Browsing Posts published by james

Another year, another fun time at DevTeach. Thanks to everyone who came out to my sessions and asked questions. For those interested, you can download slides and demos from here:

TDD/BDD as Architectural Tools (slides | code)

Convention-over-Configuration (slides | code)

Agile Development with IoC and ORM (slides | code)

N.B. Code is compressed with 7-Zip, a free and awesome file archiver. It supports a wide variety of archive formats, including the high compression ratio 7z format. It integrates into Windows Explorer and is much, much, much faster than the Windows built-in zip archiver. Highly recommended.

Once upon a time there were four friends – two TextBoxes and two ComboBoxes. They all lived happily on a WPF Window bound together in blissful MVVM harmony. The TextBoxes were bound to the ViewModel’s TextBoxText property and the ComboBoxes to the ComboBoxSelectedItem property.

MVVM ComboBox

<Window x:Class="MvvmComboBox.MainWindow"
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
        xmlns:mvvm="clr-namespace:MvvmComboBox" 
        Title="MVVM ComboBox" Width="300" Height="150">
    <Window.Resources>
        <mvvm:MainWindowViewModel x:Key="viewModel"/>
    </Window.Resources>
    <StackPanel DataContext="{StaticResource viewModel}">
        <TextBox Text="{Binding TextBoxText.Value}"/>
        <TextBox Text="{Binding TextBoxText.Value}"/>
        <ComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ComboBoxItems}" 
                SelectedItem="{Binding ComboBoxSelectedItem.Value}"/>
        <ComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ComboBoxItems}" 
                SelectedItem="{Binding ComboBoxSelectedItem.Value}"/>
    </StackPanel>
</Window>

TextBoxText and ComboBoxItem are both Observable<T> so that INotifyPropertyChanged notifications are broadcast properly to all interested parties.

public class Observable<T> : INotifyPropertyChanged where T:class {
    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged = (o,e) => { };

    private T value;
    public T Value {
        get { return value; }
        set {
            if(this.value == value) return;
            this.value = value;
            PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Value"));
        }
    }
}

ASIDE: Notice the event definition in line 2. By assigned a NOP (no operation) lambda, I don’t have to check whether any listeners are registered for the event. I can simply fire the event and worse case scenario, I execute an empty function body rather than throwing a NullReferenceException. This is tidier in my opinion than the if(PropertyChanged != null) nonsense that we’ve been using for years.

The view model is similarly simple.

public class MainWindowViewModel {
    public MainWindowViewModel() {
        TextBoxText = new Observable<string>();
        ComboBoxSelectedItem = new Observable<string>();
    }

    public Observable<string> TextBoxText { get; set; }
    public Observable<string> ComboBoxSelectedItem { get; set; }

    public IEnumerable<string> ComboBoxItems {
        get {
            yield return "One";
            yield return "Two";
            yield return "Three";
            yield return "Four";
            yield return "Five";
        }
    }
}

With the INotifyPropetyChanged in place, changing one TextBox will cause its twin to display the same value and same for the two ComboBoxes.

MVVM ComboBox synchronized

We get a strange new requirement that every second change should be ignored. (The actual business requirement was more sensible. I was displaying a list of entities for editing. If the previous entity wasn’t saved, the user would be presented with a save dialog and standard “yes/no/cancel” options. On cancel, I wanted to disregard the ComboBox change and revert back to the previously selected entity.)

public class Observable<T> : INotifyPropertyChanged where T:class {
    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged = (o,e) => { };

    private T value;
    private int count;
    public T Value {
        get { return value; }
        set {
            if(this.value == value) return;
 
            if(count++ % 2 == 0) return;
 
            this.value = value;
            PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Value"));
        }
    }
}

So based on business rules, we’ve ignored a change to the view model. The TextBoxes always remain synchronized – reverting back to the previous value if the change is ignored. Unfortunately the changed ComboBoxes becomes unsynchronized with the view model if the view model ignores a change.

MVVM ComboBox unsynchronized

If you examine the view model in the debugger, the TextBoxText is “Hello, world! Hello, again!” as expected. You can change either TextBox as many times as you want. Every other edit is ignored and causes its changes to revert, as expected. Examining the current state of the view model’s ComboBoxSelectedItem, its value is “Four” and not “Two”. I selected “Two” in the first ComboBox, which was the ignored change. The first ComboBox is now unsynchronized with the view model. If you change the selection again, both ComboBoxes have the correct value. The problem is only with changes ignored by the view model.

Let’s create a new type derived from ComboBox to fix this problem.

namespace JamesKovacs.MvvmComboBox {
    public class ComboBox : System.Windows.Controls.ComboBox {
        protected override void OnSelectionChanged(SelectionChangedEventArgs e) {
            base.OnSelectionChanged(e);
            var binding = GetBindingExpression(SelectedItemProperty);
            if(binding != null) {
                binding.UpdateTarget();
            }
        }
    }
}

I perform the normal OnSelectionChanged event and then update the ComboBox’s SelectedItemProperty from the bound ViewModel if a binding exists. This ensures that if the view model ignores changes or modifies the selection in some way, the ComboBox displays the correct value. Minor note: I am defining a derived ComboBox in my own namespace, which is also called ComboBox. I do this so that in my XAML, I can apply the fix by prepending <ComboBox/> with my namespace <mvvm:ComboBox/>. With this fix in place, my MVVM ComboBox remains synchronized with its view model.

image

In most cases, MVVM model binding dramatically simplifies your WPF code. Unfortunately there are some cases where bugs in the framework prevent it from working properly. Fortunately in many cases you can work around these limitations by simply deriving your own custom control from the one supplied with WPF to fix these problems.

