James Gregory

Continuing on from my post about an alternative syntax for the non-disposable using statements, here’s a class I’ve been using lately. It serves as a wrapper around changing the colours in a console window. It’s not a difficult thing to do, it’s just a bit awkward because you have to maintain the original colour in a variable while you do your business.

There’s been a bit of discussion of late about using statements, and how they’re more often being used for purposes other than just releasing resources. As always, there are those people who think it’s a flagrant abuse of a feature and shouldn’t be done, then there are those that like it. I’m in between. I do like what the using statement gives us, but I also think it is a bit of an abuse.

The “traditional” usage of the using statement can be found quite often in the land of files and streams. Take the following example, which opens a file and then closes it when it drops out of the using scope.

We had an issue recently where NHibernate was performing very poorly on our production server, but not on our developer machines or our test server. I investigated the issue and narrowed it down to two symptoms.

Symptom 1: Very poor performance. I’m talking 10+ seconds per page load, with no more than 5 queries being executed by NHibernate.

Symptom 2: Empty log files. None of our log files had any data in on the live server, but they did on our other systems.

I decided to investigate the second symptom first, as it may be causing the first (ends up it was).

I’ve been meaning to write up some of my experiences developing for Visual Studio while I’ve been working on BooLangStudio, but I can never seem to find the time; either that, or when I can I’m not confident enough in what I’m doing to put it out here as a valid resource.

I’ll start small, here’s a quick guide to how I’ve implemented brace matching using the managed Visual Studio extensibility SDK.

A couple of people have already covered this already, specifically Bobby Johnson, Matt Hinze, and Zachariah Young. I figure I should say something on it anyway.

I’ve adopted a project from Jeremy Miller that I think has the potential to be a really useful tool. It’s called Fluent NHibernate, and it’s primarily a fluent API for mapping classes with NHibernate.

We’re all well aware how awesome NHibernate is, but I think we all also have a bit of a dislike for the amount of XML you need to write to get your classes mapped; not only that, but also how the mappings are distinctly separate from the rest of your application. They’re often neglected and untested. One of the core tenets of the project is that we need a more succinct, readable, and testable way of writing your mappings.