Category Archives: Architecture

Limiting your abstractions

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

It’s been almost 3 years since I first wrote about moving away from the Repository abstraction. Since then, I’ve gone more or less full-bore without any concept of a repository in the systems I’ve built. I haven’t removed existing repositories, … Continue reading →

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Evolutionary Project Structure

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

I used to care quite a bit about project structure in applications. Trying to enforce logical layering through physical projects, I would start off a project by defaulting to building an app with at least two projects, if not more. … Continue reading →

Also posted in Domain-Driven Design | 72 Comments

ORM techniques for legacy databases

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

One of the reasons folks typically go with a hand-rolled ORM (i.e., using ADO.NET by hand) is the assumption that ORMs don’t work well with legacy databases or databases designed in isolation from any sort of object model used to … Continue reading →

Also posted in NHibernate, SQL | 22 Comments

Don’t write your own ORM

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

In my last post, I talked about various kinds of patterns of ORMs and how to choose an ORM strategy. From the comments and tweets I got, it seems like some folks still think that their only ORM choices are: … Continue reading →

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Choosing an ORM strategy

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

One of the mistakes I see people make (and have made myself) is assuming that you must choose exactly one ORM strategy for an entire database/application/system. It’s simply not the case. You can (and should) tailor your ORM strategy to … Continue reading →

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Troubleshooting SQL index performance on varchar columns

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

Doing a deployment last night, I ran into an issue around indexing performance around SQL columns of type varchar. Varchar is the ANSI version of character data – storing as 8-bits, while nvarchar is Unicode, storing as 16 bits. For … Continue reading →

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Limits of performance optimization

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

Back in college, where I was an Electrical Engineering undergrad, I had an especially difficult professor for my microcontrollers course. In this course, we would hand-roll assembly language instructions and upload them to the 68HC12 testing board. (Side-note, I never, … Continue reading →

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Dealing with transactions

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Jimmy Bogard

In the last post on NServiceBus, I got quite a few comments that one way to fix the problem of dealing with non-transactional operations that must happen if some transaction succeeds is to simply move the non-transactional operation after the … Continue reading →

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Async messaging realities

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Jimmy Bogard

I got a bit of a chuckle from Ayende’s post on time traveling emails. In it, he shows messages in his email inbox received out of order chronologically from when they actually occurred in the real world. That’s one of … Continue reading →

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Distributed computing fallacies and REST

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Jimmy Bogard

One item to keep in mind when investigating consuming or exposing REST APIs are the fallacies of distributed computing: The network is reliable. Latency is zero. Bandwidth is infinite. The network is secure. Topology doesn’t change. There is one administrator. … Continue reading →

Also posted in Distributed Systems | 9 Comments