You are new to blogging… You are planning to start a blog… There is a very good chance that you might end up having a blog on blogger… Or you could have a blog on geekswithblogs or if you are doing something in .Net Technologies, the probability of which is quite high since you are reading this blog (me being on .Net) then you might have a blog on asp.net.
But if you are looking for some serious options… I would suggest you guys try out wordpress. It is as easy to create a weblog and there is barely anything that you won’t find here. It really is an ocean and it might take a couple of weeks for you to explore everything.
I just created mine. And I have to tell you, I am quite blown away.
How do you plan your architecture when you are using entity framework? Do you write a data access layer? Or do you just go ahead and start writing queries on the object context. What happens if you want to use stored procedures? Why stored procedures you ask? well a no. of reasons. Some performance, others just a plain ol’ legacy database with existing stored procedures. But that’s a little out of context at the moment.
You may go ahead and start using your entities as business objects. But there’s a catch. Let me take a step back. Entity Framework entities are just plain ol’ classes with a special interface implementation, which maps the properties of these classes with the database tables and columns. So essentially, there’s a direct mapping of these classes with the database.
Now let’s add a few parameters and make the situation a little more complex. Let’s add a WCF layer to the design. As far as the WCF Service is concerned, it should not care about who’s accessing it, because it is the Service. It exposes a few contracts and doesn’t care who uses them. It receives the requests and services them.
But to service requests it has to pass data around. Now if the data is of primitive types, it’s fine, but if it is not, if it is of complex serializable type, then we would have proxies running back and forth across the wire.
This proxy types, while being independent of the clients, should also, ideally be, free from any other independencies on the back end. If you are using EF entities, then your data entities are dependant on the database. So if you change your database schema, you would have to re-publish your proxies. Break the data contract and you have to recompile your clients. That, is not a very pleasant thing to do.
I am not sure how I would get around this problem myself. As of now what I can think of is to create my Business Objects / proxy data classes with behavior and everything and map them with the entities. These business objects should not be heavy, should be serializable, should be free from dependencies from either side and should be capable to consume any changes in the database schema. We call them business objects because business should be the only thing it should depend on. If there is a database change, the mapping layer should be able to consume these changes so we don’t have to re-publish our proxies. The data contract should not break.
So then, the question arises, whey use entity framework at all. One of the big benefits that I get out of Entity Framework is that I don’t have to hand code my entities. Well that’s a question I cannot answer at this level. It has to be answered on a case to case basis. Entity Framework gives you some amazing features besides the code gen and if they matter, by all means go for it.
However, Microsoft, I believe has recognized this “problem”, and is working on the solution. .Net Framework 4.0 would come with Persistent Ignorant entities. They introduce the capability to interact with the database without having a dependency on the schema and also without losing any entity framework capabilities. In fact they are introducing a couple of other capabilities like change tracking in POCOs and lazy loading.
Exciting times lie ahead…
I have been thinking of owning a website of my own for a long time. First web space was expensive. Not universally, but at least for me. Always thought, is it worth it? How am I justify the annual cost no matter how little. And then of course my salary wasn’t that big then.
Well by God’s grace I am doing pretty ok now. But since the last couple of years, I just didn’t have the time to do it.
I bought web space some 1 and a half year back. wrote a whiz bang application that would host a video invitation to my marriage. Yeah we wanted it to be different, so we made a video wedding invitation.
Anyways. I own a web space since then and I never had the time to create a portal out of it. Just the default page. And then one day I decided to go to godaddy.com and check out what my money buys me. And it turns out that it is more than just the space. I get a host of other products free with it. like Blogs, Emails, CMS, etc.
Honestly, I felt a little shy using the CMS initially. I being a developer should be able to write my own asp.Net application. I bought the damn windows hosting with .Net and everything. I should use it. But then I figured that having a CMS made website is better than not having one. Joomla is what I ended up using.
Usually I ramble about Microsoft Technologies here. But I have to tell you guys. joomla really is zoomla. Initially it might look confusing. But once you get a hang of it, you will have your website ready pronto.
I have mine ready in 1 day. It is called http://www.dasboard.in. It is not much. Not that I have built the next google or anything. But its something, and its there. All that waiting and all it takes is a day.
Never thought I would feel so helpless without a machine. I do have a machine at work, but can’t do much there. It is a work machine after all. Got addicted to the Lenovo T60, the Iron Box (we used to affectionately call it) so much, suddenly I miss it.
The most difficult is to pacify the whims of prototyping something or churning out some whiz bang code quickly. It is when you can’t do it, that you realize how often you used to do it.
Guess I will have to get my hands on a new machine quickly.