ObjectSharp

Last week at TechEd I gave a talk about building data access layers with the Entity Framework. I covered various approaches from not having a data access layer at all, to fully encapsulation of the entity framework - and some hybrid approaches along the way. I gave the first instance of this on Tuesday and then a repeat on Thursday. To those ...

So the million dollar question is: Does the Entity Framework replace the need for a Data Access Layer? If not, what should my Data Access Layer look like if I want to take advantage of the Entity Framework? In this multi-part series, I hope to explore my thoughts on this question. I don't think there is a single correct answer. Architecture is ...

This coming Thursday, Microsoft is hosting the annual Toronto Architect Forum at their offices in Mississauga. The target audience is architects that are *not* in the financial service industry. Here's the agenda: 8:00 - 8:30 am Breakfast and Registration 8:30 - 9:00 am Welcome by Mark Relph 9:00 - 9:30 am Architectural Agility as ...

One of my readers was watching the DNRTV episode I did on LINQ recently and had this question:  At some point, when you're explaining object initializers and anonymous types, you say something regarding extension methods, like how they could be used with the anonymous types. I'm not sure how that'd work: if the anonymous type gets named ...

Do you consider your database as a service? It's worthwhile to review the tenents of a service oriented architecture. The first two tenents above are probably the most relevant to my question. If you do all of your data access through stored procedures, then you might say your database boundary is explicit. If your database doesn't depend on ...

It's been a theme for me over the past couple of weeks where people have mentioned that they can't afford the time to do modeling. If you've done a lot of UML modeling, you know what I'm talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way. Now just to ward of the UML flames, even when UML modeling seems like a waste of time, it may actual pay for ...

You may have noticed that the refactoring menu's that you see in the code editor are also available in the Class Designer. Furthermore, you can also copy & paste things from one class to another. So if you copy a property from one class to another, not only do you get the property added to the class, but also all the code in your getter's and ...

Yes, it's the longest title of all VS Live Orlando presentations! It's a big topic and it deserves a big name. I'm heading out Monday night to hurricane country to deliver this talk on Tuesday morning. I like this topic because when you get into it, it's like an onion. It doesn't look like something terribly sophisticated but as you get into you ...

Ramkumar Kothandaraman has a good article just released on MSDN discussing SOA Challenges: Entity Aggregation. Aggregation is a much better name than “composable entities“ since it's definition implies that property sets of an entity grow as more child entities are merged into it. This also implies that you need a mapping layer and ...

Scott Hanselman does a nice 30 second intro into layered design. If any of this is new to you, run quickly to read this. Scott does a quick bash at Datasets (although doesn't say why) and in my new role as DataSet boy I have to disagree with him and evangelize how simple datasets can make a lot of the code written by the typical programmer: CRUD ...