Software and me

Why does my DataTable merge not work?

2015-03-11T23:53:00.001+00:00

I was recently looking and some older DataTable code.
We were trying to merge an updated DataRow into an existing DataTable
But... it was having non of it - the changes didn't go in.

After some hunting it turned out that the RowState of both the existing and updated rows was "Modified".
So the merge didn't know what to do - what takes precedence?

The solution was to call AcceptChanges() on the existing DataTable before merging in the new data.
AccepChanges sets the RowState to Unchanged and the merge now knows what to do.

Job done!

Asynchronous WCF using the generated service interface

2012-07-16T23:43:00.002+01:00

Using Asynchronous WCF in an IoC style presents an interesting challenge.

Normal examples show that you can call async WCF something like this...
Service1Client iService1 = new Service1Client();
      iService1.GetDataCompleted += iService1_GetDataCompleted;
      iService1.GetDataAsync();

i.e. you declare the service client implementation, specify the callback and make the async call.

But... what if you want to inject the client reference, for example (using Ninject):
[Inject]
IService1 iService1 {get; set;}

where Service1 is the interface.
Well, you find that the xxxCompleted event and xxxAsync method are not available on the interface. Ouch!
But, all is not lost...
You do have two other methods... Beginxxxx and Endxxxx and you can use them as in the example below. In the Beginxxxx method you specify the callback and in the callback you can get hold of the result by calling Endxxxx

Note that in the example below, I haven't injected the Service client, but I am using the interface, IService1. The code produces the following output (with the "Waited" appearing after the calling thread has slept for 5 seconds) :

  Making call
Got result
You entered: 200
Waited

    public class Program
    {
        private static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            MakeAsynchronousCall(200);
        }
 
        private static void MakeAsynchronousCall(int value)
        {
            IService1 iService1 = new Service1Client();
 
            AsyncCallback aSyncCallBack =
                delegate(IAsyncResult result)
                    {
                        try
                        {
                            Console.WriteLine("Got result");
                            var i = iService1.EndGetData(result);
 
                            Console.WriteLine(i);
                        }
                        catch (Exception ex)
                        {
                            Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
                        }
                    };
 
            try
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Making call");
                iService1.BeginGetData(value, aSyncCallBack, iService1);
 
                Thread.Sleep(5000);
 
                Console.WriteLine("Waited");
                Console.ReadLine();
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
            }
        }
    }

The Server-side code is :

        public string GetData(int value)
        {
            return string.Format("You entered: {0}", value);
        }

Primary Keys in Entity Framework and Sync Framework - Part 2

2012-02-23T00:13:00.001+00:00

In Part 1 we considered various options when it came to using Microsoft Sync Framework with Entity Framework.

After a certain amount of pain we seem to have got to something approaching a settled condition.

We didn't want IDs that were GUIDs as this would make them unreadable. So, we are keeping Primary keys as simple ID columns.
Because of this, we went for a solution that would reseed the local tables on each client to a known range. After each synchronisation, the tables would be reseeded to the correct value. That way entries created on the client/server would have different IDs and wouldn't clash
We had to use SQL Server Express on the clients.

Number (3) above is a long story...

SQL Compact 4 won't play nicely with Entity Framework or the Sync Framework (Link here and here )
SQL Compact 3.5 wouldn't play nicely with the various items - follow this link and see the section "Limitations of SQL Server compact" - basically it can't:

"support entities with server-generated keys or values when it is used with the Entity Framework ".

There's a lot of other things that SQL server compact can't do - including supporting stored procedures. So that's how we ended up back at SQL Server Express.

I hope this gives you a flavour of the sort of things to consider when looking at data replication on SQL Server.

You're going to ask why didn't we use SQL Server Merge Replication - that's another story and another post...

Architecture Note

2012-02-22T23:45:00.000+00:00

A short note on architectures for WCF-based solutions - we've found this works for us.

