Life in the trenches

More Linq to SQL

2009-05-01T12:57:00+00:00

I've always thought that you wont really learn something unless you have to use it out in the wild. Since I posted about LINQ while back I have been able to use it in a production environment. I must say after you get the hang of it .. it's pretty cool stuff. We have an application that we're working on that didn't use it or a ORM so there are some pains involved in exposing things from the data model.

In the integration I'm currently working on I stripped out all of the store procedures I was using in favor of Linq to SQL. In terms of ease its right up there. I can easily add or change the data model and only spend about 5 minutes doing it and getting the entities updated to match the changes.

Its worth looking at. The question now is how does it scale and how is the performance? How do the other ORM options measure up?

Simple Life - Are you what you eat?

2009-05-01T12:48:17+00:00

I ran into this interesting list of foods the other day:

Apples, bananas, blackberries, cantaloupe, guava, limes, mangoes, papaya, oranges, pineapple, pomegranate, strawberries, and watermelon; avocado, cabbage, carrots, celery, cucumber, garlic, kale, onions, peppers, plantains, radishes, squash, tomatoes, and yucca; corn (maize, blue corn and elote), rice, every dried bean known to man, and all nuts, including cashews, coconut and almond milk; beef, pork, chicken, fish, sausage, and turtle (I'm told); eggs (with the hens nearby), herbs and spices, yogurt, ice cream, sour cream, coffee, tea, beer, and soda because the water is bad.

What is this all about? Well I've been interested in getting back to my regular gym schedule because we all know how work consumes us. It had been about 7 months since I was last seen at the gym but I finally when back this week. I ran into this list because of a story on simple life style options; well in the cause of some people these are not really options but what is available. I guess a list like this for a typical American might include things like Burgers and Tacos. I'd like to get away from the typical but I think that most people struggle to find a way to do this when they have a family.. its hard to go solo if there is no buy in.

Another one that sounded interesting was the Paleolithic diet. I have yet to actually research what all this entails but I think the basic idea is if a Caveman couldn't eat it then you shouldn't. I'm thinking that the basis for most of these is get away from the processed stuff.. Will I be able to? I don't know but I did make it back to the gym and thats a start!

Got Zombie?

2009-04-30T15:55:06+00:00

Well if you are like one friend of mine which we could just call I-Heart-Killing-Zombies then you should not pass this one up.

Steam is going to have 24 hours of Zombie killing for free. I've played Left 4 Dead on the XBox and it's a blast.. no pun intended.

Welcome back

2009-01-05T19:19:07+00:00

Ok.. so the holidays are a distant memory and now your faced with the long stretch to the next holiday. Hopefully it will be a 3 day weekend filled with the good things in life.. BBQ, Drinks, and good family/friends over to visit. Ok.. maybe it's the Star Trek movie due for release in May.

Well anyway I digress. I'd like to add in some more research into some things I started last year. Namely SilverLight/WPF, LINQ to Entities, and some of the other interesting things coming up or just starting to emerge as mainstream (can use it now) technologies. I did enjoy what I was able to learn from the little work I've done with LINQ/Entities.

I did one small project and used LINQ/Entities for a couple of reasons:

The consumer of the application is technical enough to maintain it if need be
The application ended up being a single source so there will be no database maintenance later
This made deployment simple
The application is only used once a month to transfer some data using business rules

One of the challenges that shouldn't end up being too hard is to get a better grip on Expression Blend. I attempted to use it while researching SilverLight but I think learning some basics on the application outside of learning something else would be advisable. Blend seems to be a pretty capable tool if you give the time to learn how it functions best.

Oh, I did want to give a kudos to Finley's. If you've never had a barber shop shave then your missing out! I was luck enough the be given a gift certificate of a hair cut and shave.. I will be going back even if it's only for the regular hair cut with a shave tossed in from time to time.

SilverLight Debugging

2008-12-08T13:16:00+00:00

I was working through a tutorial for SilverLight over the weekend and things were going just fine until the debugger just didn't seem to want to hit my break points. Oddly they were working fine but I did see on the net that some people had problems a while back with this. In those cases there is a check box added to the project properties where you select ASP.NET debugging that was getting turned off. For those the solution had been moved.. this is not the case for me of course so maybe there is another issue there someplace.

Has anyone run into this situation? I guess I can try the old standby of making a new project to see if it still fails to hit the break points or try not hosting in a web page.

Update: I found out that using a browser other then IE will cause this to happen. Sure enough.. after I reset IE as the default browser then the debugger hit my break points once again. The odd thing is it was working just fine for a while.. go figure.

LINQ and Entity Framework

2008-12-05T16:23:00+00:00

So I finally decide to play around a bit with LINQ to SQL but when I go looking for some examples and reference material on the web I quickly find out that the sample I was working on is out of date. The new kid on the block is of course Entity Framework so I have to refactor my sample code.

The reason I was looking into this is one of my side projects was small enough that I could jump in and not have to deal with too much of a learning curve and the deadline for the app was just squishy enough to absorb the extra time involved. I did run into something that was driving me crazy and I’m sure there must be a way around it but if I changed a field in the database the update option was not working so I ended up dropping the model from the solution and just recreating it.

