Yesterday afternoon I presented a quick 20 minute presentation to the Enterprise Architect user group - it was an interesting opportunity to talk with both an Enterprise Architect lead developer and analysts/BA's etc. who are using Enterprise Architect on a daily basis - there's nothing quite like doing something and then even more so presenting on what you've done to really firm up some conclusions / ideas around it (and as is often the case with me, spark 20 ideas for new products I could build to make it better/smarter).

For anyone who's interested here's the slide deck I presented - and also some links to things that were discussed:

• Enterprise Architect
• MDG Integration for Visual Studio .Net
  
• OCL (object constraint language) - we also discussed OCL tutorials, of which I've found this site to be useful in the past.
  

Thanks to catch for hosting the group and providing the video conferencing facilities to link Auckland / Wellington (small tip, if you are presenting to two groups be sure to sit at the end of the table looking towards the camera, or your spend your whole time ping-ponging your head towards one group and the other ;) - and also thanks to everyone who came along and listened.

Also of interest was the discussion after the presentation around providing a number of example/sample MDA transformations through Sparx Systems New Zealand site - which should mean that before the end of the year you will be seeing both guidance and examples on developing MDA transformations targeting NHibernate, NHibernate search, ActiveRecord, Monorail and RhinoSecurity starting to emerge (what I tend to loosely call the "Castle stack" for want of a better term.) - which I'll post about it as it starts to happen.

I've got a little project on at the moment which I chose to use ActiveRecord for... this is for a "legacy" database where there are existing nightly data warehousing scripts written against it... The cost of changing the database structure and tables is potentially quite high (it has run on effects to other systems, potentially effects SLA's when the nightly scripts fail.. and a small project ends up having a big impact)

At any rate, I'm just consuming the existing database as-is... which includes a single character status columns i.e. "A" for active, "P" for pending etc... after poking around with a few solutions I ended up creating an NHibernate custom type... first off, this was surprisingly easy... but it annoyed me a little that I had to create a different custom type for each set of enumerated values, and that this information was no longer declarative, compared to the rest of the ActiveRecord implementation...

So I took a few minutes to re-write it as generic solution to the problem today... which at least solves the declarative problem... first off, here's a property with the custom type applied - nothing amazing here, but notice the type is generic... with the type of status field itself qualifying the generic custom type...

We then declare the mappings on the enumeration itself...

I think this is a good fit for ActiveRecord... If anyone wants the code at some point just leave a comment and I'll package it up and post it... it's pretty elementary stuff, though it might save some time if you wanted to re-implement it yourself...