Today the 9th of December I spend the day in Copenhagen attending the sitecore partner seminar as well as a technical deep dive of sitecore’s e-commerce offerings. We just recently became partners, so we were interested in what the roadmap is as well as what the commerce modules offer.

First part - should have worn a tie

The partner seminar started with a "what’s new and cool" segment. As usual these things are targeted towards sales people, so as a developer I thought it was very superficial and all about shiny features and buzzwords to be honest. What I did take away from it was that there is done quite a bit of work on streamlining and performance. To be fair I missed the first part because my train was delayed - big surprise for DSB that it has been snowing apparently.

Online Marketing Suite or OMS is the module everyone likes to talk about at these things, and it will be enhanced with a number of wizards and a dashboard, as well as marketing automation designers written in Silverlight. This seemed very nice, and will help in multichannel orchestration, which is increasingly important these days.

The "Massive" data architecture was the last big thing that was talked about. The idea is that data is moved into Azure data storage where the key-value nature of the database is abstracted away by a LINQ based API that sitecore will provide. This will include the possibility to do transactional publishing and it will be backward compatible, so existing solutions can be moved. A big focus was web 3.0 and the semantic web – basically being able to associate meaning to relationships.

I warned you - it is very superficial and what is really behind these words I can only guess about until I get my hands dirty.

More...

In the previous Battle of the ORM's post I looked at setting up and configuring NHibernate and Entity Framework. So the next step is to get down to business and look at querying - the most important part of an ORM.

Gimme gimme gimme

First I need to address that the Entity Framework CTP5 has been released. This means that some more features have been added, which you can read about on Scott Guthries blog. Besides that there are some classes that have been renamed, which actually makes my last post mildly obsolete already. The renaming means that the Database class now is called DbDatabase – apparently redundancy is the new black – and that the databaseinitializer classes are called CreateDatabaseIfNotExists, DropCreateDatabaseAlways and DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges.

These days most developers use LINQ, myself included, but a very common issue is that not all LINQ implementations are created equal. Actually the reason I started this whole comparison project, was because I have been using an NHibernate 2.x, where LINQ to NHibernate was a seperate project - and suffice to say I have had my share of fights with it. Now it has been "baked in", and it has taken a pretty big leap forward.

Following up on my last post and on reading NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook I decided to download the latest NHibernate bits (v. 3 CR1), and do a comparison to Microsofts Entity Framework.
NHibernate and Entity Framework are what most developers reguard as the top Object Relational Mappers out there. So looking at how they stack up is pretty important in order to be able to choose the right ORM for a given project.

Hvad kunne være mere i julens ånd, end at have mulighed for at hjælpe en stakkels gadget hungrende med-nørd I denne svære tid? Jeg kan i hvert fald mærke at jeg allerede er kommet i julehumør over at se de mange svar, hvor nogen af dem endda har været uforudset kreative.

Det rigtige svar på spørgsmålet som 83 deltagere i alt har svaret på er kort og godt: "Don't call us, we'll call you!". De mest kreative har endda sendt en video med svaret.

Den eneste naturlige måde at finde vinderen på har naturligvis været at afvikle: new Random().Next(83); for at finde indexet på vinderen i listen af mailadresser.

Og vinderen af en WD TV HD Live Digital Box er: Jørgen Christensen 

Jeg har fået den ære at hoste den første låge i Microsofts julekalender. Så for lige at forklare reglerne er det helt enkelt at jeg stiller en opgave, som jeg har valgt er i form af et spørgsmål. For at deltage skal du blot besvare spørgsmålet  inden midnat i en email til [email protected]. Præmien til dagens vinder har jeg også fået lov at vælge, og det er blevet til en WD TV HD Live box. Jeg vil imorgen poste hvem vinderen er her på sitet, og give besked tilbage til Microsoft der sender gaven til den heldige og dygtige vinder.

Spørgsmålet er:

Hvilken sætning forbinder man både med afvisning af håbefulde skuespillere i Hollywood og DependencyInjection?

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on new features for a PDA application which is build using the .NET Compact Framework. It’s the first time I have worked with the framework, and the first things I heard were not too uplifting. Jokes about it basically being a wrapper around NotImplementedException do make you wonder just how painful it will be.

I have to say though that it has actually been a pretty good experience so far! Maybe having the bar of expectations set just above groundlevel to start with makes it easier to make me happy – who knows?! I can conclude that debugging and deploying to the device has been smooth – just plug it in, press debug and you have all the usual debuggy goodness that Visual Studio provides.

The challange with .NET CF is that when making the framework smaller Microsoft really went in hard, so you will have to find alternate ways to get stuff done.

A few weeks ago we got a copy of the NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook by Jason Dentler, which I was really looking forward to because of the scattered nature the existing documentation for NHibernate.

The word Cookbook really says a lot of how the book is structured, and how it should be used. The book consists of a bunch of recipes on how to cook with NHibernate – terrible wordplay, I know, and I am sorry :) So basically it can be a good idea with a quick readthrough, and then it will serve as a place to look up solutions to various scenarios you will be dealing with when using NHibernate.

If you are new to NHibernate you will of course also gain an overview of the different topics you need to know about and as an experienced user you might stumble upon some features you didn’t know about.

As of today we have started a blog at my company Vertica where I will start blogging along with some of my colleagues. So I highly recommend that you take a look – we have a great team of developers so I gurantee that there will be some interesting posts to find. The new company blog does not mean that I will stop writing here, but that I will write both places - and that some articles may be partially posted both places.

As it turnes out there already was another NuPack project, so Microsoft had an online vote and now it has been decided the new name will be NuGet and that it is pronounced "New Get".

Also Scott Hanselman did a talk at PDC named ASP.NET + Packaging + Open Source = Crazy Delicious mostly about NuPack/NuGet and a bunch of other MVC stuff like Razor. I highly recommend it with Scott being entertaining as allways... 

A little while ago I blogged about NuPack which is a package management system that Microsoft have released in a CTP1. The cool thing about NuPack is that solves the open source dependency hell, is really easy to use, and it comes as a Visual Studio Extension. After installing the extension you can install packages through a "add reference" like dialog, or through the Package Manager Console.