For those of you who want to play around with the code, you can find it here. Happy coding!

ADDENDUM: As noted by Michael L. Perry in this comment, WPF behaviours can also be used to inject code without subclassing ComboBox. The code sample now includes his behaviour code in addition to the subclassing option. Also to note is that a bug in .NET 4.0 prevents the fix from working. The ComboBox (regulard, subclassed, or behavioured) becomes unsynchronized from the view model. The subclassing code works correctly in .NET 3.5. If there are any WPF gurus out there who can understand why it works in .NET 3.5, but not .NET 4.0, I would love to hear an explanation.

imageSystem.Type and XML are the nuts and gum of the development world. You can stuff a System.Type into an XML file, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Sometimes you don’t have much choice. For example:

  • Custom configuration sections in App.config/Web.config
  • Handlers and modules in Web.config
  • ProxyFactoryFactory, 2nd-level cache provider, database dialect, and other pieces of configuration in hibernate.cfg.xml*
  • XML-based IoC configuration**

* NHibernate Loquacious configuration is now a better option for configuring NHibernate IMHO and I use it in all my new apps rather than hibernate.cfg.xml.

** For IoC containers, convention-over-configuration is a better choice followed by code-based configuration. I use XML-based configuration only as a last resort, but it can sometimes be useful for configurable overrides.

When you do need to encode a System.Type into a XML file, JetBrains ReSharper makes your life a lot easier. (This is a little-known feature of ReSharper shown to me by Ilya “Orangy” Ryzhenkov, ReSharper Product Manager.) I decided to create a completely silly, contrived example where we need to display a list of hot peppers and their Scoville heat units and the information is stored in App.config. (Yes, I know. A database or flat file would be a better place. I told you that it was a contrived example.) I have created a PeppersConfigurationSection class that is defines the <peppers> configuration section. I need to specify the type name in the <configurationSections> where it says <INSERT_TYPE_NAME_HERE>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <section name="peppers" type="<INSERT_TYPE_NAME_HERE>" />
  </configSections>
  <peppers>
    <pepper name="Crazy Jerry's Brain Damage" scovilles="11000" type="sauce"/>
    <!-- more peppers -->
  </peppers>
</configuration>

Rather than typing out the namespace-qualified type name, I simply type PCS for PeppersConfigurationSection and press ReSharper’s Import Symbol Completion (IDEA: CTRL-ALT-Space; VS: ALT-SHIFT-Space).

Import Type Completion

You can see the normal ReSharper completion pop-up appear. Selecting the first one, I get:

Type Completed

This is fine and dandy if the custom configuration section is defined in your project, but what if you need to specify the assembly name too? ReSharper once again comes to our rescue with a Quick Fix (ALT-Enter).

Add module qualification

Selecting the Add module qualitication Quick Fix and we end up with this. (I added linebreaks between the parts of the fully qualified type name for ease of readability in the screenshot.)

ImportTypeCompletion4

Add module qualification is even handier if the assembly has a public key token as those are a hassle to look up. Once again, ReSharper does the hard work of inserting the type name – I only typed NVSH CTRL-ALT-Space – and then the quick fix to get the qualification with assembly name, version, culture, and public key token:

ImportTypeCompletion5

I hope this little ReSharper gem makes your coding lives just a little bit easier…

N.B. ReSharper 5.1 and 6.0 EAP (up to at least build 2136) has a bug that causes Import Symbol Completion to fail for files named Web.config in a ASP.NET project. If you rename Web.config to Foo.config – no other changes necessary – you can use Import Symbol Completion. Just remember to rename the file back to Web.config when you’re done. Another option is to copy Web.config to another project type (Console and Class Library both work), make your changes, and then copy back. I have reported the issue to JetBrains here and the team is working on a fix.

[Originally published on Telerik blog here. Republished with permission.]

As developers, we like to believe that only raw data matters. And what is more raw than the written word? Does this mean that email is a more efficient communication mechanism than in-person meetings? Email contains just the raw words of our intent, right? The receiver can scan through looking for relevant content. Their computer can index and search our email. Why don’t we communicate everything in email? We’ve all experienced the miscommunication that can happen in email. So what are we missing?

The reality is that humans are social animals. We are attuned to many communication side channels – tone of voice; verbal pauses; facial expressions; body language. These side channels communicate additional information above and beyond the written (or spoken) word. What we are effectively doing with these side channels is increasing our communication bandwidth and when it comes to communication, more bandwidth is better. Just like increasing bandwidth in your computer network means pushing more bits of data per second through the pipe, you can do the same thing with your personal and team communications. Arranging some common forms of communication from lowest to highest bandwidth.

