History

Before taking a look at the roadmap, let’s quickly recap how far we’ve come. An overview of the release schedule shows a steady accretion of features over the years, as driven by customer or project needs.

Timeline

The list below includes more detail on the releases highlighted in the graphic.[1]

• 0.1: Proof of concept with metadata, PostgreSql (data and schema-migration) and Winforms UI
• 1.0: First customer product with PostgreSql, DevExpress Winforms UI and Reporting
• 1.0.5: MS-SQL driver... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

• Metadata builders are more lightweight now and have fewer restrictions on their API. (QNO-4994)
• Improve support for plugins (QNO-5189, QNO-5190, QNO-5196)
• Improve and clean up expression library (QNO-5174, QNO-5176, QNO-5182, QNO-5183, QNO-5184, QNO-5188, QNO-5198, QNO-5205)
• Improve schema-migration tools (QNO-5179... [More]

Encodo published its first C# Handbook and published it to its web site in 2008. At the time, we also published to several other standard places and got some good, positive feedback. Over the next year, I made some more changes and published new versions. The latest version is 1.5.2 and is available from Encodo’s web site. Since then, though I’ve made a few extra notes and corrected a few errors, but never published an official version again.

This is not because Encodo hasn’t improved or... [More]

“Unwritten code requires no maintenance and introduces no cognitive load.”

As I was working on another part of Quino the other day, I noticed that the oft-discussed registration and configuration methods[1] were a bit clunkier than I’d have liked. To whit, the methods that I tended to use together for configuration had different return types and didn’t allow me to freely mix calls fluently.

The difference between Register and Use

The return type for Register methods is IServiceRegistrationHandler... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

• Lots of bug fixes and improvements for the Winform UI and German translations with the release of Punchclock on this version. (QNO-5162, QNO-5159, QNO-5158, QNO-5157, QNO-5156, QNO-5140, QNO-5155, QNO-5145, QNO-5111, QNO-5107, QNO-5106, QNO-5104, QNO-5015)
• DateTimeExtensions.GetDayOfWeek() had a leap-day bug... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs.

This first-ever Voxxed Zürich was hosted at the cinema in the SihlCity shopping center in Zürich on March 3rd. All presentations were in English. The conference was relatively small—333 participants—and largely vendor-free. The overal technical level of the presentations and participants was quite high. I had a really nice time and enjoyed a lot of the presentations.

There was a nice common thread running through all of the... [More]

At the beginning of the year, we worked on an interesting project that dipped into IOT (Internet of Things). The project was to create use cases for Crealogix’s banking APIs in the real world. Concretely, we wanted to show how a customer could use these APIs in their own workflows. The use cases were to provide proof of the promise of flexibility and integrability offered by well-designed APIs.

Watch 7–minute video of the presentation

The Use Cases

Football Club Treasurer

Activity Stream in the AppThe first use... [More]

In several articles last year[1], I went into a lot of detail about the configuration and startup for Quino applications. Those posts discuss a lot about what led to the architecture Quino has for loading up an application.

Some of you might be wondering: what if I want to start up and run an application that doesn’t use Quino? Can I build applications that don’t use any fancy metadata because they’re super-simple and don’t even need to store any data? Those are the kind of utility applications... [More]

The article Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick! by Verity Stob (The Register) provides a typically twisted and unhelpful overview of the state of functional programming in this 21st-century renaissance—heralded decades ago by Lisp programmers. It includes an honest overview of the major players, including Scala, for which the “pro” and “con” are the same (a “[c]lose relationship with Java […]”) and ending with JavaScript, for which the “pro” is “It’s what you’ll end up using.”

The discussion continues with rules:... [More]

In part I of this series, we discussed some core concepts of profiling. In that article, we not only discussed the problem at hand, but also how to think about not only fixing performance problems, but reducing the likelihood that they get out of hand in the first place.

In this second part, we’ll go into detail and try to fix the problem.

Reëvaluating the Requirements

Since we have new requirements for an existing component, it’s time to reconsider the requirements for all stakeholders. In... [More]

An oft-quoted bit of software-development sagacity is

As is so often the case with quotes—especially those on the Internet[1]—this one has a slightly different meaning in context. The snippet above invites developers to overlook the word “premature” and interpret the received wisdom as “you don’t ever need to optimize.”

Instead, Knuth’s full quote actually tells you how much of your code is likely to be affected by performance issues that... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

Quino 2 is finally ready and will go out the door with a 2.1 rather than a 2.0 version number. The reason being that we released 2.0 internally and tested the hell out of it. 2.1 is the result of that testing. It includes a lot of bug fixes as well as API tweaks to make things easier for developers.

• Made... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

In the beta1 and beta2 release notes, we read about changes to configuration, dependency reduction, the data driver architecture, DDL commands, security and access control in web applications and a new code-generation format.

In 2.0 final—which was actually released internally on November 13th, 2015 (a... [More]

These days nobody who’s anybody in the software-development world is writing software without tests. Just writing them doesn’t help make the software better, though. You also need to be able to execute tests—reliably and quickly and repeatably.

That said, you’ll have to get yourself a test runner, which is a different tool from the compiler or the runtime. That is, just because your tests compile (satisfy all of the language rules) and could be executed doesn’t mean that you’re done writing... [More]

As part of the final release process for Quino 2, we’ve upgraded 5 solutions[1] from Quino 1.13 to the latest API in order to shake out any remaining API inconsistencies or even just inelegant or clumsy calls or constructs. A lot of questions came up during these conversions, so I wrote the following blog to provide detail on the exact workings and execution order of a Quino application.

