Interestingly enough, Subversion support is the most requested feature for CodePlex. I suggest reading the discussion, it is very interesting. The major points against TFS and for SVN seems to be:

• Weak offline access support
• No patching
• No anonymous access

The points above makes TFS a poor choice for an OSS project, which requires all three (but especially anonymous access and patching). For corporate scenarios, there is another advantage to Subversion over TFS. Subversion is a Zero Friction tool, TFS is anything but. A memorable quote can be found here:

I found this mostly by accident, but it looks like a few weeks ago CodePlex has lost the source code for some of the projects hosted on the site. I would like to address the part about "free means no guarantees" that came up in the post:

I would.

Regardless of the legalese involved. I have certain expectations from such a service. And having reliable backups is one of those. I don't care if it is free, SourceForge had ensured that there wouldn't be much point in charging for source control for open source projects, so I am not surprised that it is offered as a free service.

CodePlex's stated goals are to host and support open source projects, I assume that it is also meant to show off Microsoft's technologies. That is nice, except that the fact that a project is OSS doesn't mean that its source is not mission critical data that really should be safe.

Roy is hiring Team System people, I was amused by the post title:

The answer it my case would be "Yes, to avoid it" :-)

And the reason would be that it absoutely not a zero friction tool.

As long as we are talking about Roy, he posted a poll about mocking frameworks for his upcoming book about unit testing. I am impressed by the amount of votes (and the comments) for Rhino Mocks, thanks.

I just run into this post, that talks about a presentation about mocking, and included this statement (about using Rhino Mocks):

That developer, it would be me, and it can happens quite often. And I wrote the tool, so I should know what I am doing when I am using it.

Stuff happens, it is easy to forget a line of code and waste some time as a consequences. The most common sentence from me when I am developing is "Oh, man, I am so stupid that I did that".

To give an example that would be a bit easier to grok, what is wrong with this code:

Christian Maslen ping me about this article, which shows how to use NHibernate to execute multiply statements in a single round trip. Christian suggest a much neater solution:

I was sure that it wouldn't work, but it does, and I consider this extremely cool. So, now I needed to figure out how to make NHibernate understand this. There are several options, but extending HQL is simplest one in this case.

NHibernate uses a dialect to let bridge the gap between Hibernate Query Language with is a database agnostics relational/object querying lanaguge. This allows NHibernate to work against multiply databases easily. The key here is that one of the extension points that NHibernate is offering is the ability to define your own custom functions, which can translate to arbitrary SQL.

In this case, here is the query that I want to end up with:

Here is the dialect extension:

We register a new function, called rowcount, which translate to "count(*) over" string. The final "()" are added by NHibernate when rendering the function. Now, we need to register our new dialect:

And here is the code we end up with:

The generated SQL is:

Oh, and thanks for Fabio Maulo for helping me figure out the correct usage of custom functions.

Because I know that I will need it...

Expected usage:

Update: I am still struggling with the code for WasChickenSacrifised(), will be glad to get suggestions...

Nick Carr is quoting an IEEE article about OSS Economics. I am going to respond to the article later, rigth now I wanted to comment on this piece:

I have one word to say to it, rubbish! I have stated it before, working on open source software means that you have credentials. There is nothing that speaks louder than code for developers. And experianced developers are worth quite a bit, regardless of their choice of platform or license.

This statement seems to assume that the only thing that separate developers from one another is prioprietry knowledge aquired in mystic rights at the dark of the moon.

Here is a small experiment, I want to read the documentation for IDispatchMessageInspector

• Go to Microsoft MSDN search page: http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Default.aspx
  Load time: ~15 seconds or so
• Put IDispatchMessageInspector in the search input field and hit go.
  Load time: ~8 seconds
• Go the second result:
  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.dispatcher.idispatchmessageinspector.aspx
  Load time: too damn long!!

Just to give an idea, here is the wget output for this address:

That is right, over a minute half a minute to download just the HTML content of a single page, over two minutes just to get the simplest page to load.

Let me contrast that with the comparable experience:

• Go to google.com
  Load time: faster than I can measure
• Put IDispatchMessageInspector and hit enter
  Load time: ~2 Seconds
• Go to the first result's cached content
  Load time: ~7 seconds

You know what the real sad part is? The google approach is faster than locally installed MSDN!

I have no idea how I missed this post from Anders Norås. It is talking about some of the problems in using traditional software factories (code-gen) vs. using smarter frameworks. It is a long read, but it is excellent.

Mike Taulty is talking about constructing queries dynamically in Linq to SQL. Sorry, but my response to that is Yuck! Here is the code that he shows:

  NorthwindDataContext ctx = new NorthwindDataContext("server=.;database=northwind");
    
       var query = from c in ctx.Customers
                   where c.Country == "Germany"     
                   select c;
    
       if (RuntimeCriterionOneApplies()) 
       {
        query = from c in query
                where c.City == "Berlin"     
                select c;
       }
    
       if (RuntimeCriterionTwoApplies())
       {
        query = from c in query
                where c.Orders.Sum(o => o.Freight) > 100
                select c;
       }
    
       foreach (Customer c in query)
       {
        Console.WriteLine(c.CustomerID);
       }

This is not constructing queries dynamically, it is choosing a query dynamically. This isn't what I talk about when I am talking about constructing a query dynamically. You can look here as what I consider a complex query that is being constructed dynamically.

Mike, how would you handle that scenario in Linq?

Update:  I really should pay more attention when I am reading the code. Sorry Mike, the code that you have will work for the scenario that I have. I don't think that the syntax is very elegant for this scenario, but it will work. I missed the "from q in query" and read is as if a new query were constructed in each if.