Community Blogs

Today, it's been exactly 6 years ago we released the first version of LLBLGen Pro , v1.0.2003.1 after a development period of roughly 9 months (Sunday september 7th 2003, late in the evening). It was a big gamble, would it succeed or fail? We got our first customer within 9 minutes after release and we then knew it would be a success. And it still is, with thousands of companies using it world-wide, from small mom & pop shops to the biggest banks on the planet. Honestly, we hoped for success but that it took off this big was beyond our expectations. A big thank you! to all of our loyal customers who trusted our work in the past 6 years and who are keep trusting it. Needless to say, we're still going strong and are looking forward...

In the comments section of Ayende's blog , I recently debated the usage of principles like the ones in SOLID and argued that these principles aren't really the important thing to focus on. Instead, people should focus on thinking . In the Netherlands we have an old saying: "Bezint eer ge begint", which translated to English is something like "Think everything through before you start". Now, before I wake up the anti-Waterfall people , I'd like to add that this post isn't about Waterfall at all. Instead, I'd like to line out how I write my software, how thinking is an essential part of every step I take in the whole process and will illustrate it with an example which hopefully will illustrate that some...

(Follow up to: The Firefox 3.5 fiasco ) I'd like to inform the audience that the people over at NSS , the sub-system which is responsible for the disk-trashing behavior of Firefox 3.5 (and the accompanying delays on startup) on some systems, has worked on a fix for this which appears to be scheduled for FF 3.5.1. You can read the discussion by starting here (which lands in the middle of the bug comments, but the comments above the one linked are basicly bickering comments over what to do to the symptoms instead of really fixing it at the root) It's good to know that the NSS folks finally listen in and will use CryptGenRandom when available (it's a windows subsystem method) and will only revert to disk-based entropy collecting when...

I am presenting at The Humanitarian FOSS (H-FOSS) Summer Institute at Trinity College (Hartford CT) on July 2nd . The H-FOSS Project is primarily for undergraduate computing students who want to get involved in building free and open source software for use by humanitarian organizations. Details below: Presentation Title: Lessons learned and best practices in Humanitarian & Emergency Systems. In recent years, two emergency events - South Asia Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina saw the deployment of Humanitarian systems to aid in the relief efforts. This presentation will give an overview of the event scenarios, lessons learned and best practices in developing and deploying such systems. In addition, the presentation will describe a system currently...

To my surprise, today when I checked out my Subversion repository – running VisualSVN on a Windows Home Server – it downloaded just as expected. Only when I made some changes, did I realize that something is wrong as I received following error! “Server sent unexpected return value (403 Forbidden) in response to MKACTIVITY” It turns out that even on Windows, Subversion repository url’s are case sensitive. (Strangely that not the case for fetching source!) Solution: Create a new folder, and download the repository afresh with right case – as on server. Once downloaded, try making a change and it will all work fine. Enjoy! --Sharad Read More...

This morning I ran into an interesting design decision. The problem at hand isn't that interesting, I've solved it a lot of times before. The interesting thing is that this problem isn't always solved the same way. It goes like this: do you tell an element which is inside a container (which can be inside another container) to exclude (remove) itself from its container or do you tell the container to exclude (remove) the element? This might sound simple enough, but what is the right thing to do here? And if one is chosen, on what ground is that approach the right thing and is that always the case, no matter what the scenario might be? No, "It depends" doesn't cut it, for the sole reason that every single day probably...

In July 2008 I started development on LLBLGen Pro v3's new designer. The first thing I realized was that I needed a good, solid, generic framework to base the new designer on, especially because v3 would introduce a new big feature: model-first entity model development. In short, model-first means that the user starts the designer and can build an entity model from scratch (so no meta-data available whatsoever) and create meta-data and mappings from that entity model, or modify an existing or reverse engineered model by adding new elements. So the user will edit, delete, and do other things which aren't based on any meta-data, but based on theory, thought processes and perhaps trial/error. In short: the user will make changes to a live...

(Sorry English speaking visitor, this post is in Dutch, as it's about a Dutch user group meeting) In Nederland hebben we een aantal gebruikersgroepen die op gezette tijden meetings organiseren voor developers. Aan dit aantal is een nieuwe toegevoegd, Devnology ( http://www.devnology.nl ). Devnology is niet zozeer gericht op het houden van meetings waarbij 1 persoon een praatje houdt en de rest poogt niet in slaap te sukkelen, het is meer gericht op discussie en interactie tussen developers, samen bezig zijn met code, software engineering en andere aan ons vak gerelateerde zaken. Ook is Devnology niet gelimiteerd tot .NET alleen maar zijn andere talen en platforms even welkom. Het gaat tenslotte om software engineering en niet om de laatste...

Here's a simple performance tip which can benefit you without doing any effort. Linq to Objects has two methods to combine two sequences together, both with different characteristics: Union() and Concat(). The difference in characteristics makes it possible to gain performance without doing anything difficult. Let's look at a simple example first: Say we have two lists of integers: A: {1, 2, 3, 4} and B: {1, 2, 5, 6}. When using A.Union(B), a set union is executed, which results in { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. When A.Concat(B) is used, the sequences are simply concatenated and { 1, 2, 4, 1, 2, 5, 6} is the result. Pretty straight forward stuff. If you care about the duplicates, Union() is necessary. However, in the case where you can't have...

Have you ever ran into database tables with a field which is used to mark if a row has been 'deleted' ? Probably. These fields are used to implement 'soft-deletes'. For the soft-delete impaired, a quick introduction. Soft-deletes are row deletes which are not really happening: instead of removing the row from the database table, a field in the row is set to a value which signals that the row is officially 'deleted'. Every SELECT statement on that table is then filtering on that field's value so only rows which aren't marked as 'deleted' are returned (as the deleted data is not there anymore, semantically). If this sounds rather awkward, it is. However, there are people who insist in having soft-deletes...