dashCommerce

Finishing the last few courses of a geek buffet

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:00:00 GMT

I’ve been in mad scientist mode for a few months now and especially over the last few weeks, feeding off of every interesting thing I could find / read. It’s the binge. You know it. You know how it usually ends up – a million ideas, too much to do, and not enough time in [...]...(read more)

MEF – Baby Steps

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:29:28 GMT

MEF is the Managed Extensibility Framework, which is a project out on CodePlex. The aim of the project is to allow greater reuse of applications and components. Microsoft has said that they will be using it in the next rev of Visual Studio – so there’s some buy-in there. In dashCommerce we allow you [...]...(read more)

Gleaning some inspiration from a friend

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:17:02 GMT

My friend Corey Haines recently embarked on an interesting experience. He has spent the last three weeks traveling around the central midwest pair programming with people that would put him up for a few days. I’ve been watching the videos and the twitter traffic on the experience with real admiration. This apparently has caught the [...]...(read more)

Microsoft’s BizSpark – Well Done!!

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

For those of you out there looking to free yourself from The Cubicle Nation, you should definitely check out the Microsoft BizSpark program. This is an enormous package for basement startups and I wish, oh do I wish, something like this would have been available years ago. Well done Microsoft, you definitely go this one [...]...(read more)

Documentation Suggestions ??

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

There are some things that I WANT desperately to get right before we start on dC v.Next and one of those is documentation. I am talking about conceptual, code examples and and API documentation. The API documentation is pretty well taken care of with some xml comments and some discipline, but the code examples and [...]...(read more)

Programming Tip – Icon Handler

Chris Cyvas — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:05:00 GMT

I stumbled on this tool and the accompanying utility the other day and thought is particularly handy. The IconHandler will pull from the OS the appropriate icon for a file given it’s extension. In the case of servers that may not have the associated software and icons installed, you can use the IconGen.exe utility to [...]...(read more)

New Stuff at dashCommerce.com

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I wanted to mention that there are some new tools and utilities over at dashCommerce.com. There is the new YocuTeem Per Order Shipping Charge provider written by forum member YocuTeem. I know he’s got a bunch of other stuff cooking, so keep your eye on YocuTeem. YocuTeem Per Order Shipping Charge Provider This shipping provider, brought to [...]...(read more)

ISV Tip – Subversion Source Control Hosting

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

For an small ISV, the trouble you frequently encounter is managing all of the systems, environments, and tools you need to run your business. One of the fundamental things is source control. I have always been a bit of a source control nut – openly scoffing at people that have asked me to “just develop on [...]...(read more)

Toward a More Dynamic Security Model

Chris Cyvas — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking about the dashCommerce security model – or lack thereof. Sure there is standard security, but what I want to be able to do is identify certain course grained operations and apply an authorization rule to it. That rule can then be configured and assigned to a role during application configuration and [...]...(read more)

Programming Tip – Complimentary Database Tools

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I use the Database Publishing Tool a lot. For some reason the version in Visual Studio didn’t work as well for me, so I have stuck with the free standing version of it. Not sure if there is a version that works with Sql Server 2008 yet, but this one works well for 2000 and [...]...(read more)

What Unit Test Framework Should I Use?

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

I have a lot of experience with NUnit, so it is very familiar to me. I did some work with MbUnit a while back and I liked some of the features of it. But, I know there are a bunch more out there now and I am looking for some feedback on what unit testing [...]...(read more)

Programming Tip – PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

These have proven to be an excellent help. Check them out here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/PowerCommands While writing this, I was listening to "Beautiful Day" by U2 ...(read more)

dashCommerce V.Next Part II

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I am struggling with some things for the next rev of dC. Part of me wants to really geek out with it and do some neat stuff . . ....(read more)

LINQ-ify Anything

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:24:04 GMT

When I set out to write my ORM, I had two guiding principles: 1.) Loose Coupling was key. I wanted the result of the ORM to be loosely coupled, and I wanted any dependencies the ORM had to be loosely coupled as well. 2.) I wanted 1 and only 1 query language – and that was LINQ. Now, [...]...(read more)

Programming Tip

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:46:22 GMT

If you have made changes to files and have not committed them, but then find that you need to revert the file to a the previous state and you don’t want to lose those changes, simply create a patch for the file. Save the patch file to the same directory and now you have captured [...]...(read more)

dashCommerce v.Next

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:42:06 GMT

I’ve been fairly quiet over the last few months. Most of that is due to the new addition to my family (my new son, Harrison), but some of it is because I am in mad scientist mode. That entails a ton of reading and prototyping. I’ve been taking a close look at the available ORM’s [...]...(read more)

NullPaymentProvider added to dashCommerce

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:55:38 GMT

A few days ago I added a NullPaymentProvider to dashCommerce. Many people have asked for something like this – either in order to test dashCommerce without a payment provider account set up or, in some cases, to use for situations where you want to record the order, but payment will be made later (i.e. in [...]...(read more)

Is Persistence Ignorance Ignorant?

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:54:11 GMT

I’ve been reading and analyzing a lot of what people are saying about the Entity Framework and persistence ignorance. And I understand the general argument, which is, “Don’t clutter my domain model with persistence gunk.” What does that mean? No Load() methods in your classes, no attributes in your classes that “inform” the ORM layer [...]...(read more)

Mark your calendar - dashCommerce Conference Call

Chris Cyvas — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:52:10 GMT

I mentioned a while back the idea of having a conference call over Skype for dashCommerce. Well, the arrival of a new little one put that on hold for a while, but I am back on this and I would like to do something December 3, 2008 @ 6:30 PM EST. I’d was also thinking [...]...(read more)

dashCommerce and Continuous Integration

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:14:29 GMT

For anyone out there wondering how hard it is to get a CI build up and running, you should know that it has become very frictionless. After reading through a great tutorial and firing it up I spent about 1 hour. From the time I actually forced a build till I had a successful build [...]...(read more)

AutoCompleteExtender and numeric strings

Chris Cyvas — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:26:06 GMT

A feature I am adding to dashCommerce is an AutoComplete feature to the Order Search, which will allow you to type in the first few characters of an order number and the AutoComplete feature will bring up a list of possible order numbers. The problem I ran into while prototyping the work is related to the [...]...(read more)

Is Agile a business process?

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:42:49 GMT

I am sure this is going to sound ignorant, but, like other times, I’d ask you to take a closer look. You see, I was sitting in a meeting today and we were discussing the business advantages of agile. Read that again. Not the development advantages, but the business advantages. And the conversation was not [...]...(read more)

What a Great couple weeks!

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:35:23 GMT

I’ve had a pretty good couple of weeks. I don’t feel as though I talk a whole lot about “me” on this blog – most of it is related to dashCommerce, which is ok, but occasionally I like to peel things back and throw some personal stuff out there. The first thing that happened was a [...]...(read more)

The Rise of the UI

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:00:06 GMT

Mark my words, the next 10 years of software development is going to bring the Rise of the UI. I just wanted to be the first to say it . . . that I know of. ...(read more)

dashCommerce – Open Source Impact

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:40:43 GMT

I’ve been pretty quiet lately. The jump from 2 kids to 3 is significant. For those of you with 2 kids thinking about 3 … let me pass on a little advice I received from my brother years ago: “One is difficult because of the adjustment. Two is easier because they play together. Three is hectic, [...]...(read more)