Topic: Data Access Strategies for your .NET Development
Three sessions presented by members of our Thycotic team – John Morales, Ryan Olshan and me.
1. ADO.NET Interfaces and how to be database agnostic
Ever wanted to support Oracle and SQL Server for your software product? We will look at the ADO.NET interfaces and how you can write more generic code by using them. The free open source API Thycotic.Data also makes working with multiple databases easy.
2. ORMapping with NHibernate
ORMapping is the process of creating objects that correlate to your database model. In other words class representations of your tables. There are many products/frameworks currently available to help/automate ORMapping tasks in .NET, in this session will examine NHibernate, a port of the Java Hibernate which has a very strong following in the Java community. I'll show you why.
3. Introduction to LINQ
Explore the upcoming set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations.
We will be giving away a 10 user license to our Secret Server product for managing team passwords (worth $389)!
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is the password for this router?" and "Who has the password for our domain hosting?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
I am surprised at a new trend (ok, so only based on 2 experiences recently) but companies will make their product available for free (as in beer), get a lot of users and market share - then discontinue the free edition and start charging.
While I understand the appeal of such a strategy, it does leave a very sour taste in the consumer’s mouth. Paying for software is a good thing (heck, we charge for Secret Server) and everyone needs to be able to pay their bills … but why the deceit?
It is also an interesting situation as a software vendor since we may be able to get more market share if we gave our product away for free (actually we do for a single user) but we are very clear that it costs money for our core audience – administrator teams who want to securely share certain passwords. I wonder how the competitors to these products feel about their actions.
I wonder if these companies would have gained *any significant* market share if their product had cost money from the beginning.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is the password for this router?" and "Who has the password for our domain hosting?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
Unfortunately my co-presenters were not able to make the WinProTeam presentation due to unforeseen circumstances so I went it alone. This meant that the topics had to change a little but the audience seemed agreeable. The schedule for the evening changed to:
ADO.NET Interfaces
This is a favorite topic of mine since many people still seem to miss the boat with ADO.NET and use the boilerplate SQLConnection/SQLDataAdapter code everywhere. This presentation explores IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDataReader and the trusty DataSet/DataTable. Using these interfaces makes your code much easier to support multiple database platforms (something that can be critical for an ISV / product vendor). The presentation also encourages adoption of a centralized Data Access Layer (DAL). We have a free, open source DAL called Thycotic.Data which is hosted on SourceForge.
Gentle.NET (adhoc)
This session was meant to be John Morales giving us the gory details on NHibernate – something that John is very excited about. Unfortunately my experience with NHibernate is limited to some simple samples that I toyed with. We have used Gentle.NET extensively and have figured out most of the gotchas. The two seem very similar to me so the audience was happy to hear about Gentle.NET instead. We walked through the concepts of mapping business objects to tables using attributes and then various calls through broker and ObjectFactory to retrieve and persist data. For the most part, we have been happy with Gentle.NET – we have written our own little helper class called GentleHelper which makes more complex queries a little easier. One of the downsides we have found with Gentle.NET is the cryptic error messages and the poor error handling at times (for example, retrieving a record by id when it doesn’t exist throws an exception).
Intro to LINQ
Ryan Olshan was meant to give this session and provided the slides in his absence. I was drawing on my memories of various sessions at the last PDC which discussed LINQ and DLINQ. Altogether very cool stuff which is set to change the way we think about accessing data in C#. After walking through Gentle.NET, LINQ definitely seems like a next generation technology – taking it to the next level. Unfortunately I didn’t have any demo code since Ryan warned that it can make Visual Studio unstable to install the 3.0 bits - something I didn’t want to learn the hard way.
Refactoring
This session was a big departure from the Data Access theme but it has been a very popular topic with many groups. It is all hands on with no slides – just coding. I use a version of Martin Fowler’s refactoring example which was ported to C# by our very own Bryant Smith. It involves refactoring a Statement method on a Customer class to add HTML capability – the idea is to refactor the code to gain:
- understanding
- ensure it communicates its purpose
- make it more maintainable so that it can be extended for the new HTML capability
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is the password for this router?" and "Who has the password for our domain hosting?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
Three sessions will be presented by Jonathan Cogley and John Morales of Thycotic Software at the WinProTeam User Group meeting in Vienna, Virginia tonight.
Theme: Data Access Strategies for your .NET Development
1. ADO.NET Interfaces and how to be database agnostic
Ever wanted to support Oracle and SQL Server for your software product? We will look at the ADO.NET interfaces and how you can write more generic code by using them. The free open source API Thycotic.Data also makes working with multiple databases easy.
