By Javier Callico on 3/29/2010

I stumbled upon this excellent article written by Scott Haselman: Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes.

I, like many developers, spend so much time "handcrafting" my solutions that reading about how easy is to create an OData service using the new versions of .NET and Visual Studio was really refreshing and pleasantly surprising.

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By Javier Callico on 3/24/2010

For the last two weeks I've had the opportunity to work on a project which uses Entity Framework (EF) ver. 1.0. For more than a year I've been reading complains, reviews and comparisons regarding EF but finally after using it I have my own opinion:

• It's not a mature solution.
• Definitely falls short when compared to other products in the same category, like NHibernate for example.
• It's not as bad as some people want to make it appear.
• Can help some teams deliver small projects on time, especially if the developers have no experience on the use of O/R mapping tools or if like in the project I was working on, most of the business logic was implemented on the database side.

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By Javier Callico on 3/11/2010

There are plenty of good Dependency Injection Container implementations out there. The selection of an IoC container is not only defined by the developer's preference, which can swing the vote big time since most developers swear by their favorite container, but also of other factors like standards in the organization, the usage of another product which already supports, or favors, a given IoC implementation, etc.

The usage of an IoC container should always be abstracted, making the process of switching between implementations fairly simple, or at least, the refactoring needed to accomplish this task will be minimal compared to the one needed if you were using references to a specific container all over your codebase.

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