  • One-way text (email/tweet/txt)
  • Two-way text (IM)
  • Voice
  • Video
  • Face-to-Face

As you go from low to high, the amount of information communicated per unit time increases and the likelihood of asking for clarification goes up. You’re much more likely to ask for clarification on an uncertain point when talking to someone than when you’re texting. Having to craft a reply creates a certain amount of impedance and if you’re fairly certain you know what the person is talking about, you won’t send that clarifying text or email. When talking, you’re much more likely to simply say back, “Let me see if I understand what you’re staying” and proceed to paraphrase your understanding of what they said.

Let’s look at daily stand up meetings as an example of high-bandwidth communication. The purpose of the daily stand up meetings is to keep team members apprised of progress on the project. Daily stand up meetings aren’t the only way to do this. Everyone could write daily status reports. Or the project manager could walk around asking everyone for a verbal update. Or team members could update a central progress report wiki. But most successful agile teams use daily stand up meetings. Why are daily stand up meetings more effective than the other techniques? It all has to do with communication bandwidth…

Let’s say a team member emails everyone, “I’m going to finish the enrolment feature on the website today.” Sounds great. No reason to doubt them. Now let’s say that they say exactly the same thing in a daily stand up meeting, but now you notice that they say it while avoiding eye contact with other team members and shuffling their feet? Most people can tell that the developer is quite uncertain about their ability to accomplish the task today. Same raw information, but you’re receiving additional information from the communication sideband of body language. If the developer instead said the same thing, but looks other team members in the eye and says it with confidence in their voice, other team members will feel more certain about the task being completed. (If the person has been saying the same thing for a week straight now, the team has a different issue to deal with – that of honesty and integrity in communication.)

Knowing why agile teams value daily stand up meetings also helps us compensate when face-to-face stand ups aren’t possible or feasible. Let’s say that we have a geographically dispersed team, video calls are going to have higher bandwidth than a voice call or emails. Similarly if the geographically dispersed team is centred in two different locations, it would be better to have two separate face-to-face meetings linked by video rather than everyone calling in separately via video conference. The team’s goal is to maximize efficient information exchange between team members as much as possible.

Daily stand up meetings aren’t the only way that agile teams leverage high bandwidth communications. Other examples include:

  • Pair programming: two developers focused on solving a single problem
  • Team rooms: immersing project members in team-related communications
  • User stories: a reminder to have a conversation with a stakeholder
  • Story walls or Kanban boards: surrounding the team in relevant project data

In each of these cases, successful agile teams use high bandwidth communication to facilitate understanding between team members and with other project stakeholders. Notice that story walls and Kanban boards are a form of non-verbal high bandwidth communication. Team members and stakeholders can quickly glance at the board and see the current status of their project. A well-placed board cannot help but be noticed often and frequently throughout the day. It is a constant visual reminder of what the team is doing and where it is at. It often becomes a focal point of conversation and acts as an information radiator about the project.

This isn’t to say that teams should avoid written communication, but use it when it’s appropriate. Written communication is more easily archived and searchable than verbal communication. Good written communication summarizes and condenses a lot of information into a more useful form. Written communication also decouples the availability of the sender and receiver. If you need a new server set up or need to confirm a meeting time, often a quick email is more efficient than standing outside someone’s office waiting for them to have a moment to talk to you. The lesson here is use the appropriate form of communication for the job at hand. And next time you’re having trouble understanding an email from a team member or project stakeholder, don’t hesitate to increase your communication bandwidth by picking up the phone or inviting them out for coffee…

[This post was originally published on the Telerik blog and is reproduced here with permission.]

“Our team is agile because we stand up for meetings!” It’s the perennial joke of the agile community. We’ve all heard of teams that feel that they are doing agile development because they stand up for their meetings. (I sincerely hope that it is more urban legend than truth.) The reality is that there is more to agile than stand up meetings and there is more to stand up meetings than simply standing. Let’s look at some of the key aspects of the stand up meeting and how you can make yours more effective.

Just the Facts, M’am

At the heart of the stand up meeting is each team member answering three questions:

  1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
  2. What am I doing today?
  3. Are any impediments blocking my progress?

The focus of these questions is progress. Each team member should be asking himself or herself, “How is my work progressing and is anything preventing me from being successful?” It shouldn’t be about excuses or recriminations. The stand up meeting is meant to be an honest appraisal by the team members of the current status of the project.

Same Bat Place, Same Bat Time

If you need Outlook to keep track of your stand up meetings, you’re doing something wrong. Keep them at the same time and same place every day – preferably first thing in the morning and close to where the team works. It gets the whole team off of the right foot and sets the cadence for the day. By keeping the time and place consistent, you don’t lose time “gathering the troops”. If team members need to coordinate on a task, they can arrange it at the beginning of the day. If there are any impediments that need tackling, the team can figure out how to tackle them together without wasting time waiting for the stand up meeting.

Keep It Short

Stand up meetings should be short and to-the-point. They should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes. Even a large team of 10 to 12 people can finish a stand up in about 10 minutes if everyone stays focused on the three questions above. The focus is on making sure the entire team is on the same page and heading toward a common goal. If meetings are taking longer, this is usually because team members start trying to solve problems rather than staying focused on reporting their progress. As developers, we love to solve problems and it takes a great deal of discipline to not start offering solutions when someone has a problem or you think of an elegant design for some new feature. Resist this temptation. Chances are that only a handful of people in the room need to be involved in the discussion. Respect their time by saying, “I’ve got an idea about how to solve that problem. Let’s talk about it afterward.” Everyone on the team has the authority to declare that a discussion should be moved to the “parking lot” to keep the team focused and on track. Remember a stand up meeting should be 5 to 10 minutes maximum.

