Recently, I was asked to provide feedback on someone’s writing about a specific technical subject. Their work is targeted at average .NET programmers who are new to this particular subject – much like I was to NHibernate just a few months ago. By the time I had finished the 2nd chapter, I was concerned to the point I considered withdrawing from the project. There were some obvious technical flaws, and the whole thing generally rubbed me the wrong way. My feedback was pretty harsh.
A week later, I realized my real objections were over the author’s process. He did things exactly backwards from the order I typically follow. He did things in this order because that’s probably how he works, but more importantly because it’s easier to explain. From the other end, he’d have to assume some knowledge that the reader may not have.
So as not to sink in to the meta-blogging quicksand, I’ll simply ask these questions about the series up to this point:
- Which post(s) did you like the most? Why?
- Which post(s) did you like the least? Why?
- How should the process be reordered? Why?
- What left you generally confused or with unanswered questions?
- What do you think would be the next logical topic to write about?
Please comment or send me an email with your feedback.
#1 by Nick Kirkes on October 11th, 2009
I generally liked the earlier chapters of your NHib discussion more than the latter. I think the earlier items were more detailed, and the further along you got, there seemed to be less detail as to why you made a particular decision and how you intended to implement certain pieces. I’m thinking of the Transactions article in particular, but since comments are closed on that post, I haven’t bothered to send much in.
All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the process you went through and especially appreciated the amount of external linking you supplied early on in the series. I came into the project with a healthy amount of knowledge of Nhib but wanted a different perspective, which I got. I can see the value though from possibly approaching it from a different direction, but I’m not sure I would if it were my choice.
Hope that helps.
NK
#2 by Bob on October 13th, 2009
I have been startign to work through the NH series and agree with the other poster that the level of detail seemed to shrink a bit. All in all, however, I’ve found it to be very informative EXCEPT that something is missing or I’ve made a mistake with Sqlite, and the articles really don’t guide me very well in this regard. I’m sure it’s on me, but I even encountered this when I dl’ed and installed the Example4 zip.
System.BadImageFormatException: Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Data.SQLite, Version=1.0.60.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=db937bc2d44ff139′ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.
at NStackExample.Data.Tests.SQLiteDatabaseScope`1.BuildSchema(Configuration Cfg)
at FluentNHibernate.Cfg.FluentConfiguration.BuildConfiguration()
I guess my feedback from this would be that it might be nice, as sweet as Sqlite seems, to provide a tutorial with less external dependencies, perhaps simply using SqlServer since we all have it working.
#3 by Carl on October 20th, 2009
@Bob: The only time I have seen the BadImageFormatException in the past has been on my x64 Windows7.
Are you deploy to your local IIS? If so, does using the Visual Studio Development Server make the problem go away?
If you are deploying to IIS 7 on a 64bit machine, there is a setting in the ApplicationPool called ‘Enable 32-bit Applications’ that is set to false by default. Try setting this to true and seeing if that fixes the issue. I found that this fixed my issue so I created a new application pool that was specifically for web apps that relied on 32bit components.
I seem to remember that there was an issue some time ago where the x64 SQLite dll wasn’t actually x64…. I can’t find a link about it so it was potentially a dream…
If the SQLite dll that you are using is actually x86 then this coupled with the default IIS setting could be the cause of your issue.
Hope this helps you or somebody else that may be googling the BadImageFormatException.
C