All classes that are being passed across the wire must be serialisable and each property must be annotated.

The WCF service is nothing more than a thin facade on top of a call to Business Logic.
In fact it's a one-to-one relationship to the Business Logic calls... The Service layer just exposes the business logic so that it can be used in creating bindings, etc.

Business Logic - as they say, it "does the business" and calls the data access.layer.
Data Access Layer - we're using Repository pattern with Entity Framework.

Throughout, we've using IoC (Ninject) to hook data access repositories into the Business Layer and Business Logic into the Service Layer. This has meant inserting Ninject into the WCF factory pipeline - see this post.

OK, you may ask why create a WCF facade on top of the business logic?

Well, doing this lets you create clean classes and "unit" tests for the business logic without bothered about annotations, etc for WCF.
It also means that the Business Logic layer becomes a re-usable component - where you don't have to include WCF-related annotations and dlls.

How to get a WPF TextBox to update its ViewModel binding variable

2012-02-02T00:38:00.000+00:00

A short post:

Scenario:
You're using MVVM and have bound a textbox to a string ViewModel property - in TwoWay mode.

You have a button that is only to be enabled when that string property is not null/empty.

Problem:
You type in the textbox, but the button remains firmly disabled until the textbox loses focus.
Only at that point is the string's PropertyChanged event raised.

Solution:
(Taken from http://betaforums.silverlight.net/forums/t/103695.aspx )
Do the following on the TextBox's TextChanged event:

      void summaryTextBox_TextChanged(object sender, TextChangedEventArgs e)
      {
          TextBox txCtl = (TextBox)sender;
          if (txCtl != null)
          {
              var be = txCtl.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty);
              if (be != null)
              {
                  be.UpdateSource();
              }
          }

This will force the PropertyChanged event to be raised whenever the text is changed - and your button will be enabled as soon as you start typing in the TextBox.

More .NET IoC - Using Ninject in WCF Services

2012-02-01T19:24:00.000+00:00

I've seen other postings about this, but thought I'd add my own 2p-worth since I had to struggle a bit to get it working.

The basic idea is to use Ninject in the WCF pipeline and get WCF use Ninject to create the service. Then you can take advantage of Ninject's IoC to manage dependencies.

I used the base Ninject and the Ninject Web and Wcf extensions - all available via NuGet.

To integrate ninject into the WCF service pipeline, create a "normal" WCF service but add the following to the .svc file

Factory="Ninject.Extensions.Wcf.NinjectServiceHostFactory"

So, the file would look something like:

<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="WcfService.GeneralService"

CodeBehind="GeneralService.svc.cs"

Factory="Ninject.Extensions.Wcf.NinjectServiceHostFactory" %>

Then you can inject dependencies into the service as needed as follows:

[Inject]
public IUsersRepository _repository { private get; set; }

Now we're assuming that you're using a WCF application project - so, to initialise Ninject correctly you need to make changes to the WCF project Global.asax file as follows:

Make Global extend NinjectWcfApplication (from Ninject.Extensions.Wcf)
Implement and override CreateKernel - so the file looks like this:

public class Global : NinjectWcfApplication

    // Other methods omitted for clarity...
 
        protected override Ninject.IKernel CreateKernel()
        {
            IKernel k =  new StandardKernel(new ServiceModule());
            return k;
        }
    }

Now the ServiceModule is a Ninject module that would look something like:

    public class ServiceModule : NinjectModule
    {
        public override void Load()
        {
            Bind().To();
        }
    }

Notice that we're binding the IUsersRepository to the UsersRepository implementation.

Doing this will enable Ninject to do its magic in the WCF service above where it is injected.

When Service is invoked, the Ninject factory will instantiate the class and so be able to use the module bindings to pull in the correct interface implementations.

Notice that you don't need to change service bindings, etc.

Primary Keys in Entity Framework and Sync Framework

2011-12-29T18:42:00.000+00:00

Hold on - we're going for a walk on the wild side! It will take a few minutes to read - but it's a thriller...

