ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate Yup, the RC is out, read about it here and here, then grab it here, and upgrade your projects by following directions. Watch out for bugs though, apparently a few surprises made it in to this release. MonetDB Not really news, but I’ve been looking a bit at MonetDB. It makes…
try-catch-FAIL
Month: <span>January 2009</span>
The pain and horror of hand-coded data access code
At my day job, we finally decided to cull out a couple of columns that were no longer needed in our database schema. We could have left them in, but since they were in a table that typically ends up with several hundred million rows, we thought it *might* actually save us some space in…
Alternatives to Relational Storage, Part 1 – Introduction
As you might can tell from Friday’s post, my recurring obsession with persistence has flared up again. In all my years of development, I have still yet to find a solution that feels "perfect". Perhaps the holy grail of storage is impossible to obtain. Perhaps there is no perfect solution. Maybe it’s some Matrix-style philosophical…
Daily Link Roundup for Jan. 26, 2009
Thoughts about IRepository<T> If you use NHibernate or are just following "best practices" and wrapping all your data access code in a repository class, check this out. The post makes some good arguments against exposing IRepository<T> directly. From personal experience, I can tell you that exposing anything to clients that ties them to the underlying…
Data Storage: Why is the answer always "relational"?
I’ve been thinking a lot about persistence and storage lately, and I think I’ve finally come to the conclusion that relational databases are almost universally being used incorrectly, and that many times an alternative persistence medium is actually a much better solution. I think relational databases are good for holding data that needs to be…
Unit Testing in .NET Part 5 – Moq-ing your way to simpler tests
Previously on "Unit Testing in .NET", we’ve looked at: Introduction to Testing Your First Unit Tests Asserting That Your Code Rocks Overcoming Testing Hurdles That means you should be comfortable with the all the fundamental concepts of software testing, and you should be equipped to deal with some common testing headaches. In this post, we’re…
Daily Link Roundup for Jan. 22, 2009
Delete Links == Security Hole I don’t completely agree with this post (if your delete action isn’t protected by some sort of authentication and authorization system, well, your data probably deserves to be wiped), but fundamentally I agree that GET requests should *get* something, not delete it. I like the idea of using AJAX to…
Daily Link Roundup for Jan. 21, 2009
Alt.NET Podcast on Object Databases In recent months, I've started to think that many applications use a relational database when they really don't need one. I was glad to hear that I'm not the only person thinking that way. If you are working on a new project, be sure to shop around before you settle…
Daily Link Roundup
I haven’t done the best job in the new year of making three blog posts a week. Sorry, but things have been crazy-busy, just not crazy-busy with bloggable stuff. So, in an effort to post more frequently, I’m going to (hopefully) start posting a few links to other blogs, tools, stories, etc. that are worth…
Unit Testing in .NET Part 4 – Overcoming Testing Hurdles
By this point in the series, you should know quite a bit about the basics of unit testing in .NET. You should be able to write unit tests using NUnit, and you (hopefully) understand the value that unit testing brings to the table. As you’ve started to apply what you’ve learned though (and you are…