Base4 Ideas

Imprecise is not precise enough

alex@base4.net — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:10:24 GMT

I’ve been thinking about my last post, and I realized it was a bit imprecise.

See if we drill in on the axis “unsafe” versus “safe” and “useless” versus “useful” as described in the video Programming language Nirvana, Erik suggests introducing another axis that measures how precise or imprecise (or for embellishment “honest” and “dishonest”) types are in the language.

Now how exactly is this preciseness to be measured? Well the type of a method is precise if in addition to the value that is returned, it also specifies the potential effects involved in computing the result. For instance, Java’s throws clauses, or Haskell’s monads. Interestingly, if you apply this measure to dynamic languages they are trivially precise simply because they specify no type at all.

But if you take for example a property such as System.DateTime.Ticks, it is imprecise because it claims to be a long, where as in reality it is a value that changes over time, rather rapidly in fact J.

Now except for mathematically oriented languages like Haskell, which is precise, safe, and useless, most practical languages are by this definition imprecise.

So if you are really pedantic and extremely precise in your definition of “functional” programming, like say Erik, then most languages do not hit the Pure Functional Programming bar. Indeed Erik would be much happier if we agreed on a less precise word for languages that encourage a functional programming *style*. Perhaps something like “closure oriented programming” would make him happy? Examples of closures range from anonymous delegates and lambda expressions in C#, VB and F#, to even more powerful closures constructs like object expressions in F#.

Notice that a language can add excellent features that encourage a functional programming *style*. Like pattern matching which is found in both in F# and Erlang, or concurrency oriented programming found in Erlang which makes it dirt cheap to create threads, so cheap in fact that you can build clever abstractions for fault tolerant code.

Still if we return to the question of precision, one of Erik’s favorite interview questions is to ask how you might simulate one language effect with another. For instance spawning up a new thread is such a powerful effect that you can simulate mutable cells with it.

The point being that, just because you remove one imprecise language effect doesn’t mean you can’t simulate it with another even more imprecise effect…

If you want more, I suggest you check out these mind expanding videos:

Programming language Nirvana

Brian Beckman on Monads

Joe Armstrong

Joe Armstrong and Erik Meijer

Dave Thomas and Erik Meijer

F# videos

Happy viewing…

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FSharp Erlang et al are all hoaxes

alex@base4.net — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:13:04 GMT

So last night I finally picked up the courage to wander into Erik Meijer's office and introduce myself. He sits about 3 doors down from me. Anyway cue about 3 hours of very lively discussion. It all started off with me innocently talking about my vision of how metadata unlocks my dreams of a functional GUI. Oh how wrong I was! See when you talk functional with Erik, you had better be talking about a real functional language. Nothing dishonest or half baked like F#, Erlang or god forbid REST! They are all rubbish, according to Erik, at least that is, until you admit you are simply being pragmatic rather than pure! Seems Erik is giving a talk on campus next week about F# and Erlang being dishonest, I'm going to be there. Cause it is sure to be mind expanding... Oh and btw Erik, Wes and the rest of Erik's team recently released a preview of Volta... if only I could get a chance to take a look...

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My new MSDN blog

alex@base4.net — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:18:47 GMT

Okay so I've finally got around to setting up my own msdn blog.

Over there on that blog I will post all work related posts. So if you are at all interested in the EntityFramework, the Entity Data Model and Metadata you might want to head over and subscribe...

In the meantime this blog won't die... but I suspect the other one will get more attention going forward.

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Gotcha - Iterators and IDisposable

alex@base4.net — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:03:29 GMT

Okay I’ve been pretty busy recently... at Microsoft they have a phrase for this phase “Sucking on the firehose”.

But last friday evening I got to sit down with Wes Dyer, who sits about 5 doors down, and have a bit of chat (yes I talk code on Friday night).

