Recently we've been discussing ways to increase the performance of some performance critical areas of our application.  As such, a number of individuals have been doing research into various options.  Through our investigation we came upon Oracle's Timesten In-Memory database.  I was familiar with many other In-Memory databases, such as Firebird (SQLite?, VistaDB?), but up until yesterday I wasn't aware that Oracle had a product in the in-memory space.  While Oracle doesn't currently offer a .NET native provider for Timesten, TankardSoft does offer a commercial native .NET data provider for Timesten that supports the recently released version 7 of Timesten. 

If you're an NHibernate user, and/or interesting in learning about how you can create custom implementations of LINQ using IQueryable, I strongly urge you to checkout what Ayende and Bobby Diaz (and others?) have been up to with LINQ to NHibernate.

Here are some of my favorite posts thus far:

• Implmenting Linq for NHibernate: A How to Guide Part 1
  
• Implementing Linq for NHibernate - Part 2 (Ordering and Paging)
• Implementing Linq for NHibernate - Part 3 (Aggregate and Element Operators)

My wife and I welcomed our son, Keegan James Eichert, into the world monday evening.  Needless to say posting will be slow for a while until we're all adjusted, as well as until I finish up the other projects that have been keeping me busy lately...such as the LINQ book. :)

I would have liked it better if Dave started writing his series 6 months ago, but, none-the-less he's got a great series of posts going that are a must read for anyone who is thinking of writing a book, or in the process.

Most of the stories I hear about using an agile/iterative development "methodology" are from those in the consulting world.  It's nice to hear about people in product organizations, such as Adobe, using agile/iterative development successfully.  I've heard a number of people say it isn't possible due to the nature of product organizations, it sounds like the Photoshop development team might disagree.  They switched to a more agile approach and cut their bug count by approximately 1/3, ended up with a higher quality product with plenty of features, and ended up working fewer nights and weekends.

I'm going to document the things I run into as I transition from the May 2006 CTP of LINQ to the full March 2007 CTP of Orcas. Tonight after sorting out my data source issue I ran into a compile error with my Visual Basic code samples that are using XML Axis properties. The error is "XML Axis properties do not support late binding". Hopefully I'll be able to post back here shortly with an answer to why I'm getting this....

UPDATE:  Thanks to a comment from Avner I figured out that this is due to a regression in the capability of VB9 to infer types.  Previously things worked swimmingly with the following code:

    Dim rss = XElement.Load("rss.xml")
    Dim items = rss...<item>

With the March CTP the type of "rss" needs to be explicitly defined like so:

    Dim rss As XElement = XElement.Load("rss.xml")
    Dim items = rss...<item>

I like the old way better :)

Yesterday I mentioned I was having some trouble adding a Data Source in Orcas. I'm happy to report that following the instructions in the Orcas March CTP on Vista Database Connections Problem Solved post resolved my issue. Once I commented out the SQL Server CE Data Provider in the machine.config everything was back to normal.

There has been a lot of talk about LINQ as well as LINQ to SQL.  People seem to be genuinely interested in what they're going to offer.  LINQ to XML on the other hand doesn't seem to be getting much love.  I for one think it deserves it.  In the coming weeks I'm going to start a marketing campaign for LINQ to XML that will aim to convince you that LINQ to XML deserves some love as well.  Before getting started, let me ask the question, why aren't you giving LINQ to XML any love? 

I had a jolly good fun time tonight updating my code samples to the March CTP of Orcas.  Well, actually, I'm not quite finished as of yet because of the wonderful error in the title of this post.  It appears VS.NET Orcas doesn't want to let me recreate my data connection for my database that I'm using for some LINQ to SQL examples. Woot!  Hopefully I'll figure out what the dealy is shortly because I've got chapters I need to finish. :)

Simple, use the acts_as_enterprisey plugin!  It doesn't get any easier than that does it?

Let’s face it, we all want the big bucks. And we all know Consultancy Law No. 1:

    Your Rates Are Proportional To Your App's Enterpriseyness

Or, as Shakespeare would have said:

    Enterprisey Apps Invite, Nay Demand, Enterprisey Rates.  Verily, Sunshine.

Rails make life easy for us but — and it’s a big but — we don’t want it to look easy. acts_as_enterprisey is your friend.

How does acts_as_enterprisey make webapp development look hard? Well, the only way your client can judge your app is by playing around with it. What better gives the feeling of heavy weights being lifted behind the scenes than slow response times? Exactly. That’s what acts_as_enterprisey does.

So while your client clicks, …waits…, and then gets the page, you can blather on heroically about wrestling with clustered indexes, cache expiration strategies, n log n seek times, etc ad nauseam.

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_enterprisey

On a more serious note, the http://agilewebdevelopment.com/ site has a lot of good information on Rails plugins.