Architecture Chat #41

Last architecture chat was a fairly small turnout, and as such we ended up having a fairly focused conversation mostly around NHibernate, here's what we talked about on the day:

  • The rise of interest in NHibernate recently.
  • The NHibernate 3rd party tooling market and side projects.

  • What tooling / projects for NHibernate could increase developer velocity.
  • NHibernate discussion around a number of points:
    • Single table / class table inheritance.
    • Can you mix both the types of inheritance together.
    • Can a discriminator cross multiple columns.
    • Discriminator mapping over a range i.e. CreatedDate < 2003, instantiate="" a="" goldcustomer,="" otherwise="" if="" createddate ="">= 2003 instantiate a premium custom (change in customer structuring post 2003).
    • Ability to support stored procedures in NHibernate where parameters are not in the expected order, or if multiple stored proc calls are required to persist an entity and possible work-arounds.
    • Custom column types, limitations etc.


  • General ORM questions
    • Does the ORM with the best tooling with out long-term for .Net?


  • Obfuscation and License Products.
    • Why is it such a problematic space...
    • The issues people have.
    • The pain of rolling your own.
    • References to the post from Ayende on his problems with XHEO.


  • Refund policies of software product companies (especially components/libraries for developers).
    • Why companies get stubborn about refunds.
    • Just how many refund requests companies get (consensus - not that many).
    • The associated cost of bad service with considering reactions being represented in public (blogs, twitter etc.).
    • The point at which most companies should offer a refund, and should they offer it before the customer asks ex. if they can not resolve their issues in a timely manor (or at all) before eroding the money earned from the sale in the first place.


  • Factor - briefly talked about it before we finished up, I think I'm going to give up trying to get other people interested in it :) postfix notation and stacks just seems to conjure up thoughts of assembler in most developers minds.


Next chat is this Thursday, 26th of February at 11:30am.
Written on February 23, 2009