.Net
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.Net
I’m at Convergence this week in New Orleans. If you’re unfamiliar with the conference (and don’t want to follow the nifty link), all you really need to know is that it’s Microsoft’s convention for their business solutions products. For me, that means Dynamics Great Plains. I bring this up because in the last session I attended yesterday, Louis Maresca mentioned a problem I remembered having with GP Web Services. GP WS has a serious problem when you first instantiate the proxy object: it can take seconds (over 30 on our older systems—I put a timer in just to...
I had an interesting problem crop up trying to run my own application this week. We have a routine that uses an excel spreadsheet to import orders into Dynamics GP that includes some twists that aren’t handled well by Integration Manager. Since the application runs from the network (using ClickOnce) and because these orders can be substantial and represent a commitment of corporate resources, we want some control over who can run them. Specifically, we use Active Directory group membership with hard-coded/defined groups. One of the groups I want to allow is Domain Admins. And yes, this is...
I’m on record as dissenting from some of the planks of the Alt.Net bandwagon. I question design for testability and have extended that to questioning what I consider to be the over-use of Dependency Injection (though I’ve also talked about using it successfully in a project that I believe warranted its use). Further, in my last post, I asked if the Alt.Net folks couldn’t expand their treatments of design principles to include contra-indications or fault points. I also decried those who actively stifle alternative viewpoints, though I left it vague about who I think might do so. Given...
Many of the interesting .Net bloggers are part of the Alt.Net crowd; evangelizing Dependency Injection, Design for Testability, Test Driven Development, SOLID design and other development practices that they find useful in their work. It doesn’t take long reading these blogs to pick up on what looks like an unforgiving attitude towards those who don’t use the latest acronyms in their software development. This acrimony is unfortunate because most often what is at the heart of those who question the standard Alt.Net toolset isn’t so much principle as it is context. A Fundamental Assumption Unfortunately, discussing...
I spent some quality time googling this and even went and asked the nascent Stack Overflow community and didn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. Being the intrepid sort, I opened up a test project and started poking around, compiling information from a number of sources and playing until I got something that worked. For your amusement and/or edification, I’ll document what I found.
What I Want to Do
The basic scenario is that many typical “commodity” web applications use databases to store their information. Since most web hosting services come with a single database but charge extra for additional databases,...
Your environment can have a profound effect on how you develop software. The details of what I discuss here have zero practical meaning outside of the .Net world (though you can probably find parallels in other environments). That’s because .Net developers have access to tools that invalidate rules of software design that are fundamentally important elsewhere (before you question whether an environment can effect what is good design, consider the difference between good design in C and, say, Prolog). For .Net, the free availability of a tool like Typemock makes a major design consideration simply disappear—namely, testability. Typemock literally...
Prior developers and others who should have known better at my company decided many years ago that our warehouse people simply could not do their jobs unless we unleashed the ability for them to use multiple "bin" locations for each item. Now, strictly speaking, this was not really the case, because our needs simply aren’t that complex. We manufacture reading glasses so we don’t need inventory aging and all the warehouse people really needed were different sites to separate receiving from QA from shipping. In other words, we have product staging, but each stage is physically as well as...
Dependency Injection is a design pattern used to abstract a provider from the class using it. Specifically, the calling class assumes responsibility for managing the provider instead of the class being called. Data access is a classic example of a provider that can be injected into classes that use it. If you decide to implement the DI pattern in a data access project, the most common method of doing so is to add an interface parameter on the constructor of each class that needs data access.
A C# Example
A class that accesses data might look like this (if it were programmed...
The trend towards increasing security introduces a number of intricacies for medium-sized business software shops using Active Directory Domains. An internal domain with more than a dozen workstations can introduce issues that are old hat for larger shops, but way beyond anything a small business will have to deal with. I ran into one such issue recently when I decided it'd be a cool thing for one of my apps to actually run from the network.
The Problem
The first sign I had a problem was when a module that worked fine locally threw a "System.Security.SecurityException" when run from a network share....