In part I of this series, we discussed some core concepts of profiling. In that article, we not only discussed the problem at hand, but also how to think about not only fixing performance problems, but reducing the likelihood that they get out of hand in the first place.

In this second part, we’ll go into detail and try to fix the problem.

Reëvaluating the Requirements

Since we have new requirements for an existing component, it’s time to reconsider the requirements for all stakeholders. In... [More]

An oft-quoted bit of software-development sagacity is

As is so often the case with quotes—especially those on the Internet[1]—this one has a slightly different meaning in context. The snippet above invites developers to overlook the word “premature” and interpret the received wisdom as “you don’t ever need to optimize.”

Instead, Knuth’s full quote actually tells you how much of your code is likely to be affected by performance issues that... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

Quino 2 is finally ready and will go out the door with a 2.1 rather than a 2.0 version number. The reason being that we released 2.0 internally and tested the hell out of it. 2.1 is the result of that testing. It includes a lot of bug fixes as well as API tweaks to make things easier for developers.

• Made... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

In the beta1 and beta2 release notes, we read about changes to configuration, dependency reduction, the data driver architecture, DDL commands, security and access control in web applications and a new code-generation format.

In 2.0 final—which was actually released internally on November 13th, 2015 (a... [More]

These days nobody who’s anybody in the software-development world is writing software without tests. Just writing them doesn’t help make the software better, though. You also need to be able to execute tests—reliably and quickly and repeatably.

That said, you’ll have to get yourself a test runner, which is a different tool from the compiler or the runtime. That is, just because your tests compile (satisfy all of the language rules) and could be executed doesn’t mean that you’re done writing... [More]

As part of the final release process for Quino 2, we’ve upgraded 5 solutions[1] from Quino 1.13 to the latest API in order to shake out any remaining API inconsistencies or even just inelegant or clumsy calls or constructs. A lot of questions came up during these conversions, so I wrote the following blog to provide detail on the exact workings and execution order of a Quino application.

I’ve discussed the design of Quino’s configuration before, most recently in API Design: Running an Application... [More]

Quino has long included support for connecting to an application server instead of connecting directly to databases or other sources. The application server uses the same model as the client and provides modeled services (application-specific) as well as CRUD for non-modeled data interactions.

We wrote the first version of the server in 2008. Since then, it’s acquired better authentication and authorization capabilities as well as routing and state-handling. We’ve always based it on the .NET HttpListener... [More]

In the previous article, we discussed the task of Splitting up assemblies in Quino using NDepend. In this article, I’ll discuss both the high-level and low-level workflows I used with NDepend to efficiently clear up these cycles.

Please note that what follows is a description of how I have used the tool—so far—to get my very specific tasks accomplished. If you’re looking to solve other problems or want to solve the same problems more efficiently, you should take a look at the official... [More]

A lot of work has been put into Quino 2.0[1], with almost no stone left unturned. Almost every subsystem has been refactored and simplified, including but not limited to the data driver, the schema migration, generated code and metadata, model-building, security and authentication, service-application support and, of course, configuration and execution.

Two of the finishing touches before releasing 2.0 are to reorganize all of the code into a more coherent namespace structure and to reduce the... [More]

In this article, I’m going to continue the discussion started in Part I, where we laid some groundwork about the state machine that is the startup/execution/shutdown feature of Quino. As we discussed, this part of the API still suffers from “several places where generic TApplication parameters [are] cluttering the API”. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at different design approaches to this concrete example—and see how we decided whether to use generic type parameters.

Consistency... [More]

In this article, we’re going to discuss a bit more about the configuration library in Quino 2.0.

Other entries on this topic have been the articles about Encodo’s configuration library for Quino: part I, part II and part III.

The goal of this article is to discuss a concrete example of how we decided whether to use generic type parameters throughout the configuration part of Quino. The meat of that discussion will be in a part 2 because we’re going to have to lay some groundwork about the... [More]

Encodo first published a Git Handbook for employees in September 2011 and last updated it in July of 2012. Since then, we’ve continued to use Git, refining our practices and tools. Although a lot of the content is still relevant, some parts are quite outdated and the overall organization suffered through several subsequent, unpublished updates.

What did we change from the version 2.0?

• We removed all references to the Encodo Git Shell. This shell was a custom environment based on Cygwin. It... [More]

Way back in February, I wrote about my experiences with ReSharper 9 when it first came out. The following article provides an update, this time with version 9.2, released just last week.

tl;dr: I’m back to ReSharper 8.2.3 and am a bit worried about the state of the 9.x series of ReSharper. Ordinarily, JetBrains has eliminated performance, stability and functional issues by the first minor version-update (9.1), to say nothing of the second (9.2).

Test Runner

In the previous article, my main... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

In beta1, we read about changes to configuration, the data driver architecture, DDL commands, and security and access control in web applications.

In beta-2, we made the following additional improvements:

• Introduced a new generated-code version that avoids all global references and provides a... [More]

This discussion about configuration spans three articles:

1. part I discusses the history of the configuration system in Quino as well as a handful of principles we kept in mind while designing the new system
2. part II discusses the basic architectural changes and compares an example from the old configuration system to the new.
3. part III takes a look at configuring the “execution order”—the actions to execute during application startup and shutdown

Introduction

Registering with an IOC is all... [More]

In this article, we’ll continue the discussion about configuration started in part I. We wrapped up that part with the following principles to keep in mind while designing the new system.

• Consistency
• Opt-in configuration
• Inversion of Control
• Configuration vs. Execution
• Common Usage

Borrowing from ASP.NET vNext

Quino’s configuration inconsistencies and issues have been well-known for several versions—and years—but the opportunity to rewrite it comes only now with a major-version break.
... [More]

In this article, I’ll continue the discussion about configuration improvements mentioned in the release notes for Quino 2.0-beta1. With beta2 development underway, I thought I’d share some more of the thought process behind the forthcoming changes.

