Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

This thread of posts is becoming unwieldy in it’s naming convention and difficult to follow if you have come to it very recently. To help rectify or rather improve that situation I have created this linking post which has taken the physical posts that make up the series and logically renamed them here. I will follow in the next couple of days with Part 9.0 which will address strongly typed FetchingIntentions using lambda expressions (at the suggestion of K. Scott Allen). Part 10 will cover dependency injecting the Fetching Strategies by expressing intent via roles (specifying an interface).

Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 1.0

Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 2.0

Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 3.0

Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 4.0

Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 5.0

Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 6.0

Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 7.0

I can’t name the number of times I have downloaded material for learning from MSDN. My problem is this: I don’t want to have to print out a logical sequence of pages and have to collate them myself. For example recently I wanted to get all the documentation on Entity SQL together and put it in a single document (PDF) so I can easily refer to the material as a whole and not separate resources on the web. So off I go doing the ‘user friendly print version’ thing and printing that to separate PDF files only to have to merge them. Microsoft would be doing the community a huge favour by making that available online by default. Look at the Entity SQL MSDN pages for example.

What I normally do with a tree full of documents like this, is to print all the friendly versions to PDF individually and then merge as one PDF document. So for the above I have the entire Entity SQL Language reference material from MSDN all in one physical document - easy to read and print all in one action. Ok so perhaps they would prefer to provide and XPS version - that’s great with me too, I wont discriminate on document type. Do Microsoft have a suggestion box? Yes they do!

Ayende created Rhino.Queues.Storage.Disk a while ago and followed with Rhino.Queues and left it to the community to join them together. I would love to have transactional ‘store and forward‘ available as a design choice that incorporates Silverlight and I’m wondering if these two abandoned children of Ayende’s might provide the basis of an answer? Maybe not. I can see that wrapping Isolated Storage read / write operations with some kind of veneer might be useful however really what’s required here is a solution that enlists in transactions (System.Transaction) thus  making our ’store and forward’ pattern safe and durable. Offline Silverlight with MSMQ? Perhaps, but for now that’s a hack. What about localhost WCF with a database behind it? Sure there are ways and means and somehow this is something I don’t see Microsoft investing in as it’s probably a bit too ‘fringe’ as a requirement, so it’s probably going to be up to the community. Personally I will probably wait till Silverlight is working offline (by design) and reconsider durable storage with Silverlight until then. In the meantime however I am absolutely loving working with XAML based UI in both Silverlight and WPF and going back to Windows Forms is not something likely to ever happen. Oddly, when I open a WinForm application in VS.Net I get the strangest feeling, almost like the one I used to have when opening the VB6 IDE after having developed in .NET for a few years. Must be sign?