I’ve had a pretty good couple of weeks. I don’t feel as though I talk a whole lot about “me” on this blog – most of it is related to dashCommerce, which is ok, but occasionally I like to peel things back and throw some personal stuff out there.
The first thing that happened was a comment from someone I work with. We were talking about the architecture for a large project and I was struggling a bit with how to overcome some hurdles. I naturally questioned whether I needed to get more into the code – to help things along. His response was refreshing:
Just remember the guiding principle is that your value to the organization is not in key strokes – it’s in thought.
This was fantastic to hear and I think it goes a long way toward validating the idea that probably the most important thing that you can do for you is never stop looking for people or environments where you are valued.
Another thing that happened, which is dashCommerce related, is that Xerox has used dashCommerce for their new online store. They have done a great job at skinning the site and it looks great! I wish them the best – and I think it is important to note that the mouse / windows you are using to read this were originally created at Xerox PARC – a division of Xerox Corporation. This, in my opinion, is a pretty great validation of dashCommerce 3.0.
Finally, I have been spending a lot of time outside of Microsoft technologies and I am really grateful for the experience. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with Microsoft technologies – to the contrary – I still think they are great, but there is a huge amount of value in moving out of that space to see how others do things.
I don’t know about you, but I go through cycles of discovery and development. By this I mean, I usually go on a reading binge of new things to check out. This is usually coupled with small prototypes to get the feel for a technology and evaluate it. I’ve also spent a good amount of time writing a loosely coupled ORM that I wanted to use for dashCommerce development, but with the recent announcements from the ADO.NET team here and here, I wonder if there is a future for something like this? I was going to open source it with the MIT license. It’s pretty small at 82KB right now. It works, but there is some refinement that needs to go into it. Anyone interested? 
And of course, the arrival of Harrison (our 2month old little boy!) has added a lot more to my overall gratefulness that I have a happy and healthy family!
Let the good times roll!
November 3, 2008 at 1:04 am
Writing a reliable ORM isn’t exactly for the faint of heart, having experienced writing my own trial implementation a while ago, and after having used several implementations as a consumer. Best of luck though!
Personally, I’ve been investigating Entity Framework, Linq to SQL, and most recently NHibernate for use in a new software development project. I’m really working on making the shift to domain driven design and test driven development at the same time, so its a lot of work.
I’d be intersted to see which implementation you end up choosing for DashCommerce. A good query language is obviously important, as well as a mature ORM codebase, and persistance ignorance. These considerations have led us to the decision to use NHibernate for our project.
I really hope that you make the right choice for DashCommerce. I’m thinking of using the product, and potentially contributing some pieces of code to it the future. Having a nice ORM to work with, and a clear seperation of concerns would be great.
Cheers,
Kris
November 3, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I’m not sold on NHibernate – in my tests it is not really fast. I know there is a ton of other upside to it, but seeing as we support the project by offering hosting services – I am really concerned with speed and performance.
I’ve been running some tests on an ORM test bench I made (SubSonic, LightSpeed, NHibernate, Entity Framework, Ling 2 Sql, My Project, and SqlClient parameterized query as a baseline), it’s far from scientific, but I am still working through some things.
At any rate, since dC 3.0 was a complete re-write, it was a 1.0 in certain respects and I want to get some cleaner boundaries, a good API, and some more loose coupling via DI/IoC.
June 3, 2009 at 3:04 am
[...] you should probably check out a few posts, where I cover such things as increasing sales trends, Xerox’s use of dashCommerce, and increasing membership. The good news is that things are even better than they were last year! [...]