My first question was one that has been bothering me for a while. Indeed ever since about 5 months ago when I showed how you can use Extension methods to make IDataReader play nice with LINQ…

To refresh your memory:

public static IEnumerable<IDataRecord> Enumerate(this IDataReader reader)
{

using (reader)
{

while (reader.Read())

yield return reader;

}
}

The key trick is that IDataReader extends IDataRecord too, so you can use the IDataReader Read() method to move through the IDataRecords.

Anyway what concerned me was this, what happens if you do something like this:

foreach (IDataRecord record in reader.Enumerate())
{
break;
}

It looks a lot like the iterator will never leave the using {}. Now since we are relying on the using pattern to automatically dispose the reader, I worried that the Close() method would never be called on the reader, and we would leak connections.

When I asked Wes about this, he said ‘that is amazing’, see Wes had just come out of a 2 hour meeting covering that exact topic!

It seems that what I feared, was indeed a problem in C# 2.0. But Wes implemented a fix for C# 3.0 to insure that iterators if interrupted will dispose of resources appropriately.

Now if only I could remember how Wes said the C# 3.0 compiler expanded that statement under the hood!

I have a vague recollection of how it works, but before I share it I need to be 100% sure... stay tuned!

In the meantime checkout section 10.14.4 of the C# spec... you'll see that calls to Iterators actually involve the creation of an Enumerator Object that implements IDisposable, the Close() on this object is put in a finally block to guarantee it is called, and it does the magic that insures all inner block resources are disposed.

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Bring the love back

alex@base4.net — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:55:51 GMT

I got this via Scoble, so a lot of you will know about it already, but if like me you occasionally feel overwealmed by Scoble's output you might have missed it. Very funny, and from a guy working on a campaign for Microsoft. I find this kind of thing very encouraging.

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VB Sucks

alex@base4.net — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:18:26 GMT

... is an opinion lots of C# snobs hold.

There is just one problem.

We C# snobs are often completely ill informed and ignorant when it comes to VB.NET, not that that stops us judging...

I really need to re-learn VB so I better understand VB and C#'s relative strengths.

But thanks to people like Erik Meijer, Paul Yuk and the ever vigilant Nick Randolph I already:
1) ...think VB is cool
2) ...understand that VB has significant advantages over C# in many scenarios
3) ...know VB has, and is gaining more, compelling dynamic capabilities

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SyncLINQ

alex@base4.net — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:33:06 GMT

Paul Stovell has been working on an interesting extension to LINQ called SyncLINQ.

The basic premise is that when you data bind to a LINQ expression today, if the underlying data-source changes you have no obvious way of knowing whether you should refresh the user interface. SyncLINQ fixes this by raising events from the underlying data source through the various intermediary enumerations as appropriate, so that if the resulting data actually changes you can be notified with an event.

The code revolves around a call to datasource.ToSyncLinq(), which returns something that raises changes to the underlying datasource as events and flows the event raising through any chaining of typical linq comprehensions (where, orderby, select etc)

Paul has put together an interesting demo showing how this works. The code is not available yet, but I will definitely check it out when it is.

~~Unfortunately it currently looks as if you have to call lambdas for each operation directly~~ Paul and I both find it more convenient to use lambda's directly for each operation:

.ToSyncLinq().Where(p=> p.Firstname == “Paul”).Select(p=>...

rather than using a standard LINQ comprehension:

from p in DataSource.ToSyncLinq()
where p.Firstname == “Paul”
select new …

As an added bonus the lambda approach also allows you to directly leverage two other SyncLinq features directly namely Asychronous() and Pooled() more conveniently.

The Asychronous() method call is intriguing, because it allows you to bind your linq comprehension in the foreground thread, and have a background worker thread do the work of actually filling your databound component by using events.

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Pop quiz

alex@base4.net — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 06:37:54 GMT

So I stumbled across a good article on LINQ recently. Anyway the article had some code that looked a little like this: public static Expression<Func<T,R>> Expr<T,R>(Expression<Func<T,R>> f) { return f; } Now if you are like me you will have to look at this function a couple of times, before you realize it basically returns the argument untouched. I.e. it does nothing. So the question is this, How can this function be useful?

