Gil Fink's Blog : Review

Book Review – Entity Framework 4 In Action

Gil Fink — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:20:00 GMT

Book Review – Entity Framework 4 In Action

I spent some time lately to read the book “Entity Framework 4 in Action” which was written by several authors – Stefano Mostarda, Marco De Sanctis and Daniele Bochicchio. This book was sent to me by Manning Publications as part of the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP).

What You are Going to Gain from The Book?

The book is all about Entity Framework 4. The authors don’t assume that you are familiar with the technology and they take you to an Entity Framework tour. At the end of the book you will have a lot of Entity Framework knowledge. The flow of the book is great and there are lots of details and hidden gems that can help you whether you are a junior Entity Framework developer and whether you are a senior Entity Framework developer. The authors take you step by step in the Entity Framework path and late chapters rely on previous ones which help you to build the knowledge gradually.

What is Included in The Book?

The book isn’t small – approximately 550 pages and includes 19 chapters and 2 appendices (LINQ appendix and Tip & Tricks appendix). The book is divided into 4 parts which are

Redefining your data access strategy
Working with Entity Framework
Mastering Entity Framework
Applied Entity Framework.

Every part relies on the previous parts and therefore you can’t read the parts as standalone if you are a novice in Entity Framework. If you are a senior Entity Framework developer you can read the parts as standalone but you’ll probably miss some details which are included in previous parts.

Chapter 1: Data access reloaded: Entity Framework
The chapter include a discussion about the ORM world and also about the impedance mismatch which lead to the development of ORMs.
Chapter 2: Getting started with Entity Framework
In the chapter the authors shows and describe how to build the Entity Framework part of an application that will be used across the book. During the chapter you’ll get to know what is Entity Framework and will learn a lot of basic stuff.
Chapter 3: Querying the model: the basics
This chapter is all about the basics of querying the Entity Framework model. You will get to know the ways to do that and what is happening under the hood in the query process.
Chapter 4: Querying with LINQ to Entities
The chapter will explain in details what is LINQ to Entities and how to use it.
Chapter 5: Domain model mapping
This chapter is all about the EDM. You will hand craft the EDM parts manually and will gain valuable knowledge about its XML.
Chapter 6: Understanding entity lifecycle
The chapter describes the entity life cycle and the change tracking mechanism. This is a very important chapter since the details in it are very important to the understanding how Entity Framework is working under the hood.
Chapter 7: Persisting objects into the database
The chapter describe how to perform data manipulations by using Entity Framework.
Chapter 8: Handling concurrency and transactions
As in the chapter name, you will learn how to handle concurrency and transactions with Entity Framework.
Chapter 9: An alternative way of querying: Entity SQL
In this chapter you will learn what is Entity SQL and how to apply in order to query the model.
Chapter 10: Working with stored procedures
This chapter is all about stored procedures and how to use them in Entity Framework environment.
Chapter 11: Working with functions and views
The chapter will explain how to use model defined functions and defining query elements.
Chapter 12: Exploring EDM metadata
In this chapter you will gain the understanding how to use the MetadataWorkspace in order to make runtime EDM metadata queries.
Chapter 13: Customizing code and designer
In the chapter you learn how to customize the code generation by changing the Entity Framework T4 templates. Also you will learn how to extend the Entity Framework designer.
Chapter 14: Designing the application around Entity Framework
The chapter starts with a Domain Driven Design discussion and shows how Entity Framework can help you to design applications which are more Domain Driven.
Chapter 15: Entity Framework and ASP.NET
The chapter will guide you how to use Entity Framework with ASP.NET with EntityDataSource.
Chapter 16: Entity Framework and N-Tier development
The chapter discuss how to include Entity Framework inside N-Tier applications. You will learn about the Self-Tracking entities and how to use DTO design pattern.
Chapter 17: Entity Framework and Windows applications
The chapter will guide you how to use Entity Framework with WPF and WinForms.
Chapter 18: Testing ADO.NET Entity Framework
The chapter starts with a discussion about Unit Testing and explains how to test Entity Framework by using Microsoft Testing Framework.
Chapter 19: Keeping an eye on performance
This chapter is all about performance tuning. I expected more from this chapter but the major things of performance tuning are there.

