I've been getting a few questions about different aspects of the container tutorials series I posted a while back - while the series is not finished, neither is it forgotten, I've collated information regarding the series into a topic on my wiki and I'll keep this up to date until I've finished the series off.

I also notice Sam Gentile has posted that he's taking the plunge into learning about castle's Windsor container... good to hear :)

It's been a long time since I've really felt "pleased" by the results of overclocking... probably back in the days of the 300A if truth be told, which is in the long long ago ;o) ... and for the last year I've been mostly using a laptop, and having really kept track of desktop tech.

... So I have to admit to being very pleasantly surprised when I built myself a Core Duo machine (to be used while my Laptop is getting a labotomy) with a bottom of the barrel 4300 processor and then proceeded to overclock it from 1800mhz to 3042mhz ... that's a serious leap in performance :) very pleasing... and I still haven't hit the ceiling which is even more pleasing, I just had to stop fiddling and get on with doing some actual work.

More parts in the container tutorial series are on the way, I've
just been a little busy these last few days.



However I had a discussion with someone about decorators this week
- they eluded to them being too hard to "create" and maintain, and
that opportunities to get them wrong abound (manually writing the
code to call all the members of the inner service) - I was a little
astounded that they didn't know how to do this using
ReSharper.



So heres a quick 1 minute tutorial for those that don't know, first
an interface.

public interface IBondService

{

    void Smoke50Cigarettes();

    void RegisterEnemy(string name);

    void GetOfBed();

    bool GunLoaded();

}

Now let's write the start of our decorator.

public class BondService : IBondService

{

    private readonly IBondService _innerService;
    public BondService(IBondService innerService)

    {

        _innerService = innerService;

    }

}

And then generate the rest... by going to: ReSharper
->Code->Generate...->Delegating Members


Or just type Alt-insert (if your using the default
key bindings) and select "Delegating Members".



At that point select the only option, the inner service.







And then select all the members to delegate for.







And then we get the results... joy

public class BondService : IBondService

{

    private readonly IBondService _innerService;
    public BondService(IBondService innerService)

    {

        _innerService = innerService;

    }
    public void Smoke50Cigarettes()

    {

        _innerService.Smoke50Cigarettes();

    }
    public void RegisterEnemy(string name)

    {

        _innerService.RegisterEnemy(name);

    }
    public void GetOfBed()

    {

        _innerService.GetOfBed();

    }
    public bool GunLoaded()

    {

        return _innerService.GunLoaded();

    }

}

So I quite like Family.Show as an end to end solution of WPF goes... but I think what's been more fascinating is seeing how my (beautiful) Financee is finding it as a working product.

So she's a big genealogy zealot - and for the first time when saying "hey have a look at this" for some random piece of tech I could see here interest was piqued, so we click-once'd it onto her machine and she's been playing around with it for the last day or so - having loaded around 300 people into it so far.

First off the good - it's pretty, and very fluent - you can see immediately who's being edited, current vs. past relationships, dead vs. alive (hollow people are dead... ) And it performs nicely... 200+ vector "people" on screen and the machines not sweating a bit.

Surprisingly it's also pretty quick for data entry, something I had my doubts about when first looking at the application vs. something a little more traditional - after about 5 minutes of experimentation she was an expert.

Second the bugs... well the main one is that certain characters in a name like a double quote causes the "stories" data screen to crash upon saving...  And every now and then it just flakes out completely... I might throw some logging into and see just what's going on, it doesn't even let you get a stack trace *erk*.

Interaction - well here's where she's getting pissed with it and I'll probably need to enhance it a little - and it's all to do with relationships...  there doesn't appear to be any way to establish a relationship between two people once their added to the tree... a pretty big oversight - they expect you to add all relationships by adding a brother/mother/father/sister/spouse/child to the person currently being edited, but that means you cant actually implement something like:

• Joe marries Jane
• Bob marries Martha
• Jane & Bob die
• Joe marries Martha

A big problem during times of war because it was not uncommon for widows to marry the brother of their dead husband.  This seems like a big oversight (though it is just a tech demo).

Interesting though, and this sample is definitely the best WPF app with source code I've had to play/learn from... great stuff Vertigo.

So looking at Astoria
very briefly today ... a good starting point is probably Alex James blog and all the linked
posts - and so far I'm left with a "so what" attitude to the
technology releases so far (but it is very early days).



I feel like what's being presented is something I could cobble
together using Dream
and ActiveRecord/NHibernate
or Base4 with a couple of weeks
work at best... I'm probably being a little optimistic though ;o)
Devil is always in the detail... but what's in the wild so far
hasn't made me sit up and take notice, I hope the next couple of
drops will though.



However in the mean time, what does interest me:

• Standardization of a query scheme... so far I've only seen
  examples of search/get queries.. I'm particularly interested in
  any update related queries... this is where the opportunities for
  doing evil live, and where community input will be vital I think.
  
• How does WebDAV fit into the Astoria picture at the
  moment?
  
  
• Astoria SaaS ... I find the idea of being able to design and
  provision REST'ful stores on the web (with my own schema) quite
  intriguing.
  
• • That said - I'm not sure what I'd do with it, but I still
    want it ;o)
    
  
  
  • And thinking out loud, but besides the obvious uses for
    web/ajax/flash/silverlight fraternity *yawn* - could this
    kind of thing actually give new life to some desktop based
    applications - It could certainly smarten them up a bit, so
    that using the same application on multiple machines (i.e.
    work/home) could optionally give you the same
    experience.