TechDays Calgary 2010 Wrap-up: Convention-over-Configuration

2010-12-15 james 6 comments

Darth Vader Thanks to everyone who came out to my session on Convention-over-Configuration on the Web at TechDays Calgary 2010. I enjoyed sharing my ideas about convention-over-configuration and how it can simplify software development. You expend some serious brain power over figuring out how to enable your application-specific conventions, but everything after that flows easily and without repetition. You end up doing more with less code. During the talk, I demonstrated how frameworks like Fluent NHibernate, AutoMapper, Castle Windsor, ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery support this style of development. (Links below.) I only scratched the surface though. With a bit of creative thinking, you can use these techniques in your own code to reduce duplication and increase flexibility.

You can grab a zip of the source code directly from here or view the source tree on GitHub here.

.NET General, Agile, ASP.NET, Presentations none

#1 | Written by Iouri Goussev about 13 years ago. Reply

I used similar application stack for my .net projects. It is mostly stays out of the way and works.
#2 | Written by av about 13 years ago. Reply

Hi James, thank you for sharing. It’s greatly appreciated.

Wondering your opinion on repository implementations. In this case you prefer IRepository…where, for example, in the controller you still have to specify the model for it. I recently came across an even more generic implementation in one of the FubuMVC Contrib sample projects.

http://code.google.com/p/fubumvc-contrib/source/browse/trunk/samples/AltOxite/AltOxite.Core/Persistence/IRepository.cs

Just wondering what you thing about it and what would be long term advantages/disadvantages between the two.

Thanks
- #3 | Written by James about 13 years ago. Reply
  
  I’ve seen various IRepository, IRepository, and other techniques for abstracting your persistence framework of choice. I hate to say it, but it is really project dependent. If you’re suffering from an explosion of query methods on your repositories, returning an IQueryable from your IRepository can be a good way to handle it. If you’re using the IQueryable technique, but having trouble figuring out which queries are being executed, named query methods (e.g. FindTop10CustomersBySales()) can be a good solution. Which way you’re pulled depends on the number and variety of queries and how much you care about the discoverability of those queries. This is very project dependent.
#4 | Written by av about 13 years ago. Reply

Thank you for following up James, your insight is appreciated.
#5 | Written by RobP about 13 years ago. Reply

I downloaded the code, opened the solution in VS 2010, set the web project to be the startup project so I can step through the code and I immediately receive an error because the database is not present. Is there an additional file I need to download for the database or some kind of script I need to run to create the database.

Thanks!
Rob
- #6 | Written by James about 13 years ago. Reply
  
  I should probably have some instructions in there. Verify your connection string in web.config and create an empty database. Browse to http://localhost/SeedDummyData/ and NHibernate will create the schema and populate it with some data. HTH.

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