The Bottom Line

This is a good Entity Framework book and I recommend it especially for junior Entity Framework developers. The book's content is more then enough to get started with Entity Framework and also it is organized well. There are discussions about methodologies like Domain Drive Design and Unit Testing that I really liked which add to the content you are reading and enrich your understanding. The book is doing it job by giving a good deep dive into Entity Framework 4. I give the book 5 stars out of 5.

Book Review – HTML5: Up and Running

Gil Fink — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:46:48 GMT

Book Review – HTML5: Up and Running

In the last two weeks I read the book “HTML5: Up and Running” that was written by Mark Pilgrim. Since I’m and always was a web guy I always like to read about the things to come and HTML5 is a specification that is heading our way very fast.

What You are Going to Gain from The Book?

The book is about HTML5 which is a specification that is being written in these days and will be the de facto standard in the next years. Since reading all the specifications would probably make you crazy (go to the specification to see how long it is…) then reading a book that summarize the primary features is something that I recommend you to do. I picked this book since I found the book’s site while I was searching for HTML5 information. The book is very easy to read but it doesn’t go deep into details so you get a summarize of things with a few examples and that is all. I think that if the book was more thorough it would have given more added value then in its current version.

What is Included in The Book?

The book is very short – only 224 pages long. It is starting with some history that explain how did we get to HTML5 and how to detect HTML5 features (with or without the Modernizr framework). After the first two chapters the book covers eight main topics in HTML5:

Chapter 3: What Does It All Mean?
Covers the new semantic elements that HTML5 introduce such as header and footer.
Chapter 4: Let’s Call It a Draw(ing Surface)
Explain in details the new canvas element that is a two-dimensional drawing surface that can be programed using javascript.
Chapter 5: Video on the Web
Explains what are the video and audio elements and also main formats and standards in this area.
Chapter 6: You Are Here (And So Is Everybody Else)
Explains what is Geolocation which enables to share physical locations with web applications.
Chapter 7: The Past, Present, and Future of Local Storage for Web Applications
Explains what is the Web Storage specification and how to use it.
Chapter 8: Let’s Take This Offline
Cover what is offline web applications which work when the user is offline and how to create this behavior.
Chapter 9: A Form of Madness
Covers a lot of the new HTML form elements such as search, email, number and etc.
Chapter 10: “Distributed,” “Extensibility,” and Other Fancy Words
Shows how to “extend” HTML5 markup using the Microdata data model.

The books flow is very good and every chapter can be read as stand alone so you can skip things that you know or go to chapters that you find more interesting. The author’s language is very clear and he spread witty jokes that makes the reading flow of very intensive. I really liked the “Ask Professor Markup” sections that highlight things in the book.

Summary

As a jump start to HTML5 the book “HTML5: Up and Running” is doing its job. It is not recommended to beginners since it depends on previous knowledge in web development. I give this book 4 stars out of 5 only because I expect technical books to be more thorough and with much more examples.

Book Review – Clean Code – A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Gil Fink — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:04:47 GMT

Book Review – Clean Code – A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Today I finished reading
Robert C. Martin’s
wonderful book -
Clean Code –
A Handbook
of Agile Software
Craftsmanship.
The book is all about
writing quality code.
It is full of examples
of good and bad code and
a lot of suggestions for how
to write a better code base.
Even so the examples were
written in Java language
I encourage .Net developers to read this book only to learn the concepts
that are presented by the author which are universal for every language.
Since in my early days I was a Java developer then for me it was easy
to read the book and enjoy it.

What you will Gain?

The book will help you to diagnose bad code (or code smell) and to clean it
up. The book has three parts that every one of them is built on top of its
previous part. In the first part you will learn the principles, patterns and
practices of how to write a clean and quality code. The second part includes
three case studies which instruct and show how to create clean code. These
examples show how to take a working framework like JUnit for example and
even in it to clean the code. In the last part you are given a knowledge base
of heuristics and “smells” which can guide you when you develop.

