A day in the life of...

An External ID consists of two parts, ! ClassID isn't really required for ECO controlled DB structures because there is always a root table containing the ObjectID + ClassID, but when you use ECO to map to an existing DB structure there needs to be a way to know that object 1234 needs to be fetched from the PERSON table. So, now that we know why the ExternalID consists of two parts on to why I don't use it (much). If I am writing a website with ECO and I use the ExternalID for my URL like so www.mysite.com/showarticle.aspx?id=23!1234 The number 23 is determined by looking for the class's index in the list of all classes in the model. This is the problem! If you change your model by adding a new class then your index may change from 23 to 24. Not a big problem for your application, but persistent links to that URL from other sites such as Google will no longer work. An ExternalID is just like an object's pointer address. When you restart your application that addre

I'm writing an app that needs me to be able to write to a file and make sure that nobody changes it. The idea that I had was to create 2 classes: WritableSignedStream: Accepts a targetStream parameter + a privateKeyXml string. I add some space at the beginning of the target stream to reserve it for header info. You then write to the stream as normal (it reports a smaller Length than that of the target stream so your app is unaware of the header). When you close the stream it writes the public key to the stream + an RSA encrypted hash of the data part of the file. ReadableSignedStream: Accepts a sourceStream parameter in the constructor. Just before you read for the first time it will compute an MD5 hash of the data part of the file, and then compare it with the signed hash in the file (which I first decrypt using the stored public key). These classes therefore provide two functions: You can sign a stream, the app can check the stream was signed by you by inspecting the public key w

This has been driving me mad for hours now! Whenever I run my PocketPC compact framework app I cannot debug it! None of the breakpoints will stop, each breakpoint just shows as an empty circle instead of a solid one. So, what was the solution? I tried deleting all PDB files on my hard disk but that didn't do it. In the end manually deleting all of the files previously deployed to my PPC did the trick. Maybe VS couldn't overwrite them or something? No idea, but at least it works now :-)

This one is probably my favourite: "There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't". Here is one I came up with myself some years ago and used to use in my newsgroup signature: "Blessed are the geek, for they shall public class GeekEarth : Earth".

I'm rewriting a Win32 application using ECO. One of the things this application allows the user to do is to specify their preferred unit of measurement for height, distance, depth, weight, and speed. To achieve this I have an ECO class ApplicationSettings which is a singleton which identifies the units to use. I then have 2 properties for each value.... InternalLandingDistance DisplayLandingDistance The idea is that I should never expose Internal* properties in the GUI but display their corresponding Display* property instead. The Display* property will read/write the Internal* property and perform some kind of conversion on it. If I always store my values using the unit with the highest accuracy (Distance = feet, Depth = millimetres, Weight = Pounds, Speed = KPH) then I just need to convert them by the correct factor when reading/writing from the Display* properties. This isn't rocket science, obviously I can just implement these as reverse derived attributes right? The pr

Well, I feel stupid. Worse than that, I generally feel very thick. Especially yesterday! So, what happened yesterday? I went to Bletchley Park . What a brilliant place! Walking around what was for approximately 50 years one of the biggest secrets of WWII was really quite strange. The stuff these people did was simply amazing! One guy managed to figure out the inner workings of a machine none of them had ever seen just by looking at two *almost* identical messages enciphered using the same machine configuration. The second message was 5 characters shorter than the first because the operator repeated the message but decided to abbreviate some of the words to save some time. This was all they needed. Not only was the functionality of the machine divined but what seems to be the world's first (semi) programmable computer was then designed + built to decipher messages received by wireless and then transcribed to punch holes. This thing has a optical reader that works at 5,

Here's another quick blog about a new ECO IV feature. I asked for this during development because I had a particular problem I had to solve. My new application has a class named "PlannedCall". When the user logs in they see a list of planned calls that are A: Active B: Not already actioned C: Assigned to the current user, or not assigned to anyone D: EarliestCallTime <= Today + 1 As time goes on there will be a lot of instances of this class in my DB, so obviously I want to use the OclPSHandle to select my objects otherwise I will end up with a whole load of objects in memory that I do not need. However, when another user actions the planned call the Actioned property becomes true. If I use an ExpressionHandle then this planned call would disappear from the presented list, but with OclPSHandle it will not. This is where the new feature comes in! When you call PersistenceService.RetrieveChanges a collection of DBChange will be sent to the client from the server. T