Ralf's Sudelbücher

Component orientation explained - Modern software development viewed from a musical perspective

ralfw — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:36:28 GMT

You´re fluent in object oriented programming. But now and again you´re wondering what the fuzz about component orientation is? There is supposed to be more to it than just using 3rd party controls in your user interfaces. But, what and how? Component...(read more)

NSimpleDB - Use Amazon´s SimpleDB data model in your applications now - Part 4

ralfw — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:17:58 GMT

As explained in my previous postings , I implemented a local/embeddable version of the Amazon SimpleDB data model and API in C#. You can download the sources from my NSimpleDB Google Code Project and build the tuple space engine yourself, or you download...(read more)

NSimpleDB - Use Amazon´s SimpleDB data model in your applications now - Part 3

ralfw — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:05:21 GMT

In my previous postings about Amazon´s SimpleDB data model and API I explained, what Amazon´s online database service - or to be more precise: tuple space - has to offer in general. If this sounds interesting to you, then now welcome to the desktop. Because...(read more)

NSimpleDB - Use Amazon´s SimpleDB data model in your applications now - Part 2

ralfw — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 08:14:07 GMT

Amazon´s SimpleDB is an exciting new player in the database world. It´s free, it´s online, it´s not relational. SimpleDB is a dynamic database implementing a tuple space . Currently SimpleDB (as of Jan 08) is in beta - but not everyone can get his hands...(read more)

NSimpleDB - Use Amazon´s SimpleDB data model in your applications now - Part 1

ralfw — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:37:52 GMT

Have you heard about Amazon´s online "database service" SimpleDB ? They describe it like this: "Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time." So it´s not a RDBMS, because Amazon does not call the data "relational...(read more)

Code instrumentation with TraceSource - My personal vade mecum

ralfw — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:42:32 GMT

When writing more complex code you cannot really step through during debugging, it´s helpful to put stud it with statements tracing the execution flow. The .NET Framework provides for this purpose the System.Diagnostics namespace. But whenever I just...(read more)

Software Transactional Memory VII - Automatic retry of failed transactions

ralfw — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:21:00 GMT

My previous posting on Software Transactional Memory (STM) I concluded with the remark, NSTM was not finished. How true! Here is the next release of NSTM with a couple of improvements. You can download it from Google´s project hosting site . Here´s what...(read more)

Software Transactional Memory VI - Becoming Aspect Oriented with PostSharp

ralfw — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:26:00 GMT

The API for my .NET Software Transactional Memory (NSTM) I´ve described so far is straightforward, I´d say. It´s close to what you´re used to from transactional dabase access and it´s even integrated with System.Transactions : open a transaction, do some...(read more)

Software Transactional Memory V - Integration with System.Transactions

ralfw — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:14:47 GMT

So far I´ve described my own .NET Software Transactional Memory´s (NSTM) API for managing transactions. It´s close to what you are used to from relational databases, I´d say. But still, it´s my own API and it stands beside what .NET already provides in...(read more)

Software Transactional Memory IV - Thread-Bound Transactions

ralfw — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:51:20 GMT

I´ve explained in my previous posting , how a single transaction weaves its magic of isolating changes to transactional objects (txo) and atomically making them visible on commit. But what´s the "reach" or "scope" of a NSTM transaction? How many transaction...(read more)

Software Transactional Memory III - Making Transactions Atomic

ralfw — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:18:32 GMT

Now that the basic data unit of my .NET Software Transactional Memory (NSTM) has been introduced - transacational objects (txo) aka INstmObject - who implement the Isolation property of transactions, the question is, where Atomicity comes from. Enter...(read more)

Software Transactional Memory II - Isolation of Changes to Transactional Objects

ralfw — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:50:04 GMT

In yesterday´s posting I introduced my C# implementation (NSTM) of the Software Transactional Memory (STM) concept. It is supposed to make concurrent programming easier than it is today using explicit locking of shared in-memory resources. With NSTM multithreaded...(read more)

Software Transactional Memory - Making multithreading easier

ralfw — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:24:00 GMT

A while ago Carl Rosenberger - chief architect of db4o - mentioned in a personal conversation the concept of Software Transactional Memory (STM) [1, 8]. I was immediately intrigued by the idea - but the conversation went on. So I sat down later and read...(read more)

A truely simple example to get started with WCF

ralfw — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:21:00 GMT

Recently I needed to set up some simple code to demonstrate WCF (as an alternative to some other means of communication in distributed applications). But when I googled around, I could not find a really, really simple WCF example. Sure, there are lots...(read more)

Why complexity metrics don´t yet help ease software maintenance

ralfw — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Jeroen van den Bos bemoaned in a recent post , of how little help automatic software architecture complexity metrics are to him when assessing effort of a software change. I feel with Jeroen and think, we need to take another look at what complexity means...(read more)