The “No Impediments” Impediment

If a team member reports day after day that he/she has “no impediments”, that’s usually a good sign that there is a problem. Usually this goes hand-in-hand with missing commitments. It is virtually unheard of for a project to go completely smoothly for all the developers all the time and a few issues crop up every week across the team. Often team members feel self-conscious about asking for help or feel that they will be judged for complaining. The stand up meeting is about honest communication within the team. The point is to solve problems, not lay blame. If you are the project manager, team lead, or scrum master, talk to the individual afterward to see if there are any problems and encourage them to share with the group. This is a great opportunity to lead by example. Next time you hit a problem, discuss it at the stand up meeting and look to the team to help solve it. Show that the team is a supportive environment for everyone to excel.

The Whole Team

Stand up meetings are for the whole team, not just the developers. Agile encourages cross-functional teams and everyone involved in the project should be participating in the stand up meetings – developers, project managers, technical writers, QA, … Successful projects are those where the whole team takes responsibility for successful delivery. If a task needs doing, the team figures out how to get that task done regardless of official roles. For example, if the technical writer is behind on end user documentation because he was sick last week, the lead developer can step in and lend a hand. It shouldn’t be “beneath her” to do documentation work. Documentation is part of the deliverable, just as is testing, coding, coordinating with beta testers, and more. Sometimes multiple team members will need to juggle tasks around so that team members with the right skillset can tackle a particular problem. If you’re the project manager, team lead, and/or scrum master, remember to let the team figure out the solution (possibly with some gentle nudging) rather than you dictating it. The team will feel more ownership and responsibility for delivering on their commitments if they own the solution.

Report to the Team

Team members should be reporting their progress to the team and not the project manager. Stand ups work best when everyone stands in a circle. This encourages reporting to the whole team and make it easier to remember whose turn it is. The stand up meeting is about keeping the team synchronized, focused, and collaborating. It is not for updating a Gantt chart or explaining to your boss why the feature wasn’t completed on time. It is a forum for discussing progress of the project with the entire team and solving problems as a team. Team members should be making commitments to the other team members, not the project manager. It’s more important that the team meet its project deliverables than individual team members hit individual goals. In making the project successful, individual team members are also successful.

Summary

Stand up meetings are about more than just standing. They are about encouraging regular communication and collaboration between team members. They help to synchronize a team’s daily activities and facilitate just-in-time problem solving – removing impediments and keeping team members productive. They are one effective tool in our agile arsenal for delivering successful projects.

imageThanks to everyone who came out to see “What’s New in NHibernate 3?” at the Calgary .NET User Group last night. I had a fun time sharing all the new tidbits available in NHibernate 3 including…

I also talked about a few changes coming in NHibernate 3.2 including…

A few folks asked why I chose to use hbm.xml files rather than Fluent NHibernate. I used hbm.xml files because I wanted to focus on new NHibernate features. In my projects, I often use Fluent NHibernate’s ClassMap<T> and/or automapping. (ConfORM is another option for automapping, which worth considering.) And PersistenceSpecification<T> from Fluent NHibernate is da bomb! Great way to test your mappings whether or not you’re using Fluent NHibernate.

You can find the slidedeck here and the demos here.

[Code for this article is available on GitHub here.]

NHibernate 3 introduces support for both the .NET 3.5 Client Profile and .NET 4.0 Client Profile. This means that applications built with NHibernate can be deployed to client desktops without the full .NET Framework installed. Why hasn’t this been available all along?

NHibernate 2.X was built to support .NET 2.0 and above. The Client Profile wasn’t introduced until after NHibernate 2.0 was released. Microsoft introduced the Client Profile in .NET 3.5 to reduce the size of the .NET Framework on client machines. (The reality is that end users don’t need ASP.NET, server-side WCF features, and MSBuild on their machines to run client-side applications.)

So why didn’t NHibernate support the Client Profile once it was released? What was holding them back? What was holding NHibernate back from supporting the Client Profile immediately was a dependency on System.Web. Now why the heck would NHibernate depend on System.Web? There aren’t many places that NHibernate touches System.Web, but there are a few. The first is in supporting session-per-request semantics in web applications using Contextual Sessions. I won’t go into the details here, but once you configure cfg.CurrentSessionContext<T>() in Loquacious or hibernate.current_session_context_class in hibernate.cfg.xml, you can get the current session from your static session factory. (ASIDE: If none of the built-in ICurrentSessionContext classes suffices for your needs, it is very easy to implement your own.)

var session = sessionFactory.GetCurrentSession();

The ManagedWebSessionContext and WebSessionContext classes can be used for session-per-request semantics and both store the current session in the HttpContext. Hence they need a reference to System.Web. So to support the Client Profile, the NHibernate team had to break this dependency on System.Web. They did this by accessing the HttpContext via a compiled dynamic method, which is evaluated at run-time. (A compiled dynamic method has much better performance than accessing properties through reflection.)

