modelus.com Product Landing Page receives new design

www.modelus.com Product Landing Page receives new design - www.modelus.com/m/blog. Let us know what you think.

modelus.com website is now mobile-friendly!

www.modelus.com has been updated to pass mobile-friendly test by Google as well as to make a few other improvements for mobile users. Let us know if you experience any issues. 

To learn more about the mobile-friendly