Frans Bouma's blog

You might have heared about the DAL generator I released last year, LLBLGen, which as a surprise to me, became a worldwide success (over 25,000 downloads). I'm currently busy developing its big brother LLBLGen Pro, which should be released later this summer. As a quick update on what this successor is capable of, some lines of example code which uses some generated code (entities, collections) that is produced with an alpha version of LLBLGen Pro.

It loads a collection of entity objects (that's right, normal entity classes) of the type OrderDetail, from the Northwind database, which contain references to the product with ID '24', binds it using databinding to a datagrid in a form, which allows full editing of the OrderDetail objects, and after that, all changed objects are saved using an embedded transaction to the persistent storage using a single line of code. I think it's pretty neat :) Of course this is one of the many ways to retrieve / construct entity objects using the O/R mapper code generated by LLBLGen Pro. More updates later on.

I'm now working for a week or so with VS.NET 2003 and it has some neat features that version 2002 didn't have which are, well, neat to have, but also started me thinking why they are implemented the way they are and why there is so much ground left untouched. Below I've formulated some wishes for the next version of Visual Studio.NET (2004?), and as with every wish-list, I hope the wishes come true, or better: what's wished for is a bad example of a short sighted vision of how reality should be and the next version of VS.NET (2004?) will prove that :)

I saw several "Is IE dead?" blogs and most recently DonXML's blog about this subject and I really think this discussion is not focussing on the real issue.

Yesterday, the Firebird team released their .NET provider for the Open Source database Firebird (based on the Interbase code). The provider is also open source and of course free. I haven't played with the Firebird database recently but according to the features Interbase had and looking at what the Firebird team added / updated in the source code, it is a massive alternative for those developers who need a true RDBMS with ACID compliance throughout the system and full stored procedure and trigger support but can't afford SqlServer (or alternatives which cost even more money).

A quick note on the Hungarian Notation/Coding blog I wrote this morning and which was food for some good replies from Patrick and Chad. I now am a full day clean, that is, no Hungarian Notated member variable or parameter left my fingertips. The arguments I had this morning, about the naming problems of some parameters I had and the prefixing of private member variables, were not that hard to overcome.

Today, is a memorable day for me. This morning I had to bite the bullet: get rid of my Hungarian Coding style in C#. Not because I hate Hungarian Coding, on the contrary: I love it, but because I have to. The reason for this is that when you want to sell a library which targets .NET, you simply can't feed your customers a library with interfaces which use input parameters like cmdCommandToExecute or efEntityField. I did convince myself when I started this project, it was my code and I should decide how the interfaces looked like. But this is just plain stubbornness. A customer doesn't give a you-know-what about the zillion + 1 reasons you can bring to the table why you had to make the interfaces of the classes inconsistent with the rest of the classes used in the application (f.e. the .NET classes).

Which concurrency control method do you use most of the time? "First Save Wins" ? (optimistic locking in ADO.NET) "Last Save Wins" ? (Overwrite the row, no matter what). Ever wondered what the difference between the two is when it comes to efficiency? Most people haven't and think "Last Save Wins" is Bad^TM and "First Save Wins" is Good^TM. But both make at least one person loose his work to preserve the work of another person. I read a thread today in the microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.adonet newsgroup where one person asked how he could make the SQL generator in Visual Studio.NET to use the Last Save Wins method and another person stepped in and bashed him for using a not very smart concurrency control method like Last Save Wins. But does it matter which one you pick when both are as inefficient as you can possibly make them to be (i.e. someone looses work) ?

On May 20, HP regained the TPC-C performance crown for non-clustered (you know, "Big Iron") , using Microsoft Windows server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SqlServer 2000 Enterprise Edition 64-bit. It almost also nailed the clustered (you know, "Little Iron") record, also HP/Windows/SqlServer, result which was submitted September 2001. A stunning 707,102 transactions per minute were clocked on this beast with 64 Itanium 2 processors.