This is a summary of what I've discovered after a bit of research - hopefully it will help other developers/architects out.

As part of a project I'm looking at creating a SQL server replicated architecture... and need to avoid clashes in the PK. The icing on the cake is that we're using Entity Framework heavily in the project for data access.

Exhibit 1 ... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726011.aspx

This article gives a few options about choosing a suitable Primary key in replication scenarios:
1. Using a GUID
2. Pk that includes a node ID
3. Natural keys

OK.... starting from the bottom up...

Natural Keys won't work for our project. Full stop
A PK that includes a Node ID - means adding a column and giving each client a Node ID. Not the end of the world, but... doesn't feel right...
GUID... sounds good, or is it?

Enter Exhibit 2 - http://leedumond.com/blog/using-a-guid-as-an-entitykey-in-entity-framework-4/
Yes, it's all true... I tried it and had to hack the EF model XML to include the correct attribute to get it to work. And, Yes, doing an update loses the change.
Yes, it's a feature and yes, it's not pleasant - it would mean after every update hacking the XML to find all the relevant GUID PKs and adding in the attribute. I'm sure we could automate it by some clever searching and replacing, but it's not right.

Also, Enter Exhibits 3, 4, 5 and 6
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/sql-server/d662b371-ed27-481c-aee0-ebe7cf2d9fad/why-guids-are-not-a-good-idea-for-sql-server-primary-keys.aspx
http://databases.aspfaq.com/database/what-should-i-choose-for-my-primary-key.html
http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/the-identity-crisis-in-replication/
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/martinbell/archive/2009/05/25/GUID-Fragmentation-in-SQL-Server.aspx

From this set of links you start to see that GUIDs are good, but come with a number of caveats.
Also using newsequentialid() - doesn't necessarily generate sequential GUIDs - I tried this. If you do a number of inserts close together then you do get them, but not always.

So, you then can potentially have the performance issues.
Also, the space issue is relevant for us - since we're looking to replicate to SQL server compact.

Alternatives?

First off, well we could use a normal ID (int) column and change the seed value for each client.
E.g. The Server has a seed of 10,000000
Client 1 has a seed of 20, 000000,
Client 2 has a seed of 30, 000000 etc

So, each client would be able to make 9,999,999 inserts before a conflict and we'd have a limit of 214(X2) users because we could have negative numbers as well.

Lets just do some maths....

The max value of an int is +/-2,147,483647.

If you're really worried about conflicts you could go for using a bigint as the ID column, then you could have something like 9223327036850 clients! The seeds could then be something like 100,000000, 200000000, 300000000, etc so 99,999,999 inserts before a conflict - which should be enough for a lifetime - e.g. one insert a second would take you 1157 days. 100 inserts a day would take over 2500 years.

If you were using the the smaller int then 100 inserts a day would last over 250 years!

That means changing the seed on each client appropriately.
Now, there are ways of doing this:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/how-do-i-reseed-a-sql-server-identity-column/406 but it seems there a some gotchas that you have to be aware of:
http://geekswithblogs.net/argot/archive/2009/10/18/sync-framework-common-practise-of-ado.net.aspx

Basically, you have to store and remember seed values before/after synchronisation.
You'd keep a list of seed values for each client. So any time you get a new client the first sync would also download its seed value.

This solution has a certain appeal, because:
a. it leaves the PK alone as a single ID column
b. The replication mechanism takes care of the seeding/reseeding.
c. Entity Framework designer won't throw any wobblies.

Next alternative...

Go back to a compound PK, ID plus a Node ID.
a. Entity Framework should cope with this.
b. Replication mechanism should be a bit simpler.
But... it means infecting the database with the replication details i.e. the Node ID and artificially creating a more complex PK. So, you can't just go select * from Users where ID = 10.

Another thought....

This is horrible I think, but has a certain "something" about it!