2. ORMapping with NHibernate
ORMapping is the process of creating objects that correlate to your database model. In other words class representations of your tables. There are many products/frameworks currently available to help/automate ORMapping tasks in .NET, in this session will examine NHibernate, a port of the Java Hibernate which has a very strong following in the Java community. I'll show you why.
3. Introduction to LINQ
Explore the upcoming set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations.
** We will also be giving a FREE 10 user license for Secret Server (worth $229) to a lucky attendee!!! **
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
While at the Verify 2006 Conference, I got to catch up with Jeremy Kadlec (one of our local NOVASQL User Group leaders) and found out about some of the new things that Edgewood Solutions are doing. The Edgewood team, who are experts in Microsoft SQL Server, are now publishing a daily Microsoft SQL Server tip on their website
http://www.mssqltips.com
Some recent tips that grabbed my attention:
Our team (Thycotic) has strong SQL Server expertise but mostly on the development side – consuming these tips is an exciting opportunity to get inside the minds of the gurus who can administer, tweak and tune SQL Server to do amazing things. Add these tips to your daily tech diet – we plan to!
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
My new laptop is a Toshiba M400 Tablet PC – it only came with 1GB RAM which I planned to upgrade. I ordered two 1GB sticks of M400–compatible RAM from EZ-Computer (EDGE MEMORY - PERIPHERAL KTT667D2/1G-PE 1GB PC25300 NONECC UNBUFF 200PIN DDR2 SODIMM). When the sticks arrived, I started poking around the back of the tablet only to discover that there was no memory compartment!? After searching around the net, I came across this awesome detailed explanation of the procedure from Toshiba – it was a little more than I bargained for but only took about 10 minutes once I got started. You basically have to remove the keyboard to get access to the memory compartment. I had to do a similar thing a few years back to get access to the hard drive in a VPR Matrix laptop that Best Buy used to sell.
I took a few pictures to help out anyone else going through the same process …
I started by unclipping the keyboard holder from one side and remove it to get access to the screws for the keyboard.
Removed the screws then folded the keyboard over.
Now we can see the memory compartment, remove the screws on the left of it.
Now simply replace the memory sticks.
Anyone want to buy two 512MB sticks? 
Look out for a post soon about my experiences using the tablet for managing and building software.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
There was a good turnout for the Verify 2006 Conference especially since it is the very first year of the conference. The attendees were typically software testers or software development managers. There weren’t many developers so the Thycotic crew was a little out of our comfort zone but they were a great bunch to pitch on our Secret Server product.
One of the hardest parts when building an ‘off the shelf’ product is understanding the customers needs – because there is usually not one person you can call on to clarify a requirement (as is often the case in custom development for a client). This conference was our first customer engagement opportunity to see what people think of our products face to face and understand how we can tailor our products to solve their daily pains. The Thycotic booth was positioned right by the registration desk in the hallway which meant that all the attendees walked past us at some point!
(Shiva is featured in the picture working away on some new functionality for thycotic.com)
Unfortunately we didn’t get much direction for new features in the product but we did get to vindicate our decisions on current features - most attendees found the system useful and easy to understand. It was also a good testing ground for understanding which aspects of the system were most appealing to users which should help in tuning our current online marketing efforts.
I spoke this morning at 11am on “Pair Programming” – a mainstay practice for the Thycotic team. The session walked through the benefits, then a hands-on demo with Math problems and wraps up with best practices and practical issues such as configuration and setup of your team workspace. The turnout for my session was small but I was speaking to a new crowd (non .NET) and “Pair Programming” might be a stretch for the typical Quality Assurance person to bite off on.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic Secret Server is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
Thycotic is sponsoring our first ever vendor booth at the Verify 2006 Conference in Crystal City, VA (Washington DC Metro Area). The conference is all about testing, testing frameworks and tools but from a quality assurance and developer perspective. Thycotic is well versed in testing since we practice Test Driven Development and use NUnit and NUnitAsp every day!
The morning started well with Shiva and I meeting at the office at 6am to get some promotional items and one of the workstations with the big 19” screens. We arrived at the Crown Plaza Hotel and started setting up only to realize that we forgot our Microsoft Gold Certified banner and one of the analog monitor cables. 
We are showcasing two Thycotic products at the conference:
- Secret Server – the web-based encrypted database to store all your passwords and sensitive items and then securely share them with colleagues and/or family members.
- MyClockWatcher – web-based time tracking for billable professionals – ideal for teams from 1–10 people. It is optimized for
If you are in the area (or at the conference), stop by and say “hi” or come along to talk about NUnit, WATIR or WatiN or whatever else rocks your testing boat.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret Server which is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
At 5:00am on Saturday morning, I headed in to downtown DC to get some prizes and a few books from the Thycotic office. Then off to collect Ryan Olshan at 5:30, and John Morales at 5:45. We hit 95 and headed south for Richmond. The drive was uneventful with most of us still in pre-coffee haze and Bob Marley playing. We got to the Code Camp at the ECPI center well before the kickoff time and claimed our hard earned coffee and bagels (outstanding cream cheese from Panera!).