I did notice that I also had to clean out the app.config since the connection was left in there. This in turn caused a couple of issues as well since the names I gave the wizard and the final code that was generated were not always in sync. Over all this is not too major an issue since I’m used to monitoring the config files when I update WCF references. The WCF reference has a tendency to duplicate the binding and endpoint entries but thats another story.

So here are a couple of things I found out how to do:

Lambda Expressions:

The thing that gets me up until not long ago is the lambda expressions.. it finally dawned on me that your saying basically: (this_variable_is_passed_in => and_used_here) A good example is the Find methods on collections; they take a predicate as a parameter so..

collection.Find(this_item_is_passed_in => this_item_is_passed_in.some_property == some_value);

is how it works and it seems that the some_value part needs to be a basic type like a string, int etc.

Just read all of the records from a table:

var plattTransfer = Model.PlattXFER.Select(plattXFER => plattXFER);

This is basically the same as: SELECT * FROM table_or_view.

Pickup an array of records where they match some criteria:

PART[] part = Model.PART.Where(“it.ID = @PartID”, new ObjectParameter(“PartID”, customerPrice[0].PARTID)).ToArray();

This one is a basic give me this record: SELECT * FROM table_or_view WHERE ID = @ProcParameter

Add a record to the model:

dwData.AddToTable(RecordOut);

It looks like the code generator will make an AddTo<TableName> formatted method for each of the tables you drop into the model.

Commit your changes after modifying records:

Model.SaveChanges(true);

LOTRO Warden class so far

2008-11-19T18:26:00+00:00

For those not in the know.. One of the new classes for LOTRO is the Warden. This class is intended to be a tank class and it seems to do pretty well as far as I can tell so far. Granted I just added the new character yesterday and only had enough time to get to level 6.

This class uses what they are calling Gambits. Basically how it works is you have some number of skills that you can use. At this point the selection is small and easy to grasp. You use a skill and then one of the gambit slots fills up, use the next and the second slot fills up. Since I only have two slots right now I need to hit kick off the gambit. So with my two skills and two slots I have 4 different combinations to fill the slots. Actually I think it’s six because I did notice another combination but I was not sure which skill it was referring to. This class also uses Medium armor so its middle of the road in that respect with the benefit being that you’re a bit more mobile since you’re not wearing the heavy armor types. To compensate it appears that some of the gambits can restore some health so thats a plus in this classes favor.

The only down side to the new upgrade is that I don’t think this new character can gain access to the new content. From what I’ve heard all of the things you would want to hunt are more the 40+ so thats a major problem. In the end it looks like I have a long road to travel before I can see the new content but I’ll keep asking around. This is the main character I want to take there so focusing on the others I have is not really an option long term.. besides they are not all that much closer level wise anyway.

Mines of Moria

2008-11-17T16:56:00+00:00

Well tomorrow, actually the following day, they will upgrade all of the LOTR servers for the new expansion. These are always fun times; you never know how well one of these things will go off until they flip the switch. I’m actually one or the launch lifers; I figured I would come and go with this game and sure enough.. I took a few months off from it and returned for this upgrade. Of course when ever I do that I end up thinking “If I had only stayed I bet I’d be level such-and-such.”

Then again you never know how far you might have advanced.. or not. I am excited to play this expansion since the addition is the type of environment that I like.. dungeons. Granted this one is vast; and according to the reviews its basically like an outside area with a roof on it. I’m hoping that it is open to all levels though. That is the one thing that I couldn’t find a reference to and I’d hate to have to advance to one of the really high levels just to get in there. Time will tell though.

Multipage Tiff Files

2008-11-11T20:41:04+00:00

Talk about making my head hurt. We ran into a situation where we needed to generate a multipage tiff file because my client's client uses them to parse invoices and image files that belong to the relevant invoice. As it turns out they pull the file down via FTP and then split them apart and store them for future reference.

Part of the fun is they kept changing the specification on us. We ended up picking up a ActiveX control called HtmlSnapShot. This is a pretty decent control and we actually ended up using it but it did not do what we needed it to do. We also used FreeImage to help with compression since the GDI methods exposed via System.Drawing don't seem to want to compress these types of files.

I did find a couple of interesting things in the output file:

The first image conforms to the width and height of the container image
For invoices 2+ they show as a different width and height and the containing image looks the same size as the invoice output
For Invoices 2+ they don't show the logo image that was placed in the top left corner

The odd thing is that all invoices are rendered in the same section of code The difference that I can think of is that the first image used the Save method to go right into the output FileStream. The remaining invoices all use SaveAdd as do the images with the pictures. Interestingly the images with the pictures drawn onto them are also in the right shape, size, and display the logo. Talk about scratching your head.

If you inspect each of the images as they are inserted into the pages they all have to same attributes such as resolution, width, and height. Very strange indeed.

CrossOver Mac/Linux is free today!

2008-10-28T11:31:30+00:00

Check it out: CodeWeavers

I tried out this app some years ago. I'm not sure what the capabilities are these days but hey.. why pass up a free offer! For those not in the know.. CrossOver allows you to run Windows apps on a Mac or Linux install without needing Windows. Personally I used Fusion for that sort of thing since I'm primarily a Windows Server developer. But anyway.. enjoy..