to change the Page Controller architecture in the WebForms level, but I can go down a couple of levels and use Front Controller architecture, and the only functionality that I lose is the one spesific for WebForms.

But this is crying over spilled milk, I am afraid. The most pressing question at the moment is will this be fixed in .Net 3.0? And yes, I am talking about the former WinFX release. I want and need this ability. This is the closest release, and the next one after that is sometimes in 2008, which is way too long.

First things first, don't get too excited, NHibernate doesn't support Stored Procedures (yet).

What I am talking about is encapsulating HQL queries in a similar manner to the way stored procedures work.

A little background before I start talking about the technical details. When using NHibernate, I'm usually pushing the use of NHibernate's Criteria approach, since this is by far the most easy way for people to comprehend how to query the database using NHibernate. While for simple uses HQL is very simple:

HQL can get complicated when you want to do complex stuff, and it has one big problem. It looks like SQL, but it is not SQL.

Take this example, for instnace:

I will spare you the effort of trying to come up with the equilent SQL. This is still a simple query, but it is not something that can be expressed using NHibernate's Criterias.

Now we have got several options of how to use it. We can embed it in our code, but this has some serious disadvantages. I really hate to have strings in my application, and I would much rather use a seperate file or a resource somewhere, but it turns out that we don't need to. NHibernate has the concept of a Named Query, which allow you to define a query in the mapping files and give it a name, like this:

You may consider the query name too long, but I like to be explicit about such things.

Now we can use the same query in several locations, without copying and pasting the code. If you really like, you can even change the query without changing the client code (which is supposed to be the holy grail of stored procedures.

You can use this query like this:

Now, this still doesn't free the application developers from understanding what is going on, of course. For instnace, this query returns a list of tuples, of of those contains a precense report and the matching employement contract. I need to understand the return value and unpack it into a form that is easier to work with.

By the way, in this case, the idea is to get the employement contract and use that to validate the report. Notice that I am checking for the date of botht he employement contract validity and the precense report itself. It removes a whole set of issues that I suddenly do not hvave to think about.

If you wanted to be really fancy, it is trivial to take the XML above and use code generation to generate a query class that will wrap this functionality.

My current readership seems to have stabilized on around 3,500 readers a day (after a peak of about 5,500 a day after I got linked from ScottGu's blog).

After seeing the dramatic difference that such a link can cause, I decided to check how I can bring in more readers. The simplest thing is to get myself linked from the aggregations sites such as Digg, DotNetKicks, etc. Of course that the high goal there is to get slashdotted, but I'm leaving this tactic for the future :-)

Now, putting my own posts on those sites is sleazy, but there is no reason that I wouldn't make it easy for you to do it. So I added links to deli.cio.us, Digg and DotNetKicks on each post. I used dasBlog's ability to define custom macros, and this custom macro library.

The link contains all the information that you can want on this, but be aware that the macros shown there wouldn't work as-is. For some reason Vasanth forgot to put <% on the beginning of each macro.

Phil Haack has posted a really nice post about using Events with Rhino Mocks.

On other news, I saw today a Rhino Mocks question in a general .Net forum.

Bliss :-D

What would you prefer from ease of use point of view?

Or: