Chris Cyvas

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

A few days ago I added a NullPaymentProvider to dashCommerce. Many people have asked for something like this – either in order to test dashCommerce without a payment provider account set up or, in some cases, to use for situations where you want to record the order, but payment will be made later (i.e. in person, by check, by post, etc.).

If you want to check it out, pull the latest bits from out Subversion source control repo (check the FAQ for info on how to do this) and run the installer on a new database.

I hope this helps someone.

I mentioned a while back the idea of having a conference call over Skype for dashCommerce. Well, the arrival of a new little one put that on hold for a while, but I am back on this and I would like to do something December 3, 2008 @ 6:30 PM EST. I’d was also thinking I would like to do it using Microsoft SharedView which will limit us to 14 additional people. So, if you want to be a part of this, let me know. Please leave a comment below. We may end up using Skype as well as I don’t believe SharedView has support for voice.

I anticipate we’ll go for about an hour – maybe a little longer.

For anyone out there wondering how hard it is to get a CI build up and running, you should know that it has become very frictionless. After reading through a great tutorial and firing it up I spent about 1 hour. From the time I actually forced a build till I had a successful build was 12 minutes as you can see from the emails:

Omar’s tutorial is great.

A feature I am adding to dashCommerce is an AutoComplete feature to the Order Search, which will allow you to type in the first few characters of an order number and the AutoComplete feature will bring up a list of possible order numbers.

The problem I ran into while prototyping the work is related to the fact that dashCommerce order numbers are numeric strings. For example: 0123-4567-8901-2345. We did this because for our international friends, order numbers such as 09UIY79T6R$NHG would not be too helpful.

I am using an AJAX-enabled WCF Service as the endpoint and so I had the following code in my FindOrder method:

      list.Add("0234-5678-901");
      list.Add("1123-4567-890");
      list.Add("1234-5678-901");

The interesting behavior that occurs when trying to get this to work is that the results are kinda funky:

Not exactly the anticipated result. But, there is a way to get this to work as expected. For each item you add to the list, you need to add the item to the IList<T> as:

list.Add(AutoCompleteExtender.CreateAutoCompleteItem("0123-4567-890", "0123-4567-890"));

That’s ok, but not exactly great as now my service has some “UI junk” in it. I’m not entirely sure I care right now, as the service is exposed for a particular feature, but this seems to me to be – hmmm – less than good. But, once the change is made, the result is a bit better:

I only changed the first one for the demo. I hope this helps someone else who encounters the problem.

I’ve been studying alternative data access methodologies for dashCommerce as I’m not pleased with SubSonic. I’ve been looking at some alternatives and in my searching I came across LightSpeed. LightSpeed has some really nice features such as the LightSpeedContext and the UnitOfWork which encapsulate some very nice features. The model designer of LightSpeed is very nice as well – especially the round-tripping. With a new design I can see how the designer would be a very nice tool. It’s a very nice and well thought out framework. But what really struck me wasn’t necessarily the code or the model (which are really good – did I say that yet? :)) – what struck me was the speed with which Mindscape incorporates feedback from the community. As I was evaluating the technology, I asked a few questions in the forums and submitted a few suggestions about their command line generator (lsgen). They asked a few clarifying questions in return and BOOM - “We’ve added support for FEATURE X . . . it will be in the nightly builds  . . . located here .  . .” That took < 8 hours.

Now, LightSpeed is a commercial product – it’s not open source. But what Mindscape has done is really quite impressive. To evaluate, accept, and incorporate feedback that quickly into the product and to have the installer ready that afternoon is impressive – for anyone. And to me, it immediately struck me that this type of setup does a pretty good job at neutralizing the open source model. Now, I’m sure that’s not their intent – they just want to put out a great product and make some money doing it. But when I saw how quickly they turned it around – well, it got me thinking.

I’m still evaluating some different technologies, but my experience with Mindscape got me thinking about how to do software right - because those people are doing things as right as I’ve seen.

I had an idea tonight as I was chatting with Yitzchok and louisd - why not have a dashCommerce Conference Call? We can use Skype and I can include 24 others. Although, I’m not sure how that will work out . . .

Does anyone have any experience pulling something like this off? Is it a train wreck? Are there any guidelines on behaviour / etiquette, etc? - just to make sure it runs smoothly.

Opinions?