Summary

I really enjoyed reading Clean Code book. It is written in a very
comprehensive way one layer on top of the other. I encourage you to read
this book not only because I think that quality code is super important but for
the sake of you being a professional in what you are doing. I rate the book
with five stars.

Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000

Gil Fink — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:24:06 GMT

Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000

A few months ago I bought
a new mouse. I needed
a mouse that could also
act as a presenter tool
in order to assist me in
my presentations that I
am delivering from time to
time. So I talked to some
people and asked for their
recommendations.
I also searched for details
about presenter tools in the internet and in the end I found the
Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 very suiting for my
needs.

The Wireless Notebook Presenter
Mouse 8000 is more then just a
mouse. It’s integrated with slide
presenter, laser pointer, and media
remote control. At the back of the
mouse we have buttons that
help us to control power point
presentations. Those buttons are
disabled by default and can be
enabled by clicking a button on
the mouse’s front.
Using the product helped me to
stop coming back to the podium
in order to press buttons during my presentations and also since this
is a mouse I could use it in my demos and of course in other
occasions which doesn’t include presentations (such as working
at the office).

So if you are looking for a slide presenter which can act as a mouse
the Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 can suit your needs.
For further details about it go to this link.

Book Review – C# in Depth – What You Need to Master C# 2 and 3

Gil Fink — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:39:00 GMT

Book Review – C# in Depth – What You Need to Master C# 2 and 3

In the last weeks
I read the book
“C# in Depth –
What You Need
to Master C# 2
and 3” that was
written by
Jon Skeet.
You might ask
yourself why I
bothered reading
a book about
C# 2 and 3.
The answer is
very simple.
Knowing some
material isn’t
enough and
reading leads to wide and
deeper knowledge. One of the first things that I recommend people
who ask me how can I learn and gain programming knowledge
is reading good technical books. That leads me right back to the book.
C# in Depth is a great book to read. I really enjoyed the writer’s
writing and the book itself. Sometimes when I read technical books
I get bored and this book succeeded to fascinate me so I kept on
reading.

What You are Going to Gain from The Book?

A lot. The book is a deep dive into the past (C# 2) and to the present
(C# 3). It includes all the language enhancements and features and
shows how they developed during time. I really liked the discussion
about delegates which is well defined in the book.

What is Included in The Book?

The book includes the following parts:

Preparing for the journey – this chapter covers all the overview
about C# and it develop from C# 1.
Solving the issues of C# 1 - this part include all the new (currently
they are now old) features of C# 2 including Generics, Nullable types,
delegates (which were introduced in C# 1 but were very improved in
C# 2), iterators using yield and more.
C# 3 – revolutionizing how we code – this part discuss the new
features of C# 3 including initializers, anonymous types, lambda
expressions and expression trees, extension methods, LINQ and more.

Summary

"C# in Depth” is a very recommended book.
I give it 5 stars out of five.
If you look for a very interesting book about C# evolution and more this
is your book.

Don’t Repeat Yourself

Gil Fink — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:15:18 GMT

Don’t Repeat Yourself

Today while I was
doing code review
I found myself
writing a new
generic function
instead of one
piece of code
that was repeating
itself in the
developer’s code.
When you write
code sometimes you
have to duplicate
some piece of code.
When it occurs, this
is the best time to
think of refactoring your functionality.
A lot has been written about DRY principal this post is my opinion
about it.

The DRY Principal

Don’t Repeat Yourself or DRY is a very good practice when we are
writing code. It helps to produce a more reusable and maintainable
code. When you don’t follow DRY whenever a functionality that
you “Copy & Paste” all over your code will change you’ll have
the taste of one of the developer horrors -
to find all the places in the application that you duplicated the
functionality and to update it. Not being able to find all the places will
result in a non functioning application or other errors. Since changes
always occur during the life time of an application following the
simple DRY principal can prevent you a lot of headaches.