Leave the PKs alone completely - simple ID column with an int.
Then code for the PK conflicts in the sync framework - as it will detect PK conflicts.

So, we write logic that will do something like:
- determine of the inserted record exists on the server

- if not, then add it (generating a new record/PK) then remove it from the client and

- resync the client to pull down the "new" record but with the updated PK.

You'd have to write this sort of thing to cover various scenarios and it may/would be table-specific - but what if we replicating a lot of tables?

Summing up...

We're looking at either the compound PK or the different seed values.

We're going to try some stuff out - probably the different seed values first as that leaves the EF model alone completely - and I'll try and report back how it went.

Entity Framework Tip #1 - Using MergeOption to get latest entities

2011-09-08T15:38:00.000+01:00

Hopefully this is the first of various Entity Framework tips that I've gleaned along the way.
They'll serve as reminders for me and if they can help other people, they will have served their purpose.

Ok, what's wrong with this?

(We're using STEs because we're throwing things across the network).
I was doing some testing and had code that looked like this.

 DBEntities context1 = new DBEntities();
 
 DBEntities context2 = new DBEntities();
 Site newSite = new Site();
 newSite.SiteName = "QAZ";
 
 context1.Sites.AddObject(newSite);
 context1.ApplyChanges("Sites", newSite);
 context1.SaveChanges();
 
 Site site2 = context2.Sites.Where(s => s.ID == newSite.ID).FirstOrDefault();
 
 // update the site...
 site2.ChangeTracker.ChangeTrackingEnabled = true; // Because they're STEs
 site2.SiteName = "QAZ QAZ";
 context2.ApplyChanges("Sites", site2);
 context2.SaveChanges();
 
 
 // I thought I'd use the first context to query for the updated site...
 
 var query = context1.Sites.Where(s => s.ID == newSite.ID);

 Site site3 = query.FirstOrDefault();

What's the SiteName of site3?

No, it's not "QAZ QAZ" - it's "QAZ"

Why is that?

Because the site already exists in context1 - so even though a database query is actually executed, EF will not overwrite what's in context1 because its cache already contains an entity with that EntityKey.

How to make sure that I actually get the latest values back?

Set the MergeOption on the objectSet before doing the call - as follows...

context1.Sites.MergeOption = MergeOption.OverwriteChanges;

The default option is AppendOnly which won't update the context if it finds an entity with the

same entityKey present.

Another tip from the twighlight world of entity framework...

One thing I've yet to investigate is how delayed execution would affect MergOption settings.
So, if I reset the MergeOption after the query to AppendOnly and then do further queries before finally executing the query - would the different MergeOptions be applied at the right time... hmmm...

.NET IoC - part 3 (Spring)

2011-06-07T13:03:00.001+01:00

It's been some time, but this is continuing my previous posts about .NET IoC.

As I'm familiar with Spring from the Java world, I thought I'd transfer that knowledge across to .NET. It turned out to be less painful than I expected.

I was building a service-based project and used spring on both the client and server sides of the divide. For this post, I'll initially stick to it's use on the client side, but server-side has a very similar set-up. Maybe I'll come to full WCF integration later on.

For basic IoC you just need the Spring.Core.dll from the distribution - add this as a reference to your project.

Initially I'm following the KISS principle, so I created a basic application context file - spring.config.xml and put that at the top level of my project.

Basic format is as follows:



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<objects xmlns="http://www.springframework.net">



<object id="Object1"

type="<Assembly name>.namespace.classname1, <assembly name>" singleton="false">

<property name="Property1"  ref="Object2" />

</object>

<object id="Object2"

type="<Assembly name>.namespace.classname2, <assembly name>" singleton="false">

</object>

  </objects>

The singleton="false" will ensure that Spring gives you a new instance every time you request the particular object.

As a minimum in your code, you'll need to create an application context somewhere.

