Chris Cyvas

If you have made changes to files and have not committed them, but then find that you need to revert the file to a the previous state and you don’t want to lose those changes, simply create a patch for the file. Save the patch file to the same directory and now you have captured your changes since the last commit. Now, revert your changes, make the necessary changes to the project and then apply the patch to get your changes back into the file. If you have to make changes to the files you patched, then you may have some manual work to do there, but if not, you should be golden.

I’ve been fairly quiet over the last few months. Most of that is due to the new addition to my family (my new son, Harrison), but some of it is because I am in mad scientist mode. That entails a ton of reading and prototyping. I’ve been taking a close look at the available ORM’s in the market – and trying to understand a lot of the arguments / concerns around the ADO.NET Entity Framework – namely persistence ignorance and the like.

I’ve also started taking a good, close look at NHibernate again (thanks Yitzchok, for prodding me). Back in 2005 / 2006 time frame I had looked at NHibernate and I wasn’t diggin’ it. We were looking to use it as the base data access framework in our product and I was pretty well against it at the time. Things change. It has matured (as have I ) and it looks to have a lot of upside. So I am strongly considering it for the direction we want to go in with dashCommerce. I am watching what the Entity Framework guys are doing, but their solutions to POCO usage and object state maintenance puts the burden back on the developer and I’m not digging that. We’ll see how it shakes out, but right now, I’d say NHibernate is the front runner. Thoughts?

I’ve also been looking at the Managed Extensibility Framework. dashCommerce is going to get bigger and bigger and I’m looking for ways to manage that growth and to allow developers to extend the base product fairly easily. The MEF is still pretty young, and I haven’t gotten into the weeds with it yet, but it does look promising so I’ll keep you posted on what I find. If anyone out there has some in the weeds experience with the MEF, I’d love to hear it.

One thing I would like to do is capture some of the refactoring work in some screencasts. It seems to me this might be pretty neat and valuable to people. Greenfield development is always pretty easy, but how do you take a system like dashCommerce and refine it to have a better separation of concerns, a better SOA architecture, etc.? Does that sound like something you might want to see? No promises, as those things take some time to prepare, but I’d like to hear if you think there would be value there?

Happy Holiday Season to Everyone!

While writing this, I was listening to "Northern Downpour" by Panic At the Disco