Community developer blogs

The Darkside

Recent Posts

• Configuration Castle ActiveRecord 2

  Posted: 25 May 2009 at 06:29 by Ryan Schreiber

  If you’ve decided to download the Castle ActiveRecord 2 Alpha version and see how it affects your existing projects, you’ll most likely get an error like this: “The ProxyFactoryFactory was not configured.Initialize 'proxyfactory.factory_class' property of the session-factory configuration section with one of the available NHibernate.ByteCode providers.”. This release of ActiveRecord makes use of NHibernate version 2.1.0.

• Restarting the Microsoft File Transfer Manager

  Posted: 06 May 2009 at 06:52 by Ryan Schreiber

  If you’ve ever used the Microsoft File Transfer Manager to download items from the MSDN subscriber downloads section, you may have accidentally closed it and searched your drive high and low to find the application to restart it. If you haven’t run the MSI installer and just let IE install it, the application is in %SYSTEMROOT%\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe. I found this article on Microsoft which has method of starting it from the command prompt, as well as an MSI installer which ac

• An easy to use asynchronous fork

  Posted: 24 Apr 2009 at 07:15 by Ryan Schreiber

  I’ve been making use of Roger Alsing’s Async Fork for a few months as an alternative to the “for testing purposes only” Microsoft Parallel Extensions. With the release of C# 4.0 on the horizon, I decided to modify the internal workings of the Fork class to make use of the parallel extensions, which would result in very few modifications to my existing code. My reason for the modifications are to take advantage of the inner working of parallels extensions. Here is the modified version of the For

• Error when returning data from Web Services using Excel

  Posted: 21 Apr 2009 at 09:46 by Ryan Schreiber

  If you’re making use of the Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit 2.0 to fetch web service data in Excel (this version of the toolkit is compatible with Excel 2007), you may stumble across an error something along the lines of “SoapMapper:Array dimensions do not match definition.”. If the return type of the call is an array (which is declared as a Variant),  or a property in your return type is an array (also declared as a Variant),  this error is raised because the data returning from the c

• Consuming a self-hosted WCF service in Silverlight

  Posted: 09 Apr 2009 at 02:44 by Ryan Schreiber

  If you've decided to self-host a WCF service - or as in my case you already have a service in production but need it to be consumed by a Silverlight application, but keep on getting a security exception, here's a method of getting your existing services to work. It involves getting the WCF service to serve a "file" called "clientaccesspolicy.xml" when one is requested, as is done by Silverlight.  DOWNLOAD - WCF4Silverlight.Zip Firstly, if you haven't already, you'll need to expose your services

• Using SQL triggers for audit trails

  Posted: 13 Mar 2009 at 19:31 by Ryan Schreiber

  In my previous post I looked at using Castle ActiveRecord and class hierarchies & inheritance to automate some tasks related to implementing audit trails in your application. The foundation was laid to ensure some required information, namely the current user and date and time of editing data, was seamlessly integrated into the domain logic. In this post I'd like to show the next step in this process - that of implementing triggers and the tables required to store this audit trail inform

• Using Castle ActiveRecord and a class hierarchy

  Posted: 11 Mar 2009 at 22:00 by Ryan Schreiber

  Very often, one of the requirements that an application I'm working on has is that it needs an audit trail. In this post I'm going to go through a technique that will build the foundation which will allow you to add record-based audit trails to your application. We'll look at adding application user information and time stamps to the data using inheritance, as well as overriding some methods in the ActiveRecord base classes to automatically populate these values. Download - Darkside.AuditTrail

• Who is to blame?

  Posted: 10 Mar 2009 at 03:45 by Ryan Schreiber

  Here's a portion of a screen shot I took earlier yesterday evening: The portion I've highlighted must surely have been a copy-and-paste mistake, as it's totally out of context. More to the point, shouldn't this should have been: (a) proof read by the author (b) proof read by an editor They can argue about who's fault it is :) This started me thinking (again) about issues like this in my line of work. Make no mistake - back in software development land we also have snafu's that slip out into pr

• Windows Media Player – File name format

  Posted: 02 Mar 2009 at 04:00 by Ryan Schreiber

  This is a mini-rant about usability, with a workaround – so excuse me if this isn’t quite in the same vane as my usual posts. I’m pretty sticky about how my file names should be formatted when WMP rips a CD, my preference being: Track Number – Artist – Album – Song Title.ext WMP gives you the option of selecting/arranging fields in any number of ways, and gives you some predefined options for the separator. One of them is the dash, which I have selected, and then I use my trusty Total Commande