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Gartner - Meta-Data is strategic

alex@base4.net — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:41:24 GMT

We may not have agreement about how to solve the data-silo problem, but it seems everyone thinks it is important.

Indeed it made Gartner's top ten strategic technologies for 2008 under the guise of MetaDahta (emphasis added for Tim M who is already trying to get me to MetadAta and I haven't even started yet). This is what Gartner had to say:

4. Metadata Management

Metadata is the foundation for information infrastructure and is found throughout your IT systems: in service registries and repositories, Web semantics, configuration management databases (CMDB), business service registries and in application development.

“Metadata is not just about information management,” Cearley said. “You need to look beyond that. Metadata is everywhere.”

Incidentally Gartner's number 6, Mashups and Composite Applications is a whole lot easier if you can wrap existing data sources, and 10, Social Software is a complete no brainer, but again it is Meta-Data that will take it to the next level...

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What I am reading at the moment

alex@base4.net — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 21:47:44 GMT

I've got a little time before I start at Microsoft, so I am enjoying some nice light reading about the future of data. I thought I should share what I've read so far:

The “What, Why and How of Master Data Management” (MDM).

Two things prompted me to get more familiar with the terminology around managing master data, my recent discussions with Ayende and MDM was mentioned in passing by a colleague.

The End of an Architectural Era (It’s time for a complete rewrite).

A paper hypothesizing that the age of the RDBMS is almost over. Fascinating reading, even though some of what they take as a given is debatable and some of the solutions presented are trivialized.

The motivation for the paper is that the general purpose RDBMS is already being out performed by at least 2 orders of magnitude in specialized areas like text search (i.e. yahoo, live and google), Data Warehouses, Stream Processing and Scientific databases, and the remaining sweet spot of online transaction processing (OLTP) is seriously under threat.

The basic premise being that RDBMS were conceived in a time with vastly different hardware constraints to today, and yet RDBMS’ remain fundamentally unchanged.

Dare’s thoughts on Amazon’s internal storage system called Dynamo are pretty good reading too.

Incidentally, unless I am very much mistaken, according to the “End of an Architectural Era” paper, the redundancy OR consistency tradeoff discussed by Dare can be handled by single threading each node’s actions assuming all data is in memory and nodes are time synchronized. But as I said this is one of the areas that seem a little glossed over…

Single threading??? Very much a contrarian view given the times we live in. But I have to say that the arguments all have surface validity.

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At the heart of the action

alex@base4.net — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:29:16 GMT

Phil Haack who like me spent a very short time as an MVP before becoming joining the Microsoft mothership, is organizing a geek dinner in Seattle on Sunday night. Now I organized regular geek chats back in NZ, so I will definitely be there. It will be great to sit down and listen to people like Phil, Scott Hanselman and co. Reading the comments I also noticed that Simone wishes he was here too.

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Bootcamp 07 - the usual suspects

alex@base4.net — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:24:26 GMT

Peter Jones, uber community leader, has announced he is running another Code Camp, this time in Christchurch. This one has an army feel, appropriate seeing as Peter now works for Intergen, and is called Boot Camp 07. There are some very good local speakers including most of the usual suspects: Chris Auld (Intergen, MVP) Jeremy Boyd (Mindscape, MVP) Darryl Burling (Microsoft) Chris Crowe (Trimble, MVP) Edwin Dando (Clarus) Peter Jones (Intergen, MVP) Bryn Lewis (Clarus) Pat Martin (Microsoft) Nathan Mercer (Microsoft) Ivan Porto-Carrero (Xero) Andrew Tokeley (Intergen) Ivan Towlson (ECN Group) John-Daniel Trask (Mindscape) Evan Williams (HP) So if you are in, or could be in, Christchurch on the weekend of the 3-4th November be sure to register. Unfortunately I can't make it... PS: if anyone has blog links for Edwin, Bryn, Pat or Evan please let me know...

