Regular Programming

The Honeymoon is Over, My Relationship with NHibernate

huenemeca — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:45:45 +0000

I have been using NHibernate for over a year now to help me develop 2DoNext.com. After all this time I have very mixed emotions about it. When I was first introduced to NHibernate I was really excited. It seemed to be able to handle the database tasks that as a programmer I don’t enjoy doing. Such as basic updating, selecting, and deleting. I quickly installed it and went through the tutorials, I talked to the programmer who introduced it too me and tried to get as much information as I could. It was like the first few weeks when you start dating that new girl, like heaven. It was a dream come true, I was in a wonderland thinking of all the great things that I could do with this wonderful technology.

As with all relationships slowly reality began to set in. Setting up NHibernate is not as easy as they would like you to think. Finding the “best” way to implement it in a web architecture was hard to say the least. Searching online I found more arguments than I did solutions. In the end I just had to pick the one I thought was best based on my knowledge of ASP.Net and the little I knew of NHibernate. It turns out that there was a few flaws in the implementation that I picked but I think I fixed them.

After the excitement reality sets in. The learning curve for NHibernate is really high. There are several things that are built into it which are not very easy to do because of the complexity of the architecture, such as using subclasses, joining multiple tables to create one class, and selecting items that are only have specific attributes.

What really makes her tick? One of the biggest problems that I have had with it is that I need to know what is going on in the database. Sometimes there are situations where I will need to get into the database and change something. Maybe delete a bad entry or a duplicate row. When I was first using NHibernate I was not comfortable doing this because I was not sure what it was really doing with all the index rows and such. I have since figured out what is going on in the database and realized that it isn’t easy to just delete a row in some cases.
As a quick example on my book rating site we have many collections, such as books you have rated, books you own, and books you recommend. If say in the books you own list somehow a book gets inserted twice. I would like to go to the database and just delete one. But with NHibernate it also stores the order the books go in the list. So you have to delete the row and update all records that have a order number higher than that row to shift them down one.

Well, this is getting long. So I will finish it up. By saying that I have read a lot of the arguments for and against NHibernate and personally I think that in the end I spent as much time trying to learn NHibernate as I would have if I just did the Data access work on my own. For me I am not planning on using NHibernate again because I spent and still spend too much time trying to figure out how to do something which I could easily do using a Stored Procedure and a Data Object.

So the honeymoon is over, we have realized that we are not compatible, and it is best that we go our separate ways.

Next time I will talk about what I use instead of NHibernate, because something has to be done about all that Update, Insert, and Delete code.

Building an IE toolbar… hard

huenemeca — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:09:26 +0000

Just for fun I decided to try and build an IE toolbar. I naturally turned to google to find out the best way to go about this. I am a C# programmer so I wanted to find a way to make my toolbar in C#. All sites that I find are talking about com objects and guids and registry keys. Oh my, I am sure that I could figure this out but isn’t there an easier way. I found this article on code project (http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/dotnetbandobjects.asp) while it makes it seem really easy and the code is very helpful, it is still quite complicated. I must have missed a step somewhere because my toolbar didn’t show up when I restarted IE.

I guess I just thought that because IE is microsoft and C# is micrsoft that there would be some easy way to create a plugin. I should have known better after trying to make a visual studio .net plugin.

Does anyone know an easier way? Or should I just keep trying the codeproject way?

No more computer architecture

huenemeca — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:59:57 +0000

A few days ago I was looking at the Computer Science home page for the University I attended (BYU) and I noticed an announcement about changes to the undergraduate program. Naturally I was interested to see what it could be. As I read I saw that they are dropping the computer architecture courses from the required courses. I must admit I have mixed feelings about this. I think that those are important classes for computer science students. It helps them understand what is really happening when they write their programs. On the other hand they were also very hard classes and while it is good to know it is not something that I have used very much in my programming career.

The replacement classes are “Software Design and Testing” and “Internet Programming”. I wish they had both these courses when I was an undergrad. They both sound very interesting and useful in a professional environment.

So I have to say that I really like the changes they are making. I think that it pushes the program more toward education that is useful and helpful to the student.

VS 2008 Nested Master Pages!

huenemeca — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:23:24 +0000

I have heard for a while that this would be supported and now Scott Guthrie has posted a little tutorial showing it in action. This is a great addition to VS, can’t wait to get my hands on the final release.

What is polymorphism?

huenemeca — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:00:02 +0000

“C# cannot do polymorphism because it does not allow multiple inheritance.”

I heard someone say this once and I wanted to set the record straight. It is true that C# does not allow multiple inheritance but this has nothing to do with polymorphism.

Multiple Inheritance

Multiple inheritance is when a class has the ability to inherit the properties and methods of more than one class. C# does not allow this but you can implement more than one interface which is makes it so that you can do about the same things.

Polymorphism

Polymorphism is when you have a set of classes that all inherit from a common base class. When you have this you can cast the different classes to the base class and use the methods from the base class that all the classes have in common.

To make things worse the person who said this to me was interviewing me for a new job. I just sat there and stared at him. I didn’t want to argue because that is not the best way to get a job. Luckily it was a group interview and someone else changed the subject. I got the job and he turned out to be a pretty good programmer, with one small misunderstanding.

Who am I?

huenemeca — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:51:34 +0000

I am a programmer. That is what I like to call it. I could be a Software Engineer, or a Computer Scientist, or maybe just a computer guy, but I prefer programmer.

I have a B.S. and a Masters in Computer Science from Brigham Young University. I have been working as a C# programmer since 2002. I really enjoy programming and I think that C# is a very good programming language.

For fun I like to read, play games, programming, Dodgers baseball, and spending time with my family.

I am interested in Web programming (Ajax), Machine Learning, and basically automating everyday tasks.