Another more insidious dependency on System.Web was in the logging infrastructure. Before NHibernate 3, NHibernate took a hard dependency on log4net. If you wanted logging, you used log4net. Now here is the insidious part… log4net has a dependency on System.Web for its AspNetTraceAppender, which writes to the ASP.NET TraceContext. (You can access the ASP.NET TraceContext via http://example.com/trace.axd.) To break this dependency, NHibernate 3 introduces LoggerProvider and the IInternalLogger. If a logger is explicitly configured, it uses that one. Now for a bit of cleverness. If no logger is explicitly configured, and LoggerProvider is asked for an IInternalLogger, it checks the bin directory. If it finds log4net, it uses log4net. Otherwise it defaults to the NoLoggingLogger. (N.B. Out-of-the-box NHibernate 3 only supports log4net or no logging, though it isn’t too onerous support other logging frameworks by implementing an IInternalLogger adapter and some support classes.)

I haven’t done an exhaustive search of the NHibernate 2.X codebase looking for other dependencies on System.Web, but those two give you an idea of why supporting the .NET Client Profile wasn’t as simple as recompiling NHibernate 2.X. The team had to break some dependencies on assemblies not include with the .NET Client Profile while not breaking backward compatibility. For most developers, supporting the .NET Client Profile is as simple as switching the Target Framework on their assemblies.

ClientProfileTargetFramework

One word of warning… If you’re using NHibernate Profiler (and you should be), the NHibernateProfiler.Appender doesn’t support the .NET Client Profile because it requires log4net. You can use a preprocessor directive around the initialization line of NHibernate Profiler and then define that conditional compilation constant (using #define ENABLE_NHPROF) to enable/disable profiling. You’ll also have to change the target framework to .NET 3.5 or .NET 4.0 temporarily for the profiling session so that your project compiles.

#if ENABLE_NHPROF
HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Appender.NHibernate.NHibernateProfiler.Initialize();
#endif

UPDATE: NHibernate Profiler build 796 and later supports profiling applications built against the .NET Client Profile. More information can be found here.

[Code for this article is available on GitHub here.]

Nothing gets an OO zealot hot under the collar the way the term polymorphism does. You probably have three questions right now… What does polymorphism have to do with object-relational mapping? How does it relate to NHibernate? And why should I care?

An ORM that supports polymorphic loading allows us to request one type of object, but potentially get an object of a derived type back. As an example, let’s say we have the following simple inheritance hierarchy in our application:

Animal Inheritance Hierarchy

We can query for an Animal, but receive back an instance of Dog or Cat instead.

var dog = session.Get<Animal>(dogId);

NHibernate has supported this type of polymorphic loading behaviour for awhile, but the base class (or interface) had to be mapped. If it wasn’t, polymorphic loading would only work when querying with Criteria or LINQ. The following works for both NH 2.1.2 and NH3 regardless of whether the Animal base class is mapped or not.

var animal = session.CreateCriteria<Animal>()
                    .Add(Restrictions.IdEq(dogId))
                    .UniqueResult<Animal>();

// N.B. Use session.Linq<Animal>() in NH2.1.2
var query = from a in session.Query<Animal>()
            where a.Id == dogId
            select a;
var animal = query.Single();

In NHibernate 2.1.2 and earlier, ISession.Get<T>(id) or ISession.Load<T>(id) would fail if T was an unmapped base class or interface. With NHibernate 3, these methods now work regardless of whether T is mapped or not.*

// Works in NH3; works in NH2.1.2 only if Animal is mapped
// In the sample code, works in NH3 for both Animal and UnmappedAnimal base classes
// In NH2.1.2 and before, works for Animal (mapped), but not UnmappedAnimal
var dog = session.Get<Animal>(dogId);
var cat = session.Load<Animal>(catId);

ASIDE: ISession.Get(id) returns null when the entity doesn’t exist in the database, whereas ISession.Load(id) throws an exception. Generally ISession.Load(id) is preferred if you know the entity should exist as NHibernate can return a proxy object that delays hitting the database until the last possible moment. ISession.Get(id) requires querying the database immediately because there is no way to return an object (e.g. a proxy), but later change it to null when accessed.

In NHibernate 3, polymorphic loading works for Criteria, LINQ, and Get/Load. It has not been implemented for HQL. (If you want/need this feature, the NHibernate team is always willing to accept a feature request with patch.) HQL in NH3 supports polymorphic loading if the queried class is imported via <import class=”UnmappedClass”/> in a hbm.xml file.