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My new role at Microsoft

alex@base4.net — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:37:02 GMT

When I accepted a position with Microsoft, initially I had no idea what my role would entail. I knew I would be a Program Manager in the Data Programmability team, but I didn’t know what I would actually be doing. I didn’t even know who my boss would be. It was going to be either Carl or Tim. Carl, who had kindly taken me under his wing both times I had been up to Redmond, was the early favorite.

Then just before I left NZ Diego got in contact. He and I had something in common; we were both going to work on the Data Programmability team. On Saturday we finally met, and without further ado the James and Vega families went for lunch at my current favorite mid priced restaurant Red Robin (Nandos you’re still my first love).

We talked about lots of things. Diego who had already started told me we are to be office roomies. Which means it will be much easier to tag team Ayende!

A month or so before leaving NZ I talked with Tim about a Meta-Data PM role, and my name was penciled in.

All my regular readers will know this sounds right up my alley. Still I had some concerns that Microsoft and my understanding of what “Meta-Data” entails could be quite different. Well it turns out my concerns were misplaced. After talking with Tim on Thursday and being sent some light reading material, I could see that this new role promises to be everything I had hoped it would.

Today I go into Microsoft for the first time, since my interviews, to have lunch with Tim and then sit in on a PM meeting.

Cool, I can’t wait to officially start, roll on the 22nd.

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Cutting costs AND customers

alex@base4.net — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:14:26 GMT

I recently got a BIG rental car in Seattle, so I could transport my wife, kids, car seats and our maxed out luggage allowance from the airport to our temporary accommodation in Sammamish. The plan was to return the big SUV to the Bellevue office after 2 days to switch to a more appropriate mid-sized car. Sounds simple, but it wasn't. See I spent at least an hour driving around and around in circles looking for a non-existant rental car office in central Bellevue. I finally found out that the map I had been given by the rental company was out of date, the Bellevue office had moved! Now as if that wasn't bad enough, the bit that really made me mad was the explanation given by the lady. "Oh yeah sorry about that, they won't let us hand out the new maps until we've used all the old ones..." This is a classic example of what happens when accountants run businesses... cutting costs is good up to a point. The problem is lots of big companies don't know that point...

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Comments are go...

alex@base4.net — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:47:24 GMT

So I got my webserver sending emails again, which means comments are working again... So feel free! I gave up trying to get my ASPnix account configured to have SMTP access... it ended up being much simplier to just use my gmail account. I'm sure the same sort of thing would work with other hosted email providers too. The code is very simple: SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient(); client.Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; client.Port = 587; client.EnableSsl = true; client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("emailaddress","password"); client.Send(CreateMessage()); As you can see there is nothing too it.

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DNUG and F#

alex@base4.net — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:19:02 GMT

On tuesday Darryl and I spoke at the inaugural usergroup meeting in Ellerslie. Darryl did a lap around Visual Studio 2008 and I did a lap around C# 3.0. Now I have to say it was a great success, about 40 people turned up. And I think the concensus was that they enjoyed it. The most important thing though was that most of the faces seemed to be new, there were a few familiar ones, but I am sure that at least 30 of the attendees wouldn't have bothered going into the CBD chat. So we are broadening our base. Which I think is great. Afterwards I got to rambling on about a few things with some guys, one (who's name escapes me) was interested in F#. So on the off chance he (the guy I met, not the cat's father) is reading my blog, I thought I'd point him in the direction of Jomo Fisher's new post s on F#. Reading between the lines I think we can expect more of them from Jomo in the future.

