DAAB : The Ent Lib data block is still not behaving itself, so we've taken the soft option. Since the service we were working on is a web service, BTS doesnt really care that it uses Ent Lib, so we managed to hide the DAAB behind the web service so the two dont quarrel. For now we decided to let sleeping dogs lie.
Architectural Consistency Woes: The sad thing is that I'm struggling with getting the DAAB to insert NTEXT data into a database. It complains that SqlCommandWrapper cannot be used due to some protection level. See my GDN Message Forum post for details. Bah! Humbug! Now I've temporarily lost consistency in the architecture cos some services are using Ent Lib and the others are simple direct SQL Connections. Still, I need to get things done and I cant insist on consistency at the expense of getting things to work, can I? That would be too ivory tower-ish. Perhaps in a later iteration, when we've delivered some concrete stuff and can spend some time digging around, we will be able to find out what the problem is.
Deploying Ent Lib: On another, but related track I had some good feedback from Tom Hollander in the new GDN Ent Lib workspace where I asked if we could deploy code to production while retaining the MS namespaces (some people said that it had to be changed in the old App Block days) and how do we handle the issue of several components sharing Ent Lib DLLs when deploying.
But there is some satisfaction. Iteration-1 of my system is now 95% done. I can transform the source data, call the load service and archive the files (source and transformed versions) to a database at completion. We are now re-factoring the namespaces for all the projects and custom components to get some consistency into it. Future iterations will involve dynamic mapping, content enrichment patterns, possibly some de-batching and aggregators and so on. Will keep posting.
Hey, just to say that I will be at TechED Amsterdam next week, so if anyone would like to meet up do send me a message on the email there or through the delegate networking tool.
I'm really looking forward to TechEd. Last year was my first and i didnt know what to expect. This time I think I know how to get the most from it. I wont be needing to go near the Hands On Labs at all since I'm already doing BizTalk hands on and I have VSTS installed on a workstation (not that I've actively used it since installing, but thats another matter).
The EventCalendar and the nice print out it gives makes it easy to see where I've double booked. Last year it was quite tough since i didnt know how to use those facilities and ended up working on a massive spreadsheet to divide up session attendance between my colleague and myself. The annoying thing is that as of today only 5 PPTs are available so I cant make up my mind about sessions where I'vr double booked.
I have the downloaded webcast of Ron Jacobs talking about Patterns for SOA, so i might not actually go for that, but the slides are really interesting, so I might end up changing my mind.