Ian Nelson

This is the fourth in a series of five posts recounting my experiences using Entity Framework Code-First to replace ADO.NET and stored procedures in a client’s existing application.

This is the third in a series of five posts recounting my experiences using Entity Framework Code-First to replace ADO.NET and stored procedures in a client’s existing application.

This is the second in a series of five posts recounting my experiences using Entity Framework Code-First to replace ADO.NET and stored procedures in a client’s existing application.

In February 2011 I found myself doing some contract development work in a team that was still doing data access using raw ADO.NET and stored procedures.

Having slain the beast that is Shared Database, the next dragon to appear on my Enterprise Integration horizon is Shared Assemblies.

A few days ago a friend emailed me the following question regarding NHibernate mappings for a solution he’s currently developing: “I have an idea entity that has a collection of comment entities and I need to get the comment count for each idea.

So, I was in the office at a client site, walking back to my desk after grabbing a quick coffee, when a developer on a sister product to my current project grabbed me and asked (I paraphrase somewhat): “Hey, Ian – [my app] needs to retrieve [small piece of

I just had an email from a friend asking where business logic should go when using MVC – the controller or the model.

When I first started writing automated unit tests for my code, I remember getting carried away writing lots of tiny little tests, each with a single Assert.

OK, my last WCF-related code snippet of the day, I promise.

Here’s another custom WCF EndpointBehavior I found useful recently.

I’ve done a fair bit of WCF development recently (and amazingly I came out of it relatively unscathed, both psychologically and emotionally).

I’ve been asked “How do you test LINQ queries?”

If you’ve recently moved across to ASP.NET MVC development following years of wrangling with the leaky abstraction that was WebForms, you may have encountered some seemingly curious behaviour when posting back to the same URL.

This blog post comes to you live from a Starbucks in the north of England.

I’ve just become aware of this MoreLINQ project containing some neat IEnumerable extensions authored by the inimitable Jon Skeet.

A couple of weeks ago, early one morning, my friend and fellow coder Scott asked a curious question: “Do you think that programming computers for a living gives you a negative outlook on life?”

Oh, the irony!

@Jez tweeted last night: @ianfnelson admit it: you use Castle Windsor primarily to highlight and lampoon Google’s poor selection of adwords?!

The shiny new system which I’ve recently been developing makes heavy use of the Chain of Responsibility pattern, and as such a number of service classes take an array of objects in the constructor: I’m using Castle Windsor for dependency management, so I’…

Benny George, our precocious two-year-old, is quite the fan of Mister Maker, and enjoys spending time doing arty crafty stuff with his mum.

I always knew my lifestyle choices would come back to bite me some day… I’ve been making heavy use of the Castle Windsor container to handle dependency and configuration management in the shiny new system that I’m currently developing.

Improvements to the Execution Plan UI in SQL Server Management Studio 2008 sure do make it a doddle to improve query execution time.

If you’re in the Leeds area next Wednesday, why not come along to this Agile Yorkshire session?

Well, for the record, I passed MS exam 70-553 yesterday on my second attempt, which makes me a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer – Enterprise Application Developer: And I also acquired a few new MCTS certifications as a happy by-product: My full…

I promised you some photos of my new office a while back, didn’t I?

The inimitable Ayende Rahien is close to releasing version 1.0 of his NHibernate Profiler tool, and it really is shaping up to be a rather lovely little addition to my developer toolbox.

There are many things I love about Team Foundation Server, but the supplied diff/merge tool is not one of them.

If I can get a pass out from helping to look after the burgeoning Nelson family for an evening, I’ll be going along to this Agile Yorkshire session next Wednesday.

It gives me the utmost pleasure to announce the birth of Miss Isla Grace Nelson.

I spent much of this weekend over in Bradford, talking shop with the good folks at the Alt.Net UK ‘in the North’ conference.

I’m coming round to the realization that my hugely enjoyable first contract at Ventura last summer might have been something of an anomaly.

My current primary client has an annoying habit of closing for random days and half-days, including last Thursday afternoon.

One of the least surprising but more significant announcements to come out of Mix ‘09 last week was the general availability of ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

So, base rates are now down to 1.0%, and the Zero Interest Bug is not just conjecture.

OK, dear readers, today I’d like to talk about tools.

Sometimes, when you join a new team as a .NET developer, the team lead proudly points you in the direction of a Word document or wiki page detailing the team’s house coding standards.

One of the multiple hats that I’m currently wearing for a client is that of SQL Server DBA.

Earlier this week I picked up a hire car and headed over to deepest Cheshire to install an instance of Team Foundation Server 2008 for a client.

I started my career in professional software development a decade or so ago by testing and fixing banking code that had fallen victim to the millennium bug.

Earlier today a dev came over to ask me about a compiler warning he was getting when building a .NET solution: MSB3247: Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly.

Interesting article from Patrick Smacchia (the NDepend guy) in which he runs some benchmarks on the cost of looping in different ways over different constructs and comes to the conclusion that: “looping on array using for is 5 times cheaper than looping on

On my continuing journey through this thrilling world of professional software development, I frequently encounter teams who hold no truck with this crazy new-fangled concept of unit testing.

Today was a proud day indeed.

My good buddy John just published a typically navel-gazing post detailing the contents of his wallet, and went on to invite readers to divulge details of their own billfolds in what I can only presume is some cunning and evil plan for mass identity-theft 🙂

It occurred to me recently that I’m not getting any younger, and that sitting hunched over a keyboard for a dozen hours a day will probably lead to some form of RSI sooner or later.

Tobin blogged earlier this week about how quality ORM tools like NHibernate make it easier to code to normalized schemas.

In response to a blog post that I’d shared in Google Reader, Jez emailed me to ask: “Do you use RTM?

My name is Ian Nelson.

I’ve never been a fan of those motivational posters that you see on office walls (usually in sales or marketing departments) that attempt to depict a word like “Opportunity” or “Teamwork” with a single image, usual of some nature scene or a lone individual