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Number one in Data 2.0

alex@base4.net — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:54:19 GMT

This morning I was reading Jason's always good blog, and in particular his latest post a hidden benefit of blogging for entrepreneurs. So being essentially vain I decided to check to see how some of my posts rate when I use my hobby topics for key words. Now not surprisingly according to google I am the top Base4, more surprisingly I have the Number one link for Data 2.0 too! ~~Step one get to the top~~ Step two make other people realise it is important... And yes this is a blatant attempt to stay at the top ;)

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Thanks for your help - new blog is alive

alex@base4.net — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:38:49 GMT

So my question where should this blog go?, generated quite a bit of feedback both via comments and by email. Thanks everyone for taking the time to give me suggestions etc. I ended up going with Alex Barnett's suggestion of ASPnix. I decided I needed a fully blown VPC image so that I can completely manage things, and run custom services (like Base4.NET for example), and ASPnix definitely is a good fit feature/cost wise. Summarising the recommendations I received: Quite a few people offered to host my site themselves, thanks for that guys (you know who you are), but I decided I need to do it myself. A number of people pointed out that I would soon have a blogs.msdn.com blog. Which is I hope is true, the things is what I really wanted was to ensure all my old posts are still on the web! Alex Barnett suggested ASPnix. Which is what I went with in the end. Fabrice recommended webhost4life. Christian recommended using wordpress, which is probably a better option going forward, but I have a lot on my plate at the moment... so that migration from my custom Base4.NET backed blog is just going to have to wait. Anyway if you are reading this post, my new ASPnix site is working! There is just one problem. Email. My blog currently doesn't have access to an SMTP server, so my .NET code can't send email (yet) which basically means comments are temporarily unavailable... I'll let you know when it is up and available again. Thanks again everyone for your suggestions.

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Around the globe with composable data services

alex@base4.net — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:17:33 GMT

In the last few days I've exchanged a lot of comments and emails with Diego Vega. It seems both he and I are joining the same data programmability team up at Microsoft in the next month or so! Which sort of explains both our interests in the ongoing debate about Data Layer Componentization. Anyway Diego has weighed in with a nice post answering Ayende's critique too, lots of good points, many I wished I'd made myself!

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Data Layer Componentization take 2

alex@base4.net — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:17:52 GMT

It seems Ayende, has a lot of problems with my data-layer componentization idea. Fair enough concensus is an elusive mistress...

The first thing to note is Ayende's diagram describing data-layer componentization as I see it misses one key point. Namely that there is a conceptual model that is distinct from the data model.

And I hope in the fullness of time a new type of server will evolve to surface this conceptual model. I like to think of this as a DataServer as opposed to a Database. The idea being that a DataServer is the place you go to get data in the shape that makes sense for you (i.e. the conceptual model), and is responsible for getting that data from one or more data-sources or databases on your behalf.

With this in conceptual model in place and hopefully later a DataServer in place, some of the problems Ayende mentions either go away or become much more manageable.

Ayende: Reliability issues - the application talks to more than a single DB, so now any of the DBs going down will break it.

Me: Of course systems with multiple dependencies are less robust, but the alternative opens you up to relying on out of date or incorrect data, which hardly seems any better?

Ayende: Maintainability issue #1 - since you have other application dependant on your database, how are you going to handle upgrades and changes to it? When you take down a single database / application, you need to take down a significant number of applications with it.

Me: This is essentially the dual schema problem n’est pas? So you handle it the same way you always handle the dual schema problem, with an intermediary conceptual model. Incidentally there is no reason you have to have only one conceptual model for any given data model either. If one application changes and another doesn't create a different conceptual model.

Ayende: Maintainability issue #2 – changing a single database can have a ripple affect to all the applications in an organization.

Me: Only if the conceptual model changes too.

Ayende: Maintainability issue #3 – the way the previous application stored its data may cause severe issues for you when you try to consume it. Perhaps you access pattern dictate that you need to get data from several disparate tables, making it more expensive to get the data. Maybe the data that you want requires extra calculation that you want to store in the DB, etc.

Me: The data model can be atrocious, but you would be a fool to duplicate that complexity in the conceptual model too.

Ayende: Maintainability issue #4 – In any big organization, it is very likely that you will have several database products in place (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc). Those have different behaviors at time, and would require that you would remember to treat them differently.

Me: And? Surely that is the point of things like NHibernate and ADO.NET Entities? They know how to deal with different providers… so you don't have to worry about it.

