Paul Gielens:ThoughtsService

A welcome change

p.gielens — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:26:00 GMT

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.

Business of Today is the Infrastructure of Tomorrow

p.gielens — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:21:00 GMT

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?

EDM Designer Quirks

p.gielens — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:24:23 GMT

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.

Autoincrement primary key in EDM

p.gielens — Mon, 26 May 2008 21:16:27 GMT

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.

LINQ to SQL - TOP 5 + 1 of problems

p.gielens — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:37:00 GMT

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.

Putting More into Data and Less in Code

p.gielens — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:55:00 GMT

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.

Redmond and Architecture

p.gielens — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:03:00 GMT

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.

The Problem is Different from the Program

p.gielens — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:38:00 GMT

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 is too darn fun.

p.gielens — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:16:00 GMT

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 ;)

My Rescue: Visual Studio Team System 2008

p.gielens — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:06:27 GMT

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.

Battle of the Ego-systems.

p.gielens — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:37:42 GMT

According to Andreas Bitterer, VP Research at Gartner we are at the verge of the great battle between mega vendors and their ecosystems.

SAP vs. IBM vs. Microsoft vs. Oracle. I can only see the need for greater synergy between vendors.

Are the vendors prepared to do that?

Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet

p.gielens — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 10:00:02 GMT

The weekend is great for easy reading so here goes.

I am writing this while removing the crapware from my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet. This Thursday I placed my order at Bluelink (a Dutch Lenovo (IBM) specialist) and received it the next day. Final spec. Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz, 2.5GB, 12.1” Multiview/MultiTouch XGA (1024x768) TFT, Intel GMA X3100 graphics, Intel 965 Express Chipset, 120GB (5400 rpm), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4-cell battery, etc. Since I travel more frequently I need a compact and low weight notebook. My company supplies me with an excellent 15” Thinkpad but I never bother carrying it around. Besides 15” notebooks and European airlines don’t mix well.

It took me quite some time to make up my mind what new hardware to select. As an early adopter I have developed this love-hate affair with Vista. The numerous crashes of Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007 kill my productivity. The biggest disappointment is the 15-20% performance decrease with my NVidia 7800 GTX which has completely stopped me from playing PC games. I seriously considered a MacBook (pro), and if Steve would have released a stable version of Leopard, and announced a release date for his ultra thin or tablet MacBook I would have taken the plunge. It would have been priceless to see the faces of my audience while presenting a Microsoft oriented talk on an Apple. It was time to move on so I decided in favor of the X61.

...on to more important stuff .NET 3.5

Tablet PC

p.gielens — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 14:41:56 GMT

A while ago I wrote that I was in the market for a MacBook. Now don’t get me wrong, I still am. It is just that I decided to wait for the 12” or 13” LED-backlit MacBook Pro and the rumored ultra thin model. When is that thing hitting the store, anyway.

Then I met Chad Hower at the SDC in September, and Chad convinced me that I should consider getting a tablet PC instead. Since I’m doing less development work lately and find myself traveling a lot more than I thought I would, a tablet all of a sudden makes sense.

After some research I narrowed down my options to two models. The first model is the Lenovo ThinkPad X61. I used my company ThinkPad p40 quit a lot until the screen blacked out on me. For some reason I can’t be bothered to get it fixed, which says a lot about how I feel about this product. The second model is the Dell Latitude XT. This is Dell’s first attempt to enter the market with a tablet PC with an expected release in December. More likely it will be released early 2008 due to the slip of Vista SP1. This reminds me of the Lunachicks with luxury problem.

Does it take ALT.NET to see what sane men can't

p.gielens — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:54:00 GMT

For some background lean on Google.

No, it does not.

I have been explaining, helping and coaching others with principles and best practices over the last few years. You will find some of them on Roy’s list. I enjoy being a part of and learning from the leading enterprise and innovative communities. I was even lucky enough to learn from the best of breed on two occasions.

Sow seeds that benefit others. Please, don’t take yourself too seriously in the process.

Entity Framework for Domain Model based Application Architectures

p.gielens — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:07:52 GMT

I am sitting here listening to the MSDN Webcast: Framework Masterclass: LINQ to Entities and guess what. Patrick Lowendahl is there as well and beat me to it with the following remark.

Question: Eilsa, if you want more feedback from DDD mvps you can drop me or my friend Jimmy (who wrote the second book, and only .net book, on the subject) a line

Excellent! Wouldn't it be great to use the Entity Framework for our domain model based application architectures. My question in this particular area:

Question: What improvements can we expect in the designer?
Answer: The current designer is actually a CTP 1 that works with the Beta 2 of the EF. We are currently working hard to implement customer feedback and implement things such as the model first scenario. You should see significant changes in the designer coming soon.

I asked Eilsa how POCO the Entity Framework will be? She responded with... for version 1 it will implement the IPOCO concept. This means you're entities need to implement a specific Entity Framework interface. The Entity Framework will have full POCO support in version 2. Microsoft is acknowledging the fact that a lot of customers are practicing DDD.