I’ve discussed the design of Quino’s configuration before, most recently in API Design: Running an Application... [More]

Quino has long included support for connecting to an application server instead of connecting directly to databases or other sources. The application server uses the same model as the client and provides modeled services (application-specific) as well as CRUD for non-modeled data interactions.

We wrote the first version of the server in 2008. Since then, it’s acquired better authentication and authorization capabilities as well as routing and state-handling. We’ve always based it on the .NET HttpListener... [More]

In the previous article, we discussed the task of Splitting up assemblies in Quino using NDepend. In this article, I’ll discuss both the high-level and low-level workflows I used with NDepend to efficiently clear up these cycles.

Please note that what follows is a description of how I have used the tool—so far—to get my very specific tasks accomplished. If you’re looking to solve other problems or want to solve the same problems more efficiently, you should take a look at the official... [More]

A lot of work has been put into Quino 2.0[1], with almost no stone left unturned. Almost every subsystem has been refactored and simplified, including but not limited to the data driver, the schema migration, generated code and metadata, model-building, security and authentication, service-application support and, of course, configuration and execution.

Two of the finishing touches before releasing 2.0 are to reorganize all of the code into a more coherent namespace structure and to reduce the... [More]

In this article, I’m going to continue the discussion started in Part I, where we laid some groundwork about the state machine that is the startup/execution/shutdown feature of Quino. As we discussed, this part of the API still suffers from “several places where generic TApplication parameters [are] cluttering the API”. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at different design approaches to this concrete example—and see how we decided whether to use generic type parameters.

Consistency... [More]

In this article, we’re going to discuss a bit more about the configuration library in Quino 2.0.

Other entries on this topic have been the articles about Encodo’s configuration library for Quino: part I, part II and part III.

The goal of this article is to discuss a concrete example of how we decided whether to use generic type parameters throughout the configuration part of Quino. The meat of that discussion will be in a part 2 because we’re going to have to lay some groundwork about the... [More]

Encodo first published a Git Handbook for employees in September 2011 and last updated it in July of 2012. Since then, we’ve continued to use Git, refining our practices and tools. Although a lot of the content is still relevant, some parts are quite outdated and the overall organization suffered through several subsequent, unpublished updates.

What did we change from the version 2.0?

• We removed all references to the Encodo Git Shell. This shell was a custom environment based on Cygwin. It... [More]

Way back in February, I wrote about my experiences with ReSharper 9 when it first came out. The following article provides an update, this time with version 9.2, released just last week.

tl;dr: I’m back to ReSharper 8.2.3 and am a bit worried about the state of the 9.x series of ReSharper. Ordinarily, JetBrains has eliminated performance, stability and functional issues by the first minor version-update (9.1), to say nothing of the second (9.2).

Test Runner

In the previous article, my main... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

In beta1, we read about changes to configuration, the data driver architecture, DDL commands, and security and access control in web applications.

In beta-2, we made the following additional improvements:

• Introduced a new generated-code version that avoids all global references and provides a... [More]

This discussion about configuration spans three articles:

1. part I discusses the history of the configuration system in Quino as well as a handful of principles we kept in mind while designing the new system
2. part II discusses the basic architectural changes and compares an example from the old configuration system to the new.
3. part III takes a look at configuring the “execution order”—the actions to execute during application startup and shutdown

Introduction

Registering with an IOC is all... [More]

In this article, we’ll continue the discussion about configuration started in part I. We wrapped up that part with the following principles to keep in mind while designing the new system.

• Consistency
• Opt-in configuration
• Inversion of Control
• Configuration vs. Execution
• Common Usage

Borrowing from ASP.NET vNext

Quino’s configuration inconsistencies and issues have been well-known for several versions—and years—but the opportunity to rewrite it comes only now with a major-version break.
... [More]

In this article, I’ll continue the discussion about configuration improvements mentioned in the release notes for Quino 2.0-beta1. With beta2 development underway, I thought I’d share some more of the thought process behind the forthcoming changes.

Software Libraries

what sort of patterns integrate and customize the functionality of libraries in an application?

An application comprises multiple tasks, only some of which are part of that application’s actual domain. For those parts not in the... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

These are the big ones that forced a major-version change.

• Rewrote configuration and application API. (QNO-4666, QNO-4679, QNO-4659, QNO-4772, QNO-4663, QNO-4664, QNO-4360)
• Data-driver architecture has been consolidated. All drivers, ADO, Mongo and Remote, now use the same base implementation, logic and... [More]

Microsoft has recently made a lot of their .NET code open-source. Not only is the code for many of the base libraries open-source but also the code for the runtime itself. On top of that, basic .NET development is now much more open to community involvement.

In that spirit, even endeavors like designing the features to be included in the next version of C# are online and open to all: C# Design Meeting Notes for Jan 21, 2015 by Mads Torgerson (GitHub).

C# 6 Recap

You may be surprised at the version number “7”—aren’t... [More]

In part I of these series, we discussed applications, which provide the model and data provider, and sessions, which encapsulate high-level data context. In part II, we covered command types and inputs to the data pipeline.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the data pipeline itself.

1. Applications & Sessions
2. Command types & inputs
3. The Data Pipeline
4. Builders & Commands
5. Contexts and Connections
6. Sessions, resources & objects

Overview

Major Components of the Data
DriverThe primary goal of the data pipeline is, of... [More]

In part I, we discussed applications—which provide the model and data provider—and sessions—which encapsulate high-level data context.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the command types & inputs

1. Applications & Sessions
2. Command types & inputs[1]
3. The Data Pipeline
4. Builders & Commands
5. Contexts and Connections
6. Sessions, resources & objects

Overview

Major Components of the Data
DriverBefore we can discuss how the pipeline processes a given command, we should discuss what kinds of commands the data driver... [More]