Ayende: Duplication issues - Quite often, the data in the database is not readily consumable, and requires a bit a business logic to handle properly. For instance, the policy status that the user sees may depend on the policy type and the risk level of the customer. If you want to do the same on another application, you need to duplicate this logic again. This can be a real issue if this is a piece of business logic that often changes.

Me: I’m not claiming that the ability to share data-layers suddenly negates the need for a business layer! In fact by sharing data-layers it finally becomes possible to share business layers. That is what Base4 tried to do, it was after all a client/server ORM.

Ayende: Security implications –leaving aside the problem of letting multiply applications to access a database, there are security implications that are beyond what can be specified using SQL permissions. The salary of an employee is only visible to the HR person responsible for the employee and its manager (if he is above level 16). Now, please try to define that using SQL Permissions. You can't, at least not without a lot of awkwardness. This means that you need application level security decisions. To say that those are complex is a big understatement.

Me: Again yes this is a business layer issue, but the key to being able to share business rules is first sharing business types!!! Kinda re-inforces the need for me. In fact one of the unexpected side effects of having a shared enterprise data model is that you get more context, upon which you can base security decisions without having to resort to user groups and roles etc, that essentially are a temporary way of modeling the reality which is often captured elsewhere anyway. For example why create an Active Directory Group called "Sales", when you have access to the data from the CRM application which indicates which staff are sales people immediately and is the ultimate source of truth?

Ayende: FK issue – traditionally, cross DB FK are a problem, especially when you consider cross server and cross database products FKs.

Me: Until relational databases matured I am sure the management of standard FK’s was tricky too, we need to recognize that we are the age of distribution, all the data necessary often can’t be in one place, it is an interconnected world and we need to understand this. This is why we need data-servers not just databases.

Ayende: Performance – A fairly big issue here is performance, since cross database joins are rarely possible (linked servers are one way, but they are a PITA and comes with their own set of problem), so you would need to be aware of that, but this is just a side effect of the approach used.

Me: Yes doing joins across databases is likely to be slow, but using this performance issue, to say it shouldn't be done is a little like saying downloading a movie from the internet takes a long time, so we should never do it. I don't care if it takes a long time, I want to see the damn movie!

Just because something has issues, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. I am not claiming that data layer componentization solves every problem; rather that it is a very nice trick to have in the arsenal.

It is fairly easy to point out 'potential flaws' in a new way of doing something, but what about the potential flaws of the current standard way of doing things? For example Ayende's preferred route of using an ETL process to create local copies.

More often than not developers don't actually know that there is another database that has the information they need or simply don't bother with an ETL process anyway.
Often times every database thinks it is the master, and the natural result is no database can be trusted.
Sometimes It is just not practical to duplicate all data, sometimes there is just too much, or sometimes the cost of transfer is too high, or it takes too long to do it, or you can't tolerate dirty data, or you have too many places to copy that data.
In order to avoid (2), unwieldy and error prone ‘human’ processes need to develop, people need to remember to go into 2, 3, 6, 15 (?) systems to keep everything in sync.

I am not claiming creating a Data-Server is going to be easy, or that data-layer componentization is the be all and end all, but I do think that a Data-Server is great long term goal and one key step on the road is the ability to break data-layers out into re-usable fragments...

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Data Layer Componentization

alex@base4.net — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:59:57 GMT

Yesterday Ayende left a comment on my post about <Using> support in the Entity Framework. He wasn’t sure what my point was. So it seems further explanation is required.

So without further ado:

Today whenever a developer creates a new application, the default behavior is to store all the data they need in a nice shiny new database. This is because historically integrating with existing databases is not that easy, not to mention the added risk. We all know that creating stable software is hard, and doing so without owning or controlling the data is much more so…

Unfortunately the obvious problem with this start from scratch approach is the tendency to create Silos.

Now Silo’s themselves aren’t actually a bad thing, the real problem is data duplication across silos.

Duplication is essentially the opposite of re-use. Re-use is good; I mean database normalization is based on the principle.