I've put it in a singleton Locator class as follows:



private static IApplicationContext _context = null;

_context = new XmlApplicationContext("spring-config.xml");

where spring-config.xml is the name of your config file. This is sitting at the top-level of the project.

Then you'll want a method to grab hold of an object instance as follows:



public object getObjectInstance(string name)

{

  return _context.GetObject(name);

}

or, if you need to pass arguments in to the constructor...



public object getObjectInstance(string name, object[] args)

{            

  return _context.GetObject(name, args);

}

In both cases "name" is the object's ID in the configuration file.

Passing arguments in like this is "OK", but can be a pain, since there's no compile time checking - but we're staying simple.

At some point you could call:



Locator.Instance.getObjectInstance("Object1");

This will:

create an instance of Object1
create an instance of Object2
set Property1 on Object1 to be Object2
return you a "ready-to-go" instance of Object1.

These are your absolute basics. But hopefully this will put you on the road.

.Net IoC - part 2 (StructureMap)

2011-01-12T23:32:00.002+00:00

It's been some time since I've last posted anything up, but I thought I'd put up a bit more about my

working with IoC in .NET.

In a previous post I mentioned that I'd come across Spring.NET, Unity and StructureMap

I wanted something that I could pick up easily and which focused on IoC.

Starting to using it fairly simple.

You reference the structuremap dll
Add something looking like this into your code... I wrapped it up in a Singleton to give me more flexibility..

public sealed class Locator {
private static volatile Locator _instance = null; private static object syncRoot = new Object();



        private static Container objectFactory = null; 
        private Locator()
        {
            objectFactory = new Container(
                 x =>
                 {

                    x.For<myservice>().Use<myserviceclient>();                        </myserviceclient></myservice>
 
                     x.For<ihelper>().Use<realhelper>();

  
                     x.For<iinterface1>().Use<implementation1>()
                         .Setter().IsTheDefault();
                 });
        }
 
        public static Locator Instance
        {
            get 
            {         
                if (_instance == null) 
                {            
                    lock (syncRoot)             
                    {               
                        if (_instance == null)                   
                            _instance = new Locator();            
                    }         
                }         
                return _instance;      
            }
        }
 
        public object getObjectInstance()
        {

            return objectFactory.GetInstance();
        }
 

        public object getObjectInstance(Dictionary items)
        {

            var args = new ExplicitArguments();
 
            foreach (var item in items)
            {
                //args.Set(item);
                args.SetArg(item.Key, item.Value);
            }
            return objectFactory.GetInstance(args);
        }

In code I'm calling:

Locator.Instance.getObjectInstance()

The second method allow you to pass in constructor parameters.

All this means I can remove references to StructureMap from my Code and, if need be,
swap out IoC containters without affecting the rest of the code. In fact, this happened eventually.

StructureMap looked a good candidate, the fluent interface is nice and there's no XML if you don't want it! But, I did find the that the lack of decent documentation was an issue.
There was a lot of information - but scattered around. I didn't want to spent ages hunting stuff down.

Unity, I'm afraid, seemed over complicated. I'm still getting my head round other .Net stuff and I wanted to minimise the amount to learn.

That left Spring.... which, all being well, I'll cover in part 3.

Early Entity Framework thoughts

2010-09-20T17:48:00.000+01:00

It's been a few weeks since my last post, but I've been reading and working with a couple of good books.

One of those was O'Reilly's Programming Entity Framework (ISBN 9780596807276).
It's not an easy read, but, then again, it's not really meant to be. The topic is huge with ramifications across any multi-tier application.
I'm currently looking at an N-tier app with a combination of WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET presentation layers, so having the underlying technology and architecture right is critical.
With that in mind, the sections on WCF RIA and Data services are very helpful and the worked examples are excellent to go through.

Now, behind all this is a niggle along the lines of "I've seen this before"... where?
Well, Hibernate's been around Java world some time (Nhibernate more recently for MS) and, before that, you have J2EE's early awkward/abortive (choose your adjective) attempts at ORM using EJB 1 and 2.
EJB3 and Hibernate now provide a data access layer with Spring or EJB3 session beans sitting above that providing declarative transaction management and access control.
We had Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) for passing data across layers.

