Chillisoft Blog
 

About a year ago Chillisoft switched allegiances and raised the RoR flag from its towers. We’ve been fairly faithful Microsoft users for a number of years, for a variety of reasons. Despite the advantages of a uniform platform on which to develop, ASP is a heavy elephant. After many mouthfuls, we realised that the ASP problem would not be eaten quite as quickly as … Ruby on Rails.
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We’re proud to announce a new form of development here at Chillisoft: “Development-Driven Tests”.  Actually, it’s an old development pattern that has stood the test of time, despite numerous onslaughts.  In truth, we can’t really claim it as our own, but at least we can now proudly put a name to it.

This monumental methodology has been under tremendous pressure from an impostor known by a similar name.  Some infidel sought to challenge the throne and coined a similar phrase “Test Driven Development”.  The mere ordering of the words suggested sacrilege, that somehow tests could impose authority and dominion on development.  The sheer thought of it!
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As Neo stood besides the governor of Zion, the governor quipped, “Do the machines depend on us, or do we depend on them?” A staggering thought for the computer addicts of the world. Even more staggering when you stare into a dark future of another kind - a real future: no power.

For foreigners, I’ll just clarify that South Africa is experiencing an electricity crisis, so that our current network cannot support the full load. What that simply means is that someone in headquarters says: no more availability, the systems are going to burn out, so we’ll just flip the switch on that city for two hours. Incredulous, isn’t it?
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Chillisoft have been busy with further improvements to the Habanero object relational mapping (ORM) framework:

Improved Inheritance Support
Habanero now supports a wide range of inheritance implementations, including some forms of mixed inheritance in a single heirarchy.

SQLite
Support has been added in the main framework for the SQLite database.

UI Generation Enhancements
Generated grids have received an overhaul and the innovative DateRangeComboBox has been added.

As always with a framework being used in production projects, there are a wide range of additional bug fixes and minor improvements. The newest release package is available on the downloads page of the Habanero website: http://www.chillisoft.co.za/habanero

While trying to detect a KeyPress event on my DataGridView, I began to suspect all was not well. Because deleting a row in an editable grid is not very easy for newbies (you have to click the side column first and then press delete), I was implementing a new improvement in Habanero where you can delete a row by pressing Delete while having a single cell selected (when not in edit mode). I was also including a similar option to clear the cell contents if you prefer, similar to Excel.
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In writing code where I was deleting the objects in a collection, I encountered the exception:

System.InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.

Simply put, I was using enumeration to walk through the collection, and the change in collection contents was messing up .Net’s counting system. My old code looked like the following:
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In a previous post on the Chillisoft Blog, we discussed different implementations when you attempt to store an object-orientated inheritance structure in a relational database.  Catering for these different implementations is one challenge, but a new frontier dawns when you try and mix multiple implementations in a single heirarchy.
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In the quest to map an object-oriented structure into a relational database, one area with a plethora of implementations is inheritance.  For a moment I will attempt to categorise the possibilities here, but in truth, new possibilities could be emerging all the time.  For now, however, let’s look at several common implementations.
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