Duplication it seems is the villain of our story!

By putting all the data you need in a new database you are practically guaranteed to end up creating duplicates of at least some of your corporate data. In any decent sized enterprise things like Customers, Staff, Addresses, Contacts etc can be found spread far and wide in literally hundreds of different databases.

WinFS’s schemas promised to solve that, by providing a way to re-use data. I liked to think of WinFS schemas as Data-Layer components that essentially grouped a set of tables, views and stored procedures together to provide shared persistence services for some logical related information.

Classic examples might be a set of tables designed for storing Music Information (Artist, MP3File, Genre, Album etc) or a set of tables for storing information about Clients (Client, Contact, Deal, DealTeam, DealTeamMember etc).

Conceptually this is no different from DLLs or assemblies that allow for functionality to be shared amongst different applications.

A data-layer component simply allows for information to be shared between different applications.

By supporting re-use data layer componentization allows you to break the duplication habit. You can still have silos, but the natural tendency to duplicate data disappears. Each new silo will instead contain only new types of data and where old types are required, simply pointers, or cross silo foreign keys.

This is why a large chunk of the time I spent on Base4 simply added support for data-layer componentization, and overtime this feature evolved to support the creation of re-usable data-layer components out of other people’s data.

So you can imagine my excitement to see that the Entity Framework now supports references between conceptual models… which is essentially the same thing.

IMHO his data-layer re-use framework is the 800 pound Gorilla feature that every ORM needs.

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Most likely too...

alex@base4.net — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 04:46:54 GMT

So I’ve recently started playing around with Facebook, seems like another good way to stay in contact with people, friends and otherwise.

Anyway one of my real friends from back in the day, used one of those nifty Facebook apps (superlatives) to do that most school yearbook of things, and label me Most likely too…

Of course you can make your own Most likely too's. If I was doing it myself, the truth would out...

Most likely to laugh infectiously in a movie...
Most likely to corner someone and waffle on about data…
Most likely to mention REST…
Most likely to forget someone’s birthday
Most likely to enthuse about some obscure TV show you’ve never heard off…

What would your Most likely to's be?

While on the topic of Facebook, I was interested to read on the Dot Net mailing list today the conspiracy theory about Facebook and the CIA.

All I can say is if it is true, the cleansing of all that Facebook data is going to be one hell of a nightmare, the hit rate would be awful. 1 billion Alex recommends Donnie Darko’s and Most likely to Walk around in PJs all day for every piece of useful information is my prediction…

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Where should this blog go?

alex@base4.net — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:12:40 GMT

As some of you will have read, I'm heading up to Redmond at the end of September to join Microsoft's Data Programmability team. Exciting huh? Anyway the point of this post is to ask you guys (and girls) for some advice... It seems I will need to move to a hosted blogging service, because quite apart from the 2-3 months window when I won't have a home, I can't see me continuing to run my blog on a home server. So I need to move to a host... and I am not really sure who is best. Basically I need A fully featured hosted blog Cheap Bandwidth costs BlogML import capabilities to move my old posts etc Any suggestions?

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Support for Using in the Entity Framework

alex@base4.net — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:37:12 GMT

Elisa has just announced the Entity Framework beta 2. There are a whole heap of new features from the June CTP... But for me the big one is this: "<Using> support in metadata files". Which sounds innocuous and innocent enough. But make no mistake this feature is the 800 pound Gorilla that changes the game. This is essentially what separated Base4 from all other ORM's, namely the ability to componentize data layers. WinFS had this too, it was called schemas...

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Blue Monster

alex@base4.net — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:40:35 GMT

About three weeks ago, I was interviewed by Nigel from Microsoft NZ, for a sound bite. It eventually made its way into a video shown at the TechEd keynote.

It’s a little embarrassing, as I rant about Data, joining the Data Programmability team at Redmond and Hugh McLeod’s Blue Monster, also look out for NZ’s own Hamish Carter’s SQL 2008 joke…

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