// Criteria works in NH2.1.2 and NH3
var animal = session.CreateCriteria<UnmappedAnimal>()
                    .Add(Restrictions.IdEq(dogId))
                    .UniqueResult<UnmappedAnimal>());

// LINQ works in NH2.1.2 and NH3 (NH2.1.2 uses session.Linq<T>())
var query = from a in session.Query<UnmappedAnimal>()
            where a.Id == dogId
            select a;
var animal = query.Single();

// Get/Load works in NH3, but fails in NH2.1.2 and earlier
var animal = session.Get<UnmappedAnimal>(dogId);

// HQL works for NH3 if UnmappedAnimal is imported, but fails for NH2.1.2
var animal = session.CreateQuery("from a in UnmappedAnimal where a.id = :id")
                    .SetParameter("id", dogId)
                    .UniqueResult<UnmappedAnimal>());

* I should note one restriction on the generic parameter T when calling ISession.Get<T>(id) and ISession.Load<T>(). Polymorphic loading only works if there is a unique persister for T. Otherwise NHibernate throws a HibernateException, “Ambiguous persister for [T] implemented by more than one hierarchy”. What does this mean? Let’s say you have an unmapped abstract base class, such as Entity. (Entity is a class defined in our application, which includes properties common across all persistent entities, such as primary key, audit fields, and similar. It is not required by NHibernate, but often useful for extracting common domain code.) Consider the following contrived example:

Contrived Inheritance Hierarchy

Note that the Animal inheritance hierarchy is mapped and so is Customer. If we try to execute the following code:

var id = 42;
var entity = session.Get<Entity>(id);

We will get a HibernateException as mentioned above. We are asking NHibernate to load an Entity with an id of 42. But primary keys are only unique within a mapped inheritance hierarchy. So there could be a Cat (or Dog) with id of 42 and a Customer with id of 42! So NHibernate fails with a HibernateException since it has no way of returning a list of objects from Get/Load. If you really want to query across inheritance hierarchies, you can do so with Critera or LINQ where you return a list of objects. The following code will work:

var id = 42;
var entities = session.CreateCriteria<Entity>()
                      .Add(Restrictions.IdEq(id))
                      .List<Entity>();

Here’s a NHibernate trick that makes for a good demo, but isn’t terribly practical in real applications… Retrieve a list of all entities in the database:

var allEntities = session.CreateCriteria<object>()
                         .List<object>();

Happy coding!

UPDATE: Fabio Maulo, NH project lead, pointed out to me that HQL in NHibernate 3 can load unmapped classes so long as you make NHibernate aware of the classes via an <import class=”UnmappedAnimal”/> directive in a hbm.xml file. Thanks, Fabio.

We’ve all done it at one point or another. Our application throws an exception and we start wading through a standard Windows error dialog or a log file to examine the exception and stack trace. If you’re a ReSharper Jedi, you’ve probably copied the exception and stack trace to the clipboard and hit CTRL-SHIFT-E (IDEA) or CTRL-E, T (VS) in Visual Studio to launch ReSharper’s Stack Trace Explorer. (If you have’t, you’ll see the Stack Trace Explorer in just a second.)

Let me show you an easier way that works well on desktop or Silverlight apps. I’ll use Silverlight for demo purposes, but the same technique works with WPF and WinForms. First we need to hook up a global error handler:

public MainPage() {
    InitializeComponent();
    Application.Current.UnhandledException += HandleApplicationUnhandledException;
}

private static void HandleApplicationUnhandledException(object sender, ApplicationUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e) {
    if(Debugger.IsAttached) {
        Clipboard.SetText(e.ExceptionObject.ToString());
    }
    e.Handled = false;
}

Please note that this is demo code and I’m simply hooking this up in the code behind. In a larger application, I would typically publish an ErrorOccurred message to my application’s message bus and register a listener that would contain the code in HandleApplicationUnhandledException.

Notice that I’m checking whether a debugger is attached. If so, I place the contents of the System.Exception (or derived exception) on the clipboard. (Clipboard is in the System.Windows namespace for Silverlight and WPF apps, but there is an identically-named class in System.Windows.Forms.) The reason that I’m checking whether a debugger is attached is so that end-users don’t get the clipboards spammed with exception text. You could conditionally compile the code so that production builds don’t contain it, but personally I like having the code in production too. It means that I can grab an old build, attach a debugger, and get the same exceptions that the end users are getting.

Now that the exception and stack trace is on the clipboard, I jump over to Visual Studio and press CTRL-SHIFT-E (IDEA) or CTRL-E, T (VS). I am immediately presented with ReSharper’s Stack Trace Explorer as ReSharper is smart enough to grab the current clipboard contents to display:

StackTraceExplorer

The advantage here is fictionless debugging as you no longer have to find, select, and copy the exception and stack trace to the clipboard. It’s there for you automatically. As soon as you hit an exception, simply jump to Visual Studio and press CTRL-SHIFT-E (IDEA) or CTRL-E, T (VS) and you’re ready to find the problem. Also note that all the method names in the ReSharper’s Stack Trace Explorer are hot links to the appropriate code file allowing for easy navigation of your code base, the .NET Framework, and third-party libraries.

One quick note regarding Silverlight… Many modern browsers (e.g. FF4, IE8+, Chrome, …) will run Silverlight in a separate process. So even when you launch with debugging (F5), you’ll be attached to the browser process itself and not the child process that is hosting Silverlight. To correct this, simply go to Debug… Attach to Process… and find the hosting process where the type is Silverlight. (For FireFox 4, the hosting process is called plugin-container.exe. For IE8+ and Chrome, the hosting process is called iexplore.exe or chrome.exe, respectively. Just look for the one hosting Silverlight as noted under the “Type” column.)

AttachToProcess

Happy Debugging!

[Code for this article is available on GitHub here.]

