I have been evaluating source control solutions for Visual Studio 2005 this last week. I went through the exercise of setting up VSS 2005. What a pain that was. First of all SourceSafe is slow. Very slow. It is not just slow when accessing data through a slow connection (which is really near impossible – it seems to refresh a lot of data every time you click on a file so it takes forever), or when checking out a large number of files. Everything is just painfully slow, even just browsing the repository on a local link. In addition the VSS integration is terrible. Admittedly I stumbled a bit when designing the repository layout and had to rename some folders. The problem is the path information is embedded in so many places in the VS project file it was almost impossible to get it out – I ended up having to recreate the solution files from scratch (wasn’t a big deal in this case but this shows how much of a royal pain this could be to manage). Also the whole lock/modify/commit process is very hard to get used to… basically VS will tend to automatically check out some files like the project file and then screw me if I try to modify the project on another machine and forgot to check it in.

Anyway out of despair I decided to give a try to subversion, although I really would have liked to stick with a Microsoft technology for once. This little guy is lightning fast, and absolutely not picky about what you do to the file. I installed the TortoiseSVN interface to manipulate the repository and I love it. Main thing missing right now is integration with Visual Studio. Also so far I have not had to deal with merges so I don’t know how good it is at that but I don’t think it can be as bad as VSS. I might install the AnkhSVN plugin to see how well that work – but I will just skip on the integration for now so I can get some work done!

Found out that Decimal.Parse would not handle scientific notation.
Instead I had to use:

(decimal)Double.Parse(...)


The last project was porting the SLX leads management module to the web. Obviously I did not want to have to deal with the SLXWEB development environment so I have developed it as an ASP.NET website. I am using NHibernate 1.0.2 for object persistence. Of course there were a few rough patches but overall it went in pretty well, doesn’t seem to have any problem chatting with the SLX OLEDB provider and generating SLX ids. I have yet to decide, however, if it is actually worth the hassle vs creating my own DAO from scratch! The hope I have is that some of the performance features (caching, lazy loading) will pay off. A lot of the “plumbing” is implemented in a shared assembly so we will also be able to reuse it for future projects (including a MyGeneration template that generates the code automatically, though I need to change this one to take advantage of the JOINDATA table instead of using the SQL constraints since SLX “forgot” to implement those).

I just found out about the ISession.FlushMode property. Set that to commit and it seemed to yield a big performance improvement (though actually it seems a bit too big to be true and I think what happened is my laptop was bogged down when I ran a performance test last week… it went from 2 minutes to 10 seconds). Anyway this is a good thing considering I will only call Save from my DAO objects, to ensure everything is consistently wrapped in transactions.