I’ve been doing my best to do other things lately and completely missed this terrific news. Opening up the development process of the Entity Framework V2 and the input from these smart guys should guarantee success.
Regardless of whether I agree with Jeffrey Palermo in his answer to the question: How do we ensure the long-term maintainability of our systems in the face of constantly changing infrastructure? Jeffrey first gives his definition of long-term maintainability and changing infrastructure. With the definitions his answer to this question is: Don’t couple to infrastructure.
Two questions came across my mind. First what exactly is infrastructure? In other words is the infrastructure of today the infrastructure of tomorrow. I see a trend where the business of today is the infrastructure of tomorrow. Service Orientation is one of the big drivers in this area where services covering certain aspects of the business become a commodity, because certain products and services become a commodity. I also see today’s infrastructure becoming more and more transparent. Significant investments in open standards are starting to pay of.
Jeffrey’s article takes on the aspect of object-relational mapping from a particular viewpoint. Frans Bouma commented that object-relational mapping frameworks are incorporating more advanced functions which make it harder to decouple important business aspects of our applications from these framework and tools.
In one of my previous lives, in the industrial automation, it was very common to enable transparency through standards and regulation. I consider a nut and bold to be very standardized. Taking this analogy further aren’t object-relational mappers the nut and bolds for our applications? What about standardisation?
Don't be fooled with the EDM designer in SP1 beta for VS.NET 2008. Apparently there was no need "yet" for in depth customizability of the store model schema. For my class table inheritance example I'm using table prefixes since I'm running many examples on the same database. The prefix I'm using for this example is cti_ as you might have guessed. Everything works as you would expect until you try to write a linq to entities query. Instead of writing:
var query = (from f in ctx.Players
where f.Name == "Roger"
select f).First();
I have to write, in order to have a happy compiler, something like this:
var query = (from f in ctx.cti_Players
where f.Name == "Roger"
select f).First();
In order to fix this you need to hack your way into the schema files. Not really a problem as long as you don't need to do this for many entities. Designer support would be very useful though.
I encountered this weird bug that when you copy paste a project containing an EDM file to a different directory other than it was created in, it doesn't open anymore in VS.NET.
I must be overlooking something.
The ID field in my SQL Server database is configured to autoincrement through setting the Identity seed and Identity increment properties. For some reason the generated code allows the end user of the conceptual EDM model to set the ID property since it’s public. I would expect the setter to be at least private.
Anko Duizer is spot on with his post on the top 5 problems with LINQ to SQL. I’d like to take this opportunity to express my biggest concern with LINQ to SQL.
#6 LINQ to SQL is intended for direct 1-1 mapping of a Microsoft SQL server database to .NET classes. LINQ to SQL is not a natural fit in typical enterprise scenarios.
What does it mean to put more of our applications into data and putting less in code? Are WCF and WPF early examples of this thinking in which we put more and more of the application in configuration. It would be interesting to learn more about what Microsoft, from their perspective, considers to be an “application”.
Looking forward to the PDC where we’ll definitely get more information about this new declarative programming language code-named, ‘D’. Read more here.
Next week I’ll be travelling to the Microsoft campus in Redmond for the last couple of sessions in the LEAP-program. I’m looking forward to meeting smart guys such as Clemens Vasters, Jack Greenfield and Erik Meijer. Should be great fun to talk about technology architecture and learn more about Microsoft’s vision and to exchange ideas with them.
I had the pleasure of meeting Charles a few years ago and got infected with the Intentional virus. Please read this interview and be aware that your point of view on software development will never be the same again.
Refactoring it too darn fun. Stop it!
I agree (see refactoring is not free) with the opinion that refactoring, under certain circumstances, is waste. Whether refactoring is a necessary waste depends on how likely it is that a particular piece of code will change in the future. Do not refactor code that will never change. You will never get a payback other than that it makes you feel good for a moment. You should refactor when you see the opportunity to diss fellow developers though ;)
That's right. In my enthusiasm I even installed the whole MSDN. Don't you just love new bits.
Perhaps this will even halt my ivory tower architectures and help me to get my hands dirty again writing code.
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