Learning by doing

While looking for Castle ActiveRecord examples, I found a blog by David Hayden - post 1 (design pattern overview) , post 2 (some details on a possible implementation) and post 3 (using the Castle Project). David had a series of articles about Rocky Lhotka's .NET Business Objects (one for each chapter), which I have also read and tried to apply. Don't get me wrong, Rocky's CSLA library works, but as of .Net 1.1 it required a great deal of code on my part. There are reasons why I and many others were investigating code generation tools. I have been studying Castle's ActiveRecord framework for a week and a half, and it is awesome for new development and clean data. During this discussion, remember that ActiveRecord mostly generates the XML mapping files for you and delegates the heavy lifting to NHibernate . If you have a legacy database with "sometimes there" keys, the framework will punish you severely. Below is an example of a legacy scenario that wi...

Since this is my first post on the subject, let me introduce the Castle project - a .Net framework that I have been exploring recently. It has a project that tries to mimic ActiveRecord in Ruby-On-Rails, although the Castle version of ActiveRecord uses NHibernate. The good news is that an ActiveRecord class doesn't require any XML configuration or mapping files. The somewhat bad news is that you DO have to declare your classes and populate them with properties, private members and AR mapping attributes. Since I will probably use SQLServer 2000, I will just write a few queries to extract the data type and field list for each table that I want to support. More on this later. For today, I wanted to extract the class-to-database mapping information that Castle's ActiveRecords feeds to NHibernate. I finally looked through the source code a bit and after a blind alley (NHibernate.Cfg Configuration is mostly for database connections), I ran across the ActiveRecordModel class...