In this post, we’ll examine the ways that NHibernate supports the DateTime-related data types, including some new features introduced in NHibernate 2 and 3. Here is a quick summary for the impatient.

DbType .NET SQL Type
DateTime System.DateTime datetime
LocalDateTime System.DateTime datetime
UtcDateTime System.DateTime datetime
DateTimeOffset System.DateTimeOffset datetimeoffset
DateTime2 System.DateTime datetime2
Date System.DateTime date
Time System.DateTime time
TimeAsTimeSpan System.TimeSpan time
TimeSpan System.TimeSpan bigint (int64)

Local/UTC

Let’s take a look at a few DateTime-related problems that developers have run into in the past…

public class DateTimeEntity {
    public DateTimeEntity() {
        CreationTime = DateTime.Now;
    }

    public virtual Guid Id { get; private set; }
    public virtual DateTime CreationTime { get; set; }
}

Note that CreationTime is initialized using DateTime.Now. The corresponding mapping file would be:

<hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2"

namespace="Nh3Hacking"

assembly="Nh3Hacking"> <class name="DateTimeEntity"> <id name="Id"> <generator class="guid.comb" /> </id> <property name="CreationTime"/> </class> </hibernate-mapping>

If we create an instance of our DateTimeEntity and reload it, we get:

Original entity:
Id: 09bead07-5a05-4459-a108-9e7501204918
        CreationTime: 2011-01-24 5:29:36 PM (Local)
Reloaded entity:
Id: 09bead07-5a05-4459-a108-9e7501204918
        CreationTime: 2011-01-24 5:29:36 PM (Unspecified)

Note that I am outputting both CreationTime.ToString() and CreationTime.Kind. DateTime.Kind returns a DateTimeKind (surprising, huh?), which indicates whether this DateTime represents Local time or UTC time. We initialized the value with DateTime.Now, which is the local time. (If we wanted UTC time, we would use DateTime.UtcNow.) When the object is reloaded, the DateTimeKind is Unspecified. This is because the database does not store whether the DateTime value is Local or UTC. NHibernate has no way of knowing which one it is, hence Unspecified.

NHibernate 3 includes two new DbTypes that allow us to resolve this ambiguity. In our mapping file, we can write:

<property name="CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime" type="LocalDateTime"/>
<property name="CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime" type="UtcDateTime"/>

We are explicitly telling NHibernate whether the database stores Local or UTC times.

Original entity:
Id: 09bead07-5a05-4459-a108-9e7501204918
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:29:36 PM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:29:36 PM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-25 12:29:36 AM (Utc)
Reloaded entity:
Id: 09bead07-5a05-4459-a108-9e7501204918
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:29:36 PM (Unspecified)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:29:36 PM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-25 12:29:36 AM (Utc)

This is strictly metadata and it is up to the developer to ensure that the proper DateTime is present in the property/field. For instance, if I initialize the entity as follows:

public DateTimeEntity() {
    CreationTimeAsDateTime = DateTime.Now;
    CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
    CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime = DateTime.Now;
}

Note that the LocalDateTime property contains a UTC DateTime and the UTC property contains a Local DateTime. The results are:

Original entity:
Id: 4579d245-46f3-4c3f-893b-9e750124a90b
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:45:32 PM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-25 12:45:32 AM (Utc)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:45:32 PM (Local)
Reloaded entity:
Id: 4579d245-46f3-4c3f-893b-9e750124a90b
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:45:32 PM (Unspecified)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-25 12:45:32 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-24 5:45:32 PM (Utc)

Notice that NHibernate did not perform any conversions or throw an exception when saving/loading a DateTime value with the wrong DateTimeKind. (It could be argued that NHibernate should throw an exception when asked to save a Local DateTime and the property is mapped as a UtcDateTime.) It is up to the developer to ensure that the proper kind of DateTime is in the appropriate field/property.

System.DateTimeOffset

One problem that LocalDateTime and UtcDateTime does not solve is the offset problem. If you have a DateTime and its Kind is Local, all you know is that it is a Local DateTime. You do not know if that Local DateTime is Mountain (MST), Eastern (EST), Pacific (PST), etc. You do not know whether it has been corrected for daylight savings time. All you know is that it is a Local DateTime. You have to assume that the local time is based on the time zone of the current computer. Although this is often a reasonable assumption, it’s not always. (Consider for example that you’re collecting log files from a distributed system and servers reside in multiple time zones.) The problem is that System.DateTime class does not contain a place to record the timezone offset. Microsoft solved this problem starting in .NET 3.5 by introducing the System.DateTimeOffset class. It looks a lot like System.DateTime, but does include the timezone offset rather than the DateTimeKind. So we can just use System.DateTimeOffset in our applications rather than System.DateTime.