Moving across to .NET4 we have the DTO equivalent - i.e. POCOs or STEs or RIA Services' own cross-tier mechanism. You also have EF4 providing the ORM and data access, then WCF in it's various forms provides the service/session layer.

So, for N-tier apps, I get a feeling of it being a case of "Hello Microsoft, welcome to my world!".
It's early days and I'll see how this all goes in MS-land. Having done some prototyping, I have to say is that the MS tooling goes a good way to smoothing out a lot of bumps in the road.
I'm still waiting for Netbeans/Eclipse/MyEclipse to get to the level of Visual Studio tooling - especially when developing UIs.

See you back here soon.

Quartz.NET

2010-08-10T18:56:00.001+01:00

I haven't got round to trying Spring.NET yet, but had a play with another Java-to-.NET port: Quartz.NET.

I'm sure that there are other posts/tutorials about how to get it working, but I'll add in my twopennyworth as a step-by-step account of what I did.

1. Downloaded latest version of Quartz.NET - 1.0.2

2. Using VS2010, I created a Web Project and added references to the Quartz and Common.Logging dll's that are in the bin directory

3. For good measure I also added a reference to the log4net dll - I would be using this in the Quartz job.

4. For log4net config, I kept this separate from the application and placed a log4net.config file in project. I then referenced this in Global.asax as follows:

log4net.Config.DOMConfigurator.ConfigureAndWatch(new System.IO.FileInfo(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase + "log4net.config"));

My log4net config file looked like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<log4net>
  <root>
    <level value="DEBUG" />
    <appender-ref ref="RollingFileAppender"/>
  </root>

  <appender name="RollingFileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender">
    <file value="logs\Logfile.log" />
    <appendToFile value="true" />
    <lockingModel type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender+MinimalLock" />
    <rollingStyle value="Composite"/>
    <datePattern value="yyyyMMdd"/>
    <maxSizeRollBackups value="10" />
    <maximumFileSize value="1000KB" />
    <staticLogFileName value="true" />
    <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
      <conversionPattern value="%d [%t]%-5p %c [%x] - %m%n" />
    </layout>
  </appender>

</log4net>

5. Ran the database script (for SQL server) to create the relevant tables.

6. Updated the Web. Config file as follows:

  <configSections>

    <section name="quartz" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler, System, Version=1.0.5000.0,Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
  </configSections>

  <quartz>
    <add key="quartz.scheduler.instanceName" value="CommerceScheduler" />
    <!-- Configure Thread Pool -->
    <add key="quartz.threadPool.type" value="Quartz.Simpl.SimpleThreadPool, Quartz" />
    <add key="quartz.threadPool.threadCount" value="10" />
    <add key="quartz.threadPool.threadPriority" value="Normal" />
    <!-- Configure Job Store -->
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.misfireThreshold" value="60000" />
    <!--<add key="quartz.jobStore.type" value="Quartz.Simpl.RAMJobStore, Quartz" />-->
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.type" value="Quartz.Impl.AdoJobStore.JobStoreTX, Quartz" />
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.dataSource" value="default" />
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.tablePrefix" value="QRTZ_" />
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.clustered" value="true" />
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.lockHandler.type" value="Quartz.Impl.AdoJobStore.UpdateLockRowSemaphore, Quartz" />
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.driverDelegateType" value="Quartz.Impl.AdoJobStore.SqlServerDelegate, Quartz" />
    <add key="quartz.dataSource.default.connectionString" value="Data Source=Server_Name;Initial Catalog=quartz;Integrated Security=True" />
    <add key="quartz.dataSource.default.provider" value="SqlServer-20" />
    <add key="quartz.jobStore.useProperties" value="true" />
         </quartz>

