Huy Nguyen has a great write up on implementing a generic repository interface that supports Entity Framework 4. His code is written in C# and today I had to rewrite it in VB.Net. The VB.Net version looks like this Public Interface IRepository Inherits IDisposable Function GetQuery(Of TEntity As Class)As IQueryable(Of TEntity) Function GetAll(Of TEntity As Class)() As IEnumerable(Of TEntity) Function Find(Of TEntity As Class)(predicate As Expression(Of Func(Of TEntity, Boolean))) As IEnumerable(Of TEntity) Function [Single](Of TEntity […] Read more »
Don’t Base64 encode things that users should enter
Base64 encoding is great for converting binary data into a string representation which can be transported over text based protocols like soap or json. Unfortunately Base64 uses a character set which is difficult for humans to interpret so for any data that needs to be human interpretable, like binary representations added to urls, base64 can be a real problem. Douglas Crockford solved this issue years ago with his special Base32 encoding scheme which uses a […] Read more »
Is EDA the way to go?
I have been reading a lot about Event Driven Architecture (EDA) in relation to SOA recently and while the ideas are very interesting and the benefits are alluring it adds an additional complexity and uncertainty to the overall behaviour. Two good articles on EDA are http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventCollaboration.html and http://eaipatterns.com/docs/EDA.pdf From my view the main problem is that when implementing a business process that spans several services (for example entity services) we do not generally want the […] Read more »
Jim Webber: “Business people are spaghettiheads!”
This is a guest post by Herbjörn Wilhelmsen @ Objectware After working for years with business people and SOA Jim Webber has come around to thinking that fighting against real world complexity is neither successful nor valuable. Dr Jim “World Wide” Webber – an author as well as global architecture lead for Thoughtworks – gave an interview last month after finishing his “Guerilla SOA” presentation at the Developer Summit 2008 conference in Stockholm. Watch the interview […] Read more »
Norwegian SOA weekend
I spent last weekend with a bunch of my Norwegian colleagues at Objectware listening to their experiences implementing SOA and looking over the material that they have produced. It’s great to hear some really pragmatic and developer-oriented ideas about how we can implement SOA. In contrast to many of the theories and ideas that I have been reading up on in my current project, Objectware’s patterns and theories support the developers as well as the […] Read more »
Agile modeling with UML 2 templates for Visio
I have been working on putting together the documentation for a project these last few days and I use Visio for all my diagrams. I don’t always create UML diagrams for my projects because they just take too much work. UML in Visio is difficult to use as pure documentation since you also need to create the underlying structures for it to work properly and there is some pretty extensive validation built in, although obviously […] Read more »