Example

Lets look at the code that I helped the developer to refactor:

     private void ValidateContactDetails()

    {

       var validator = ValidationFactory.CreateValidator<ContactDetails>();

       var results = validator.Validate(uc.DataSource);

       if (results.Count > 0)

       {

          ValidationError.DisplayError(results.First().Message);

       }

    }

This code validate a contact details entity using the
Validation Application Block. Since the code was repeated in more
than one place but with different object types and different data
sources then I created the following method instead:

    public void ValidateEntity<T>(object dataSource)

    {

       var validator = ValidationFactory.CreateValidator<T>();

       var results = validator.Validate(dataSource);

       if (results.Count > 0)

       {

          ValidationError.DisplayError(results.First().Message);

       }

    }

Now instead of duplicating the functionality of validation with a
lot of functions that perform the same thing we have only
one function that perform the same thing but is more generic.
This is much better!

Summary

Lets sum up, to achieve code quality you shouldn’t repeat yourself.
”Copy & Paste” helps to create code faster but it has the ability
to make your code very poor when it is being used without thinking.
Whenever you repeat some piece of code all over the place it’s a very big
sign for you that you need to refactor your code. One of the horrors of
a developer is to find all the duplications in a code base and change
some simple functionality.
So don’t repeat yourself!

Programming Entity Framework Book Review

Gil Fink — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:51:57 GMT

Programming Entity Framework Book Review

One of the books I read in
the last weeks was
Julia Lerman’s
Programming Entity Framework book.

Review

Julia Lerman’s book is currently the best
choice if you want to learn
Entity Framework. The book is very
thorough and even though it is very long
to my taste (about 800 pages) it is written
very good. The book covers almost every aspect
in Entity Framework and also suggests some
solutions to problems that V1 has like for
example an approach to N-Tier applications.
The book has a web site with all the code
examples and more materials that you can download.
The author builds the knowledge base of the readers layer on top a layer
in a very easy to follow manner. She doesn't assume that the reader
is a .NET programmer or know Entity Framework so you get all the
details that you need to understand the framework (and nothing more).
As someone that use Entity Framework from its early days, I got to learn
some new stuff so the book was very helpful.

Summary

Lets sum up, as I wrote the book is very impressive. It’s written
in a fluent language that helps to understand the materials. I found myself
learning more things that I didn’t know about Entity Framework so to me
the book was valuable. My rating of the book is 5 stars out of 5.

Pro ADO.NET Data Services Book Review

Gil Fink — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:32:20 GMT

Pro ADO.NET Data Services Book Review

Lately I’ve been reading a lot.
One of the books that I read is
Pro ADO.NET Data Services -
Working with RESTful Data from
Apress which I’ll review in this post.

Review

The book isn’t long, its about 300 pages and has
four major parts:

ADO.NET Data Service Fundamentals
ADO.NET Data Services in the Real World
ADO.NET Data Services from the Outside
The Future of ADO.NET Data Services

The first part is written well and it gives a very thorough
understanding about the world of RESTful services and
ADO.NET data services in particularly. The part includes a lot
of material about the foundations of data services and how to use
them. I really liked the exercises that are spread all over the chapters
that help you to get started with the features that were discussed
early.

The second part was to short to my taste and only discussed
how to implement a data service alongside with an existing
legacy services. It shows how to build a new data service for
a customer service alongside of a legacy customer service which is
a legacy SOAP service. I really expected more full examples of
building applications with ADO.NET data services or a discussion
of were ADO.NET data services are fitting in the real world.

The third part included a coverage of a lot of subjects including
Ajax, Mashups, Silverlight and BizTalk. The information of the
Ajax and Silverlight chapters weren’t enough for my taste and
I think that the authors drilled down to much with the chapters
about Mashups and BizTalk. To be honest I read these two chapters
in a very fast manner because I’m very far away from these worlds.

The last part was a discussion about the future of ADO.NET data
services.

Summary

The book is very helpful especially in the first two parts. I think
that if you want to learn about ADO.NET data services this book
is not enough. In the internet there are a lot of materials that weren’t
covered by the book. Moreover I think that the book could be written as
a major part of a book about .NET RESTful services and not as a stand
alone book. My rating of the book is 3.5 stars out of 5.