• GeneratorStudio and project/file layouts

  Posted: 15 Feb 2009 at 17:28 by Ryan Schreiber

  This is just a tip for anyone using GeneratorStudio or any other code generator for their ActiveRecord classes (or any other classes, for that matter). I generally have my templates set up to generate my files with the name "<TABLENAME>.Generated.cs" or something similar. In addition to this naming convention, I also make sure that my generated classes are marked as partial classes, and then I do all custom code, like additional "Find" methods methods, etc, in files na

• A Simple Windows Service Template

  Posted: 11 Feb 2009 at 17:32 by Ryan Schreiber

  I've been lucky enough to attend an Architects Master Class presented by Juval Lowy from IDesign this past week, and one point briefly covered was that, for the foreseeable future, self-hosting WCF services inside a Windows service was going to be the way to go. Very briefly: Although Windows 2008/WAS seems to solve this problem, you won't be able to use WAS for the service bus functionality in C# 4.0, so it looks like its back to, or still in my case, Windows services. That being said, a gripe

• Using Castle ActiveRecord and MySQL

  Posted: 20 Jan 2009 at 22:00 by Ryan Schreiber

  I’ve started some new development on the Generator Studio tool, and one of our big features that we felt is a real necessity is the ability to point to different database engines. With that in mind, I started off trying to get Castle ActiveRecord connecting to MySQL as part of the learning curve. Here are some pointers on getting it to work smoothly. Firstly, what' you’ll need (in addition to Castle ActiveRecord): MySQL Connector/Net – Version 5.2 is the latest version – I’ve can confirm that i

• Castle ActiveRecord and Linq

  Posted: 16 Jan 2009 at 22:00 by Ryan Schreiber

  Introduction I've been having a look at the NHibernate contributions project on SourceForge and decided to give the NHibernate.Linq project a whirl. After some initial test, I have so say I'm very impressed. There are some limitations that are actually the result of NHibernate, not the Linq project, but nothing serious enough for me not to use it. My next logical progression was to find out how to make use of NHiberntate.Linq in Castle ActiveRecord. Some very quick searching revealed this articl

• Castle ActiveRecord - Using CreateSchema()

  Posted: 09 Dec 2008 at 05:32

  When running unit tests, I often using ActiveRecordStarter.CreateSchema() in my test startups to give me a clean database to work from. Whether or not this should be done by a SQL script or a restore from a backup is for another time. On one such occasion, I started getting a 'binary or string data

• The semphore class and the case of the missing method

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 06:13

  I had an interesting error crop yesterday on a production server that was only happening there, and not in development and QA. I was using a sempahore to throttle the number of threads that could enter a critical section on code and on this particular machine I was getting this run-time error begin

• Generator Studio released on CodePlex

  Posted: 30 Oct 2008 at 05:47

  Generator Studio is a code generation tool (yes, another one one, but more on that later) that allows you to set up templates using the Velocity Template Language, and then generates files based on your source database structure. It can be found here on CodePlex and the Pre-Beta 0.1 can be downloade

• Castle ActiveRecord - Using an identity/computed/default column

  Posted: 23 Oct 2008 at 08:08

  To expand on the title a bit: What if I have an identity column in a table, but it isn’t my primary key? Or what if I have a computed column or default value for a column, and need to use the value as soon as I’ve created/saved/updated?Firstly, you need to make sure that ActiveRecord doesn’t update

• Castle ActiveRecord - Lazy Loading and session scopes in the web

  Posted: 09 Oct 2008 at 23:00 by Ryan Schreiber

  This is the third post I'm doing related to a Castle ActiveRecord/NHibernate/lazy loading/sessionscope error that occurs. The first two are here and here. I received a mail the other day about an ActiveRecord/NHibernate error begin thrown in an application (web application, actually), which subseque

• Castle ActiveRecord - Lazy Loading and session scopes in the web

  Posted: 09 Oct 2008 at 22:00

  This is the third post I'm doing related to a Castle ActiveRecord/NHibernate/lazy loading/sessionscope error that occurs. The first two are here and here. I received a mail the other day about an ActiveRecord/NHibernate error begin thrown in an application (web application, actually), which subseque

• Castle ActiveRecord - more on Lazy Loading and session scopes

  Posted: 09 Sep 2008 at 09:11 by Darksider

  This is a follow-up post on an article from a few months back located here and hopefully expands on how to overcome the error "failed to lazily initialize a collection, no session or session was closed" which I get very often in WinForms development. This error generally gets thrown when the object