Friday, January 11, 2008

Useful MSDN Blog Links and Immutable Classes

The standard feed provided in the Visual Studio 2005 Start Page provides some very useful links. One of them is this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/lucabol/archive/2007/12/28/creating-an-immutable-value-object-in-c-part-iv-a-class-with-a-special-value.aspx

a blog tutorial on creating immutable classes and the clever things to do with them.

I'm hoping to build a large list of really useful links featured on that feed, here.

Yes, yet another list.

MicroSoft Visual Source Safe

This is just a little post to lament the problems provide (as features) by VSS.  Fortunately, this guy has posted them already: http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/windev/sourcesafe.html

Happy coding...

Thursday, January 10, 2008

SubSonic and some DAL stuff

So I've been using CodeSmith with NetTiers for over a year now and loving almost every minute. However, there is now a very large problem which seems to have settled in and won't go away, like an elephant in the corner at a party. Except that everyone is talking about how to get rid of it, but no-one's managing to shift the thing. This problem is that Deep-Loading and Deep-Saving cannot be guaranteed in any version. (My personal issue with this is that if a nightly release does appear with a fix, any number of other critical bugs arise to replace it.) So, what we have is a DAL (Data Access Layer) generator which used to be wonderful and cuddly, but is now more of a problem than the number it solves.

So, what am I doing about it? Helping to solve the code issues? Submitting a new series of DAL templates using a radical and effective new code schema? Or ignoring the problem entirely?

That's right, I'm leaving my rather large application using the last, most reasonable generated DAL layer as it is, until I find another DAL generator I can use. Obviously, this is because there's a lot of people with much more experience solving their own code bugs without me trying to hack their templates apart. While I feel a little guilty about jumping ship, I will quite happily throw my support behind them if this quite annoying bug gets solved - something which used to be a huge selling point, IMHO.

Anyhow, this situation has opened a number of avenues. Among them is a little thing called SubSonic, with the catchy slogan "All Your Database Are Belong To Us!" Nice.

I'm only just starting with this one, so I've no useful (or other) information to pass on, so I'll start with some links and hopefully, soon, there'll be plenty of musing from my addled brain...

http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2007/12/30/118069.aspx
http://geekswithblogs.net/scottkuhl/archive/2006/11/17/97470.aspx
http://subsonicproject.com/view/for-web-sites---using-the-buildprovider.aspx
http://www.codeplex.com/subsonictools
http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2007/10/setting-up-subsonic.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/94319/SubSonic?query2=%27SubSonic.Generated.+does+not+contain+a+definition+for