Multiple AppDomains on a single Web

I was getting some weird errors when using a Neo ObjectContext on a Web as a global variable. This thing is supposed to be dependency-injected into factories and stuff, but I've set it to be a static property long time ago and saved me a lot of effort, since most stuff became possible with the Neo code generation tool.

This was long before I learned that singletons are evil.

Anyway, I've been getting very weird errors. Such as, I see a page with a record that should have been deleted, I refresh the page and it's not there, I refresh it again and it's there etc. It looked as if there were two contexts, and the record has been deleted from only one of them. However, since a Context was a static variable, there couldn't possibly be two contexts, right?

Or so I thought. Recently, I've been investigating the whole remoting thing in connection with Ivonna, and I discovered the trivial fact that different static variables exist in different AppDomains. So, I thought that maybe there are two AppDomains for the same site? A quick experiment showed that this is true indeed, if there are two (almost) simultaneous requests.

And the moral of the story is.. dunno, will figure out tomorrow.

LOLCode, DLR Edition

This is a code snippet that actually works.

HAI

CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"

I HAS A CODE ITZ "CRAZY"
VISIBLE CODE

I HAS A NUMBR
LOL NUMBR R 2
VISIBLE NUMBR TIEMZ 2

I HAS A FIB
I HAS A A ITZ 1
I HAS A B ITZ 0

It's written in LOLCode.NET, a brand new .Net language that quickly gathers support among agile developers. Read the full story on the Scott Hanselman's blog.

Activating the Record

Lots of things happened since I last cared to blog. Here's the first one, chronologically. While I'm trying to not get too excited about Dependency Injection, I realized that it's about time to use some services in Inka, and I sort of needed an IoC container. My first idea was to use StructureMap by Jeremy Miller, but I wanted an automocking container for my tests as well, and I was forced to choose Castle Windsor. Or so I thought at that time -- it turned out that, first, I didn't have time to implement these things, and second, StructureMap also has an automocking container. But that's not the point.

The point is, I thought, hell, why not move to a decent ORM as well? Meaning Castle ActiveRecord.

My first ORM was Neo (Net Entity Objects, I think the name has been invented before The Matrix). Unlike Castle AR, which is really a nice interface for NHibernate, Neo is Active Record in a true sense. I'd even say, it's Typed DataSets Done Right. Each entity class is a wrapper over the DataRow class, so we can track the state (is it added, deleted, or modified) automatically. Each object is created via a factory, and added to the context automatically, so it can appear in your query results without being saved to a database. Cool. And also very convenient for testing.

Speaking of testing, I still can't figure out how to test AR applications without a database connection.

So, Neo is not for purists (nor is AR), they want POCOs. But I''m just a script kiddie, so it's OK for me. Neo's got a code generator, so I quickly enjoyed the idea and put all sorts of stuff into my templates, including some UI-related things. Don't blame me, I haven't heard about SoC in these days. In return, I managed to do some boilerplate stuff extra quickly.

Unfortunately, there's a very small community around Neo, and the development seems to stop. I've fixed a few bugs, but never got to publishing the fixes (only recently I learned that I had violated the LPGL license). Also, it's pretty simple, and perhaps won't cover more complex situations, including fat query results.

I'm only learning Active Record, and it has some very nice points (including a great graphic schema editor, Active Writer), but I've had some really weird moments with it. One, for example, is that I've been getting some weird exceptions that I wasn't able to reproduce in my tests. Almost intuitively, I invoked a Scope constructor at startup, and the problem was gone, although I never used the created scope variable anywhere! Turned out there's some dirty game with shared (static in C# :) variables here and there. I used to wonder why people hate these statics, now I know!

I'd like to learn more about AR, but now I'm totally thrilled by Ivonna being released soon, so I'm leaving the applied programming world for a while..