7. Created a test job:

public class QuartzJob1 : IJob

{

protected static log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);

void IJob.Execute(JobExecutionContext context)

{

log.Debug("QuartzJob1 run");

}

8. For testing purposes created a class with the following static method.

public static void InitQuartz()

{

// construct a scheduler factory

ISchedulerFactory schedFact = new StdSchedulerFactory();

// get a scheduler

IScheduler sched = schedFact.GetScheduler();

sched.Start();

// construct job info

JobDetail jobDetail = new JobDetail("myJob", null, typeof(QuartzJob1));

// fire every hour

Trigger trigger = TriggerUtils.MakeMinutelyTrigger();

// start on the next even hour

trigger.StartTimeUtc = TriggerUtils.GetNextGivenMinuteDate(DateTime.UtcNow, 1);

trigger.Name = "myTrigger";

sched.ScheduleJob(jobDetail, trigger);

}

9. Global.asax added a call to InitQuartz()

10. Ran the application.

You should see a log message being written out every minute.

And you should see entries in the

QRTZ_SIMPLE_TRIGGERS and QRTZ_FIRED_TRIGGERS tables.

RIA Services and ASP.NET

2010-08-06T14:30:00.006+01:00

I've been looking at WCF RIA services for a new project - and looking at seeing if I can use the DomainService on an ASP.NET page directly.

This gets you to a half-way house situation where you have your middle-tier, but don't have to learn Silverlight just yet. It's not immediately obvious where to start, but you need to get hold of the RIA services toolkit (for SL4... I'm working with VS2010) - which then gives you a DomainDataSource available for use on .aspx pages.

So.... created my DomainService with a couple of related entities.

pulled in a couple of DomainDataSources for the master and detail queries and hooked up a grid for the master query and DetailView for the detail.

The basic concept worked fine!

But.. then I tried to enable paging and sorting in the master and detail view and got this error

The method ‘Skip’ is only supported for sorted input in LINQ to Entities. The method ‘OrderBy’ must be called before the method ‘Skip’.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.NotSupportedException: The method ‘Skip’ is only supported for sorted input in LINQ to Entities. The method ‘OrderBy’ must be called before the method ‘Skip’.

Hmmm....

It turns out (thanks to this link) that you need to add some default ordering to your query methods in the DomainService. This enforces the ordering before any other modifier.

Training

2010-08-04T22:52:00.000+01:00

Running an ASP.NET training course recently got me thinking about the range of skills someone needs nowadays working in IT.

The students came from a wide range of backgrounds - some with more or less development experience, but the range of topics we were covering on was huge:

HTML
Javascript
C#
OO concepts
XML
Security
Database access
Visual Studio IDE (a course in itself!)

... and we're not even talking about particularly complex sites.

If you are talking about complex enterprise applications, then you're into services (of varying kinds), AJAX, async messaging, enterprise integration, design patterns, various competing Microsoft and Java/J2EE technologies, etc, etc

I've picked this up over many years in the industry - these students are faced with a bewildering array of information to absorb at the outset. Unfortunately, all too often, potential employers want to see the "finished" article - but it doesn't happen overnight.

I wish them well on their chosen career path - if they appreciate that being in IT means being willing to look at new ideas and continue learning, then they're a good part of the way there to appreciating what IT is as a profession.

.NET IoC

2010-08-04T22:31:00.000+01:00

Blogging is a new departure for me, but now I've started my own company (Solutionist) - it seemed like a good time to start... so here goes...

I've been working a lot with .NET technologies lately and have been trying to pull across my

existing Java/J2EE knowledge as a frame of reference.

Something that was sorely missing was Dependency Injection - I'd become fairly hooked on Spring for that and was really missing it in Microsoft World. So, finding Spring.NET and Microsoft's own Unity framework has come as a bit of a relief. Now it's just a case of seeing which one "fits" better.

Hopefully, over the next few days as I try them both out, I'll write it up.