Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

I was reviewing some code today for a project that uses ActiveRecord.  One of the things that stood out for me was the use of a query to find objects by their primary key.  There's two reasons this raised a red flag for me:

As someone who did a lot of SQL a few years ago, I was immediately more comfortable using HQL for my ActiveRecord queries than the Criteria API.  But from a documentation/samples standpoint, I see a much higher percentage of the Criteria API being used vs. HQL.  I still use HQL most of the time.

From BradA: Simone Chiaretta is doing another Ajax survey to see how things have changed since his last survey a couple of years ago.  I just filled it out (you should too!).  The survey can be found here.

If you don't read Eric Lippert's Fabulous Adventures In Coding, you're really missing out on some great stuff.

I'm working with an automotive client that has a couple of data formats for some of their files.  One is a simple CSV format and the other is XML using .NET's XML Serializer (nothing fancy).  The CSV format is handy as it's easy for the engineers to quickly load it into Excel and view in a columnar format.  The XML format was implemented as a much more "full featured" version of the data and contains additional metadata to describe the data.  All of the maintenance of these files is very easy as we have a library for dealing with them.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to get log4net to log to an OutputDebugStringAppender with no success.  At first, I thought I had a configuration error in log4net so I added a file appender and that works fine.  It's a Monorail application that uses ActiveRecord for database access.  There's a couple of spots where I wanted to check out the SQL being generated by ActiveRecord (NHibernate).  I did all my set up for log4net and even got it logging to a FileAppender.  But I wanted to log the SQL to an OutputDebugStringAppender.

As you've probably heard (via Twitter), there's a new look to the CodeMash website.  SRT Solutions and inner circle media have been working on the website for a while now getting things organized.  Much of the praise for the new look goes to inner circle media – Catherine Hayes and Alaine Karoleff have put a lot of thought and design into the new site and it shows!

Just found something interesting while researching a problem Dianne was having with a website SRT was working on.  In checking various browsers throughout the office (FireFox, IE, Opera), a page looked ok on most of the browsers, but not all.  In fact, there were just a couple of machines running Firefox that had problems (others, running the same version of Firefox had no problem viewing the page correctly).