The turn out was good – over a 100 people I think. I started with a session by Joe Waldin on VSTO – I had tried downloading the new beta of VSTO and had problems getting a sample add-in to compile. Joe worked through all the quirks and gave some great tips and advise for deployment. It sounds like Microsoft has made huge progress on the ease with which add-ins can be developed but still have a few wrinkles to iron out on the deployment process. Next up was a Podcasting session by Frank La Vigne (Tablet PC MVP) – we have recently been videotaping a series of Thycotic development team presentations and the idea of a podcast to share some of the public stuff had come up. Frank walked through the tools and tricks of recording your own podcast and also got into the gory details of the XML to publish your feed. Look for an initial Thycotic team podcast soon …
Now it was my turn, my session was titled simply “Refactoring”. I went slideless during the last Code Camp in Reston and had so much fun that I wanted to do it again. First problem, the projector didn’t work – not expected at all since I was not the first session of the day! I walked through the introduction to Refactoring where I used Bob Martin’s explanation about “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and explain that software can be considered broken if it doesn’t meet all 3 requirements:
- it works (hopefully this means that your unit tests pass)
- it is easy to change
- it is easy to read and communicates its purpose clearly
Next we jumped into the code and used Bryant Smith’s (another Thycotic team member) C# conversion of Martin Fowler’s refactoring example. This involved Movies, Rentals, Customers and a nasty looking Statement method. Lots of discussion occurred including why static methods are often a bad idea and how data and operation should be related.
Next was John’s session on “ASP.NET Performance Tuning”. This is something close to John’s heart as he really likes to get in there and tweak away whenever possible but he has a method! (standard best practices for Performance Tuning … measure, measure, measure!) and the tools to support it. John used Application Center Test to produce a repeatable test to produce load and get some timing numbers for some simple tasks in the web application. After finding the slow points in the application (the application under test was our very own Secret Server), he pulled out DotTrace 2.0 from JetBrains and showed how to drill down into the problem area. John had made some initial guesses as to the cause of the slowdown but then showed through careful measurement and profiling that the cause was something else! Veterans of Performance Tuning will be smiling right now – it is very common to find that your guess is completely and totally wrong. This was John’s first solo session at a Code Camp and he did a great job both with his pace through the material and engaging with the audience.
Last up was my session on “Web Application Testing ASP.NET with NUnitAsp and WATIR (and even WatiN!)” which was a hands on coding session playing with all 3 tools and talking about best practices. We also talked through the contrast in testing techniques since NUnitAsp tests at the HTTP level whereas WATIR and Watin use Internet Explorer automation. In the age of AJAX and sophisticated Javascript this is a big plus (NUnitAsp cannot test Javascript). The WatiN framework was a happy surprise when John IM’ed me about it at 11pm on Friday (yes, the night before). It is the equivalent of the WATIR framework but for .NET … why is this cool?
- All our existing tools work with it (TestDriven.NET, NUnitGui, Build scripts)
- The developer team doesn’t have to learn a new language (no matter how much fun that might be!)
- <flameretardant>It also seemed to execute much faster than WATIR!</flameretardant>
I hope to post more about Watin as we experiment with it. We have a HUGE amount of testing code in NUnitAsp so a migration is probably out of the question but it would be fun to try it on new work.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret Server which is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
I will be presenting two sessions at the Richmond Code Camp tomorrow:
- Refactoring
This will be a walkthrough of the Martin Fowler example but in C# (thanks to our very own, Bryant Smith who converted it to C# some time back). We will also get in to why, when and how to refactor.
- Unit Testing ASP.NET with NUnitAsp and WATIR
Our team excels with NUnitAsp – we use it daily on all our projects and this session will highlight our tips and tricks. The smaller section on WATIR is very new and is designed to showcase an alternative to NUnitAsp – this is something which I have far less experience but hope to put on a good show anyway! John Morales on the Thycotic team just pointed me towards WatiN tonight which looks very intersting and I will try to spin up an example in this too.
John will be presenting on Performance tuning ASP.NET Applications and Ryan will be coming along for the ride and to possibly fill in for a session if one comes up. We will all be wearing bright green Thycotic shirts so watch out for us and come to our sessions to win lots of great stuff:
- Thycotic notepads and pens
- 10 user license to Secret Server in each session
See you there!