Except… Date/time types in SQL databases do not have anywhere to store the timezone offset. The notable exception is SQL Server 2008, which introduced the datetimeoffset type. NHibernate 2 introduced support for System.DateTimeOffset, but only for SQL Server 2008 onwards. (If you’re using SQL Server 2005 or earlier or another database server, you’ll have to implement your own IUserType to store System.DateTimeOffset in two separate columns – one for the DateTime and the other for the timezone offset.) The additional code in DateTimeEntity.cs looks like this:

public virtual DateTimeOffset CreationTimeAsDateTimeOffset { get; set; }

The mapping file just needs the new property added:

<property name="CreationTimeAsDateTimeOffset"/>

Note that I don’t need to specify the type in the mapping as NHibernate can infer it from the property type in DateTimeEntity. The resulting output is:

Original entity:
Id: 95aa6c15-86f5-4398-aa9e-9e7600ae4580
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-25 10:34:30 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-25 10:34:30 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-25 5:34:30 PM (Utc)
        CreationTimeAsDateTimeOffset: 2011-01-25 10:34:30 AM -07:00
Reloaded entity:
Id: 95aa6c15-86f5-4398-aa9e-9e7600ae4580
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-25 10:34:30 AM (Unspecified)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-25 10:34:30 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-25 5:34:30 PM (Utc)
        CreationTimeAsDateTimeOffset: 2011-01-25 10:34:30 AM -07:00

Support for DateTime2, Date, and Time

Let’s look at some C# and the corresponding mapping file for these types:

public virtual DateTime CreationTimeAsDateTime2 { get; set; }
public virtual DateTime CreationTimeAsDate { get; set; }
public virtual DateTime CreationTimeAsTime { get; set; }
public virtual TimeSpan CreationTimeAsTimeAsTimeSpan { get; set; }
public virtual TimeSpan CreationTimeAsTimeSpan { get; set; }

Modifications to the hbm.xml:

<property name="CreationTimeAsDateTime2" type="DateTime2"/>
<property name="CreationTimeAsDate" type="Date"/>
<property name="CreationTimeAsTime" type="Time"/>
<property name="CreationTimeAsTimeAsTimeSpan" type="TimeAsTimeSpan"/>
<property name="CreationTimeAsTimeSpan"/>

We’ll examine each of these in turn…

DbType.DateTime2 is a higher precision, wider range version of DbType.DateTime. DbType.DateTime maps to the datetime (or smalldatetime) SQL type, which has a range of 1753-01-01 to 9999-12-31. DbType.DateTime2 maps to the datetime2 SQL type, which has a range of 0001-01-01 to 9999-12-31. (Precision can be as high as 1/10 of a microsecond with a datetime2(7).) One of the niceties of DateTime2 is that an uninitialized DateTime struct (which has a value of 0001-01-01 12:00:00 AM (Unspecified)) does not cause a SqlTypeException with a SqlDateTime underflow.

DbType.Date does just what it advertises. It represents a Date without a Time component. It is stored in the database as only a date. .NET does not have a Date type and NHibernate represents it via a DateTime with the time portion set to 12:00:00 AM. I personally prefer to define my own Date class, which has no time component, and create an IUserType to handle the mapping. My custom Date class can handle the time truncation and provide a more natural programing model for my domain, but that’s a post for another day.

Time-related DbTypes stores just the time, but no date. In .NET, there is no Time class and so NHibernate uses a DateTime with the date component set to 1753-01-01, the minimum value for a SQL datetime or a System.TimeSpan – depending on the DbType that we choose. DbType.Time stores a System.DateTime in a time SQL type. DbType.TimeAsTimeSpan stores a System.TimeSpan as a time SQL type. DbType.TimeSpan stores a Syste.TimeSpan as a 64-bit integer (bigint) SQL type. As I mentioned for DbType.Date, I am more inclined to write my own Time class and custom IUserType to achieve a better programming model than relying on the .NET constructs of System.DateTime and System.TimeSpan. (I typically use System.DateTime or System.TimeSpan as a field in my custom Date or Time class for storing the data, but provide my own API for consistently working with the data.)

WARNING: Not all databases support all date/time SQL types. So before choosing .NET and SQL types for your entities, make sure that they’re available in all databases that you plan to support.

Now we’ll take a look at these date/time types in action:

Original entity:
Id: 6b2fb9ff-8036-4c17-b9ef-9e7600bf37e3
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-25 6:36:12 PM (Utc)
        CreationTimeAsDateTimeOffset: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM -07:00
        CreationTimeAsDateTime2: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsDate: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsTime: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsTimeAsTimeSpan: 11:36:12.2688265
        CreationTimeAsTimeSpan: 11:36:12.2688265
Reloaded entity:
Id: 6b2fb9ff-8036-4c17-b9ef-9e7600bf37e3
        CreationTimeAsDateTime: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Unspecified)
        CreationTimeAsLocalDateTime: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Local)
        CreationTimeAsUtcDateTime: 2011-01-25 6:36:12 PM (Utc)
        CreationTimeAsDateTimeOffset: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM -07:00
        CreationTimeAsDateTime2: 2011-01-25 11:36:12 AM (Unspecified)
        CreationTimeAsDate: 2011-01-25 12:00:00 AM (Unspecified)
        CreationTimeAsTime: 1753-01-01 11:36:12 AM (Unspecified)
        CreationTimeAsTimeAsTimeSpan: 11:36:12.2700000
        CreationTimeAsTimeSpan: 11:36:12.2688265

Summary

As you have seen, NHibernate has a wide variety of options for mapping date/time-related types to and from the database. The right choice is highly dependent on your application and database server. I hope that this post has given you a few more tricks up your sleeve for effectively mapping date/time-related types using NHibernate.