Wow it’s amazing time flies very quickly

It's hard to believe I will be getting married in 2 weeks time. Wow rime really does fly. Luckily everything is in order as far as I am being told at least. The only downer is the number of my family that can't make it over, we did expect that a few wouldn't be able to make it as it is a mid week wedding which cases trouble for people getting time off. Unfortunately this combined with the recession making people less free with their cash and the ill health of a few people, it has really dwindled those on my side. At least I will get the best of the best there and tbh the day is a success if Heather is happy, the rest is a bonus.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-08-30 13:39:01

Brilliant

Just came across this link http://newslite.tv/2010/04/06/7500-shoppers-unknowingly-sold.html it's great to see that nobody reads their terms and conditions, when Gamestation added a clause to their conditions, I note with a checkbox to opt out, that relinquished the buyer of their everlasting soul by continuing the purchase. Over 7500 people fell for it, lol.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-07-22 08:01:55

Moved in

Last week we moved into the new house and we are both really happy. It is so great to have a house of our own. The next few tasks are to clean up the old flat so we can get our deposit back, that £300 would be very nice in my wallet, and unpack the stuff in the new house. Even with our immense clear out it is surprising how much stuff we have. A wealth (or tonne) of well read books which I managed to thin out a bit before leaving, still need a bit more thinning but well have plenty of time for that in the future.

We assembled all the furniture and our clothes are now back out of the bags we used to store them giving us enough room to move around. The sky box is in today, just a little too late to see England booted from the world cup, but aww well. At least the news will go back to something interesting at last.

My parents made a trip over to our sunny isle and met Heathers parents prior to the wedding. All went very well by all accounts and I got a chance to catch up. We drove up around the north coast and got to see the Armed Forces Day in carrikfergus, and the military parade which the soldiers really deserve after their hard work. Then along to the carrick-a-reid bridge which spans a 30m deep gap between the coast and a small island, then finally onto a mystery tour of the north coast, when our sat-nav went a little silly, at every chance it was saying "make a u-turn".

Oh and what else, 10 weeks to the wedding from tomorrow.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-06-29 15:49:53

Update on recent events

Well what has been happening recently? My new house is almost ready and we can move in next month, yay! We got a chance to look around a few days ago, and I like what I was seeing, though I've already got some ideas about projects for the house. The next problem though will be where we put all the junk both Heather and I have accumulated over the last 2 years. The big clearance is already underway, we are dividing things into keeping, binning, and selling piles luckily we are shifting a few things.

What else, oh yes I'm getting married in less than 4 months now WoooHooo!, just don't tell Heather. :-P and things are progressing well. We were out the other day making up our wedding list which we should hopefully have up on the wedding website we set up very soon. Other than that we are both doing well, work is progressing nicely I'm really getting into the swing of the Programming Framework we are using and really appreciating what hibernate does.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-05-18 09:43:32

Presentation class woes solved

Using spring.net and nHibernate I was creating a class in the presentation layer to display the contents of a container. Now normally the presentation logic for an object would be in the webpage itself and thus the tying up of data access would be quite simple. Simply add a new line to your web.xml as below.

< object type="test.aspx">
< property name="ContainerBLL" ref="ContainerBLL">< /property>
< /object>

This would simply create the connection between the page test.aspx and the business logic layer's object ContainerBLL. I had however created my own class to house the presentation logic for displaying and dealing with a container, the reason for this simple, I wouldn't be duplicating effort if I needed to interact with a container on a different page, I would just be calling the same single class. This called its own problems as it was the container presentation logic class which was calling ContainerBLL not test.aspx so I needed to tye that class in somehow.

After a bit of tooing and froing I thought about spring.net's use of interfaces and tied it in that way. First I created an interface for the presentation class.
public interface

IcontainerInterface {
IContainerBLL ContainerBLL { set; }
ArrayList fieldObjects { get; set; }
ArrayList loadContainerEdit(Page page, int typeID);
}

public class containerInterface : IcontainerInterface
{

And then changed the web.xml to reference the class as a part of the page.

< object type="test.aspx">
< property name="containerInterface" ref="containerInterface">< /property>
< /object>

And finally the clever bit was altering the Business logic layer's Business.xml to create internal references to the business logic layer objects, not database access objects like what would usually be stored here.

< object id="containerInterface" type="NS.containerInterface, NS">
< property name="ContainerBLL" ref="ContainerBLL"/>
< /object >

Now it is working properly I can work on the more complex presentation logic.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-03-02 13:50:00

Very useful site

Working with the new frameworks of Spring.net and nHibernate I came across this article which has been invaluable sussing out spring. Of course there is the spring manual but when just starting I found it explained many of the concepts of dependency injection that spring is famous for.

In summary spring does a load of the coding for you, you create interfaces for your classes, data access layer, business logic, and presentation layer and then create interfaces for them. Initially I could not understand why you would want to add this extra level of abstraction to the class, but this article explains that spring uses these interfaces to add it's classes to yours making it work. Its class, pun intended.

http://www.developer.com/.../Dependency-Injection-with-SpringNet.htm

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-03-02 13:28:30

In Training

Most of my projects have reached a natural stopping point. There is still more that could be done to make it even better as there always is in these sorts of projects, but the project is stable the latest design release is integrated so it looks fantastic and there are other projects that need my attention. That is where I am directing myself now, for the next few days I am delving into hibernate, no that's not what bears do in winter (well it is but it is not that type of hibernate I am talking about). "Hibernate is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service." Their words not mine. Hibernate is as different to traditional programming as object orientated programming is to functional programming, there is a logical leap, a mental bridge to get a cross (sorry for all the euphemisms).

Though for all the differences there are key principles what relate to what I already know, and I can definitely see the power. Especially the speed of development, with this structure up and running we should be able to build a test driven platform (so we can know it won't fail), quickly, reducing duplication of effort, and easily make the resulting code multiplatform. Literally if this works, as the materials I am going through lead me to believe, if we need to develop code for a different type of database or operating system, that would be considerably easier than it is with the current system, just add in a plug-in for the database of choice and away you go.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-02-08 10:02:04

Intense Saving mode enabled

Seven months today will be the wedding day and I have started saving intensively, well tell a lie I have been saving constantly for a while but a large whack, pretty much all of that disappeared over Christmas , new year, and booking the honeymoon. So reduced back down to zero savings again it was time to re-assess my savings and start saving intensively, especially as certain key items have to be bought soon. Combine that with buying a house we probably won't be having any holidays for a while, well apart from the honeymoon.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2010-02-08 09:48:21