I've rather sadly not been able to keep up with this blog as I would have liked. A great but demanding new job at an awesome company, two young children and a relocation to Ireland (while still working in London and occasionally traveling to the US) have made it hard to keep it up. Our latest and greatest family project isn't going to help I suppose. But I'm hopeful I'll get back to blogging about software soon. … [+]
Since I can't seem to find the time to write an in-depth article these days, I'll cheat for once and just link to others. These are posts that I've come across recently on distributed systems and DDD, the two main areas I'm interested in at the moment. They are all well worth your time reading if you haven't already. Distributed Systems Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg This was of particular interest to me as I was designing a somewhat similar system at work when I came across this paper. It's a great read for anyone interested in distributed systems. The paper is well-written and is packed with insights. The authors are also very candid about what worked and what didn't work so well with Borg. Omega, and what it means for Kubernetes: a Q&A about cluster scheduling If you liked the Borg paper, you'll love this. … [+]
The source for the DbContextScope component I presented in the previous post is now on GitHub. As usual, work got in the way and it took me longer than I would have liked to put this up. The good news is that DbContextScope has now been battle-tested for two months in production in a large scale application and has worked beautifully so far. … [+]
UPDATE: the source code for DbContextScope is now available on GitHub: DbContextScope on GitHub. A bit of context This isn't the first post that has been written about managing the DbContext lifetime in Entity Framework-based applications. In fact, there is no shortage of articles discussing this topic. For many applications, the solutions presented in those articles (which generally revolve around using a DI container to inject DbContext instances with a PerWebRequest lifetime) will work just fine. They also have the merit of being very simple - at least at first sight. For certain types of applications however, the inherent limitations of these approaches pose problems. To the point that certain features become impossible to implement or require to resort to increasingly complex structures or increasingly ugly hacks to work around the way the DbContext instances are created and managed. Here is for example an overview of the real-world application that … [+]
This is the first part of an n-part series on using Entity Framework 6 coming from an NHibernate background . Although this series is primarily aimed at NHibernate veterans making the transition to Entity Framework 6, any developer new to EF will probably find most of this information helpful too. Introduction After having used NHibernate quite extensively for the past few years, I've just completed my first 6 months in the Entity Framework world. I had actually already given Entity Framework a try back in the EF4 days. I quickly abandonned it as it became clear very quickly that it wasn't ready for prime time. But I have to say that Entity Framework has come a long way since then. EF6 has become not just a usable but a very capable ORM. It's definitely now a very credible alternative to NHibernate. The transition from NH to EF6 was fairly smooth as … [+]