Software Libraries

what sort of patterns integrate and customize the functionality of libraries in an application?

An application comprises multiple tasks, only some of which are part of that application’s actual domain. For those parts not in the... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

These are the big ones that forced a major-version change.

• Rewrote configuration and application API. (QNO-4666, QNO-4679, QNO-4659, QNO-4772, QNO-4663, QNO-4664, QNO-4360)
• Data-driver architecture has been consolidated. All drivers, ADO, Mongo and Remote, now use the same base implementation, logic and... [More]

Microsoft has recently made a lot of their .NET code open-source. Not only is the code for many of the base libraries open-source but also the code for the runtime itself. On top of that, basic .NET development is now much more open to community involvement.

In that spirit, even endeavors like designing the features to be included in the next version of C# are online and open to all: C# Design Meeting Notes for Jan 21, 2015 by Mads Torgerson (GitHub).

C# 6 Recap

You may be surprised at the version number “7”—aren’t... [More]

In part I of these series, we discussed applications, which provide the model and data provider, and sessions, which encapsulate high-level data context. In part II, we covered command types and inputs to the data pipeline.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the data pipeline itself.

1. Applications & Sessions
2. Command types & inputs
3. The Data Pipeline
4. Builders & Commands
5. Contexts and Connections
6. Sessions, resources & objects

Overview

Major Components of the Data
DriverThe primary goal of the data pipeline is, of... [More]

In part I, we discussed applications—which provide the model and data provider—and sessions—which encapsulate high-level data context.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the command types & inputs

1. Applications & Sessions
2. Command types & inputs[1]
3. The Data Pipeline
4. Builders & Commands
5. Contexts and Connections
6. Sessions, resources & objects

Overview

Major Components of the Data
DriverBefore we can discuss how the pipeline processes a given command, we should discuss what kinds of commands the data driver... [More]

One part of Quino that has undergone quite a few changes in the last few versions is the data driver. The data driver is responsible for CRUD: create, read, update and delete operations. One part of this is the ORM—the object-relational mapper—that marshals data to and from relational databases like PostgreSql, SQL Server and SQLite.

We’re going to cover a few topics in this series:

1. Applications & Sessions
2. The Data Pipeline
3. Builders & Commands
4. Contexts and Connections
5. Sessions, resources... [More]

We’ve been using ReSharper at Encodo since version 4. And we regularly use a ton of other software from JetBrains[1]—so we’re big fans.

How to Upgrade R#

As long-time users of ReSharper, we’ve become accustomed to the following pattern of adoption for new major versions:

EAP

1. Read about cool new features and improvements on the JetBrains blog
2. Check out the EAP builds page
3. Wait for star ratings to get higher than 2 out of 5
4. Install EAP of next major version
5. Run into issues/problems that make... [More]

In the previous article, I explained how we were using NDepend to clean up dependencies and the architecture of our Quino framework. You have to start somewhere, so I started with the two base assemblies: Quino and Encodo. Encodo only has dependencies on standard .NET assemblies, so let’s start with that one.

The first step in cleaning up the Encodo assembly is to remove dependencies on the Tools namespace. There seems to be some confusion as to what belongs in the Core namespace versus what... [More]

Full disclosure

A while back—this last spring, I believe—I downloaded NDepend to analyze code dependencies. The trial license is fourteen days; needless to say, I got only one afternoon in before I was distracted by other duties. That was enough, however, to convince me that it was worth the $375 to continue to clean up Quino with NDepend.

I decided to wait until I had more time before opening my wallet. In the meantime, however, Patrick Smacchia of NDepend approached me with a free... [More]

The long and very technical article Introducing the WebKit FTL JIT provides a fascinating and in-depth look at how a modern execution engine optimizes code for a highly dynamic language like JavaScript.

To make a long story short: the compiler(s) and execution engine optimize by profiling and analyzing code and lowering it to runtimes of ever decreasing abstraction to run as the least dynamic version possible.

A brief history lesson

What does it mean to “lower” code? A programming language... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes in Quino. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

Data & Schema

• Applications can now choose a base class for generated ORM objects. (QNO-3107)
• Data driver: made various bug fixes and improvements. (QNO-4538, QNO-4554, QNO-4551)
• Improved schema migration for fields and constraint-violation messages under SQL Server. (QNO-4490, QNO-4111, QNO-4582)... [More]

Quino is a metadata framework for .NET. It provides a means of defining an application-domain model in the form of metadata objects. Quino also provides many components and support libraries that work with that metadata to automate many services and functions. A few examples are an ORM, schema migration, automatically generated user interfaces and reporting tools.

The schema-migration tool

The component we’re going to discuss is the automated schema-migration for databases. A question that... [More]

The version of EF Migrations discussed in this article is 5.0.20627. The version of Quino is less relevant: the features discussed have been supported for years. For those in a hurry, there is a tl;dr near the end of the article.

We use Microsoft Entity Framework (EF) Migrations in one of our projects where we are unable to use Quino. We were initially happy to be able to automate database-schema changes. After using it for a while, we have decidedly mixed feelings.

As developers of our own... [More]

On Wednesday, August 27th, Tymon gave the rest of Encodo[1] a great introduction to PowerShell. I’ve attached the presentation but a lot of the content was in demonstrations on the command-line.

1. Download the presentation
2. Unzip to a local folder
3. Open index.html in a modern web browser (Chrome/Opera/Firefox work the best; IE has some rendering issues)

We learned a few very interesting things:

• PowerShell is pre-installed on every modern Windows computer
• You can PowerShell to other machines... [More]