Circles and Crosses

Windows Forms data binding is a great tool for model-view-style applications, where the connection between the model and its view is easily declared. However, data binding is also an error-prone and tedious process with no IntelliSense support where properties are specified as strings.

Tired of the need of looking up property names when you declare data bindings? Sick of mistyping a property name when you bind and not discovering the mistake until you run your application? Have a look at Strongbind.

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The typical (and original AJAX) approach to calling web services asynchronously from a browser uses the XMLHTTPRequest object to request data asynchronously. However, as most of you probably already know, requests made using this object are restricted to the same domain as the script they originate from. This means that in order to request data from services like Google Maps, Flickr, etc. you need to implement a server-side proxy on your domain to use the XMLHTTPRequest object. But what if you want to stay on the client side? Enter JSON injection.

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Creating an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) has become the de facto way of handling persistence in the object-oriented programming paradigm. Almost all systems require some form of persistent state, and relational databases have become the de facto place to put that state. Relational databases are proven, scale well, and organize data in a tabular manner suitable for many of the real world problems that we try to solve, so they are an obvious choice. Choosing them, however, means we have a new problem at our hands, known as the object-relational impedance mismatch.

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C# 3.0 includes a new feature known as extension methods, and fiddling with it triggered the idea of creating a mechanism for copying or cloning (virtually) any .NET object or graph of objects. The manifestation of that idea has become a rather decent little framework for copying objects. It performs a deep copy as automatically as it possibly can, and provides mechanisms to easily solve many of the cases which cannot be covered automatically. It is great for copying your custom object hierarchies, and saves you the pain of a solution like implementing ICloneable for an entire hierarchy of objects. Click here to grab it now, and read on for a presentation.

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I’ve spent the last few days at work implementing a cache in the data access layer (DAL) of one of our services. The cache works great, and speeds up our service very much in some cases, and somewhat in all cases. I’ve implemented caches before, and experienced many of the difficulties that arise when introducing a cache. It always seems rather easy, and always has unwanted side effects. The general advice is of course not to do it (and the advice from the database guys are always not to do it), but here are my five best advices on what you should consider if you decide to do it.

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