Diagnosis vs Design

This is a subject close to my heart, and my abilities too.

I am ok at diagnosis, but by no means a ninja - and sometimes as a solution architect you're going to need to diagnose a problem. Some are easy. Some are not.

I am from the design school of systems architecture which means doing it right in the first place. I can hold court on OO design til the cows come home, and I can design you a domain model that will model your system's data and - most importantly - its behaviour. Cleanly, concisely and to the point of your requirement.

I can do this across a huge range of technologies - web front end, Sitecore, Kentico, WCF, ServiceStack, Biztalk, MSMQ, SQL, Oracle. The building blocks of a lot of .NET solutions.

What I'm not so good at - compared to the above - is diagnosing where and how things are going wrong in an existing solution. I tip my hat to a select few who can do this better than me.

I can diagnose things that are wrong to a certain degree, and you can and should too. Today I had to sort out a non-working ASP.NET app. Here's what I did, in 10 minutes: -

• Installed the IIS6 metabase compatibility components
• Ran aspnet_regiis /i to install ASP.NET
• Set the App Pool's identity to Local System
• Set permissions on folders

This got the guy going, and I revelled slightly in my ability to spot what was wrong and correct it.

But problems I've seen in the past (and recently) have been a whole lot hairier and have required more tools, and more knowledge.

• .NET Reflector - this thing is a life saver in so many situations. What does this DLL do ? Let's find out..
• SQL Profiler - now this one I do know well. What's being sent to the server ? Answer in confidence. SQL Profiler is your friend
• ANTS Memory Profiler - nice, but a bit bloated. Handy, but the daddy is...
• WinDebug - see the Matrix as it truly is. Here is where your memory is being allocated. And why

I'll tip my hat to some colleagues of mine past and present who can do this diagnosis phase of systems engineering way better and quicker than I can: -

A guy I knew at Datacom who showed me The Way regarding debugging a live app using WinDebug

Another guy at Datacom who worked for me on an app of unfathomable architecture, and is the only person I know to date who got WS-AT working over MS DTC. We spent a pleasant evening, actually entire day and  night, debugging a WCF sync service that if I'd had more say would never have existed.. another story ..

A person I work for now, who can cut razor-like to the cause of and solution to many problems using the weapons in his arsenal, which are mostly Reflector but he also brings his networking knowledge to bear on things I don't get. Like Nick, an awesome troubleshooter

Working with all of these dudes has humbled me when finding problems. These guys can pick the bones of a solution to the n-th degree and tell me what is and isn't right.

I can do this to a degree, but I think I have a different mindset. I design. I usually do it well.

Both skillsets are needed when doing big stuff. 

Which are you ? Can you do both at the outer edges of ability ? I'm not sure anyone can.

Be careful what you delete for...

Be very careful deleting stuff from a Sitecore Analytics database before you hand it over to your hosting company.

The usual approach is to clear the Page, PageEvent and Session tables because these will be full - many months worth of team dev, in my case - of locally registered page views. BUT - Don't get overzealous and delete the contents of the IPOwner table.

 Sitecore Analytics refused to do anything when I did this. Required inspection of the logs, which revealed a problem with some record not actually existing in IPOwner, even though a cursory inspection showed that this logged unique IP's for a session.

Delete these with extreme caution... because analytics stops working, period !

Javascript Frameworks

Richard sent this list of Javascript / Web frameworks around the office today.

The stupendously named batman.js caught my eye, as I am prone to following daft names, although my knowledge of Coffeescript is not great (I've had a play).

However, the even more daftly named Mustache and it's big brother Handlebar.js (where do people get these names from ?) are more my thing and I am playing with them now. More to follow.

Initial Thoughts on RavenDB

It's good.

More to follow :)



But seriously, it's good and I'm scratching around the surface at the moment. I prefer its simpler-use approach to document (i.e. object) storage compared to Mongo. I like the fact it's natively JSON and I can serialize an entire object graph in one go.

I like the fact that I can embed it it an application. As in - embed the server.

Rumour is that Sitecore 7.0 is going to support it. Interesting. We at 5 Limes may find a use for it sooner rather than later.

And I'm currently exploring the way it implements Map/Reduce indexes

More to follow. Much more probably - this is my R & D subject at work, and I have to present it next week. Wonder if I can use it to present CQRS to the team in my next project ?

nHibernate 3.0 DateTimes

Ok, so - this sucks.

I want to be able to filter date ranges in an NH 3.0 query, and I don't want to have to first scan the whole table and then feed the results through LINQ to get my range. This table could contain millions of rows and my query will be hit on each request of a certain page.

This works: -

public IList InvoiceSearch(InvoiceSearchCriteria criteria)
        {
            IList list = null;

            using (var session = SessionFactory.OpenSession())
            {
                var query = session.QueryOver < Invoice > ();

                if (criteria.DateCreatedFrom != null)
                {
                    query = query.AndRestrictionOn(x => x.DateCreated).IsBetween(criteria.DateCreatedFrom.Value).And(criteria.DateCreatedTo.Value);
                }

  .. snip

What I'm doing here is filtering my results by a date range using nHibernate.Criterion.Lambda.IQueryOverRestrictionBuilder's innate ability to write good SQL and therefore limit the set I am querying. So far so good.

I have a requirement to show all thingos (Invoices in this case) in a given month and year. According to those that know, this is simply (?) solved by mapping a YEAR and MONTH function to my Fluent entity, and then querying by those properties in my QueryOver expression, thusly: -

Entity: -

        public virtual int InvoiceYear     { get; set; }
        public virtual int InvoiceMonth    { get; set; }

        Map: -

        Map(x => x.InvoiceYear).Formula("SELECT YEAR(DateCreated)");
        Map(x => x.InvoiceMonth).Formula("SELECT MONTH(DateCreated)");     

and then doing suchlike in my querying codeage: -

    list = session.QueryOver()
                  .Where(x => x.InvoiceYear == year)
                  .And(x => x.InvoiceMonth == month)
                  .List();

Well - it doesn't work. nHibernate throws a fit when trying to compile the query expression.

In the end, the only workable solution - one that doesn't involve a complete table scan into NH entities and from there a filter, cos that'll be scalable !!! - is as follows: -

using (var session = SessionFactory.OpenSession())
            {
                DateTime from = new DateTime(year, month, 1, 0, 0, 0),
                         to   = new DateTime(year, month, DateTime.DaysInMonth(year, month), 23, 59, 59);

                list = session.QueryOver < Invoice > ()
                              .Where(x => x.Active == true)
                              .AndRestrictionOn(x => x.DateCreated).IsBetween(from).And(to)
                              .List();

            }

Got to say that annoys me somewhat, but then I guess I need to spend more time studying expression trees. On the other hand, I have business requirements that a) need solving and b) must scale to meet demand.

Wish me luck :)