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret Server which is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
We have just moved our offices from the Vienna, Virginia area to downtown Washington DC. We now have more space for our team room and have tried new strategies to minimize wiring and optimize communication across the team. Here is a picture of 2 pairing stations in the new team room.
The desks are part of the GALANT series from IKEA and we used their new SIGNUM cable holder which screws into the underneath of the desk at the back. This means no cables on the floor!
Next step is to get whiteboards and properly wire up our Squeezebox for music during the day.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret Server which is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
I will be presenting on Pair Programming at the Northern Virginia SQL Server User Group tonight. I have done this presentation several times before but it is always fun to hear new perspectives – tonight should be interesting to hear DBA turned developer opinions (many people in this user group seem to fall into that category).
Please stop by and share your experiences.
** There will be several door prizes including two free 5 user license packs for our product, Secret Server. **
We (Thycotic) are also sponsoring the event to supply pizza and soda.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. Thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret Server which is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.
Our next release of Secret Server is out. This
release includes lots of performance improvements and minor new features as per
customer requests. We have also invested a lot of time in support for browser
toolbars which we will be releasing soon. The browser toolbar will communicate
with your Secret Server instance and automatically log you into web sites!
* Slashes are now escaped on Secret View page avoiding any clipboard
failures
* Quick Search added to the tabs/toolbar
* Secrets can now be
"deleted" (marked as inactive)
* Notes field is now multiline (like real
notes)
* URL fields in secrets are now clickable
* Browse all was very
slow and has been reworked for much better performance when there are lots of
secrets
* Importer has been extended to support any Secret Type
* Enforces
single browser per login for improved security
* Added "Bank Account" Secret
Type
* Added more Remember Me settings to allow timeout after a period in
minutes, hours and/or days
* Support for browser toolbar in Secret Server
(via web services)
If you ALREADY have Secret Server installed then it
will detect the new version and should offer an upgrade link in the toolbar (do
not reinstall from the msi) (if your upgrade link is not showing then touch the
web.config file and refresh the browser - this will cause Secret Server to check
for updates).
If you do not yet have Secret Server installed then
download it here (http://www.thesecretserver.com/download.aspx)
I tried something the weekend before last at the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Code Camp ... I went
slideless! I presented 3 sessions during the day and I did not have a
single slide, not one, nada, nothing. The good news was the audience loved
it. I took a few polls during the day and the response was definitely
positive.
Pros:
- Definitely an adhoc, adlib feel to the sessions - it was "real". I
even started the first session (The Tao of Test First Coding) by offering 3
choices of things we could build and opening the floor to other ideas -
perhaps the audience hadn't consumed enough caffeine by 9am to appreciate the
dynamic nature but it was still fun - unfortunately the whole Tao thing was a
little lost too. Not exactly the best idea to pair TDD (a process that
takes a long while to truly grok) with an abstract concept like the Tao but I
thought it was neat.
- Less tedious preparation since I could just focus on the fun bits - the
communication with the audience and the code.
- Less conventional format - everyone seemed to wake up in their seats as if
to say "Oi! What's going on 'ere?" - certainly got people's attention!
Cons:
- Difficult to convey essential information (the whiteboards were on the
side of the room - no, the back row can't see orange and it definitely takes
longer to write things than to click Next)
- No flow to fall back on. I tried to have the flow of the session
mapped out on a piece of paper that I kept to myself but it was less intuitive
than simply following a deck.
- Nothing to post afterwards. I had a few people come to me
afterwards asking for slides since they had unfortunately missed the
sessions - can't help them a whole lot!
- Hard to improve the session. Usually you improve your deck based on
feedback - this will be tricky since the session becomes so adhoc it is
difficult to remember format.
Conclusion:
I definitely enjoyed the format more since I enjoy process and thinking on my
feet. The audience definitely preferred the code first approach and adhoc
nature. I think I will continue this format but need to figure out how to
structure an overview so that I can:
- improve sessions over time
- have something to give attendees who miss the show
- keep some kind of structure
Next time you give a session, go slideless! It is fun.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of
Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC.
Thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret
Server which is a secure web-based
solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for
our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management
and sharing within companies and teams.
I will be presenting on Pair Programming (something we practice daily at
Thycotic) tonight at the Washington DC Extreme Programming
User Group. The session involves an exercise (which I have blogged
about before) but it is always interesting to hear peoples opinions and past
experiences. Pair Programming is definitely something that can have great
effect in the right setting but requires disciplined practices and the right
people to work effectively.
Please stop by to join the group which meets from 6:45-8:45 pm at the SE
branch of the
Washington DC
Library.
We will also be giving away a 10 user license to our product Secret
Server (worth $229) to some lucky attendee. If you haven't tried
Secret Server yet - you can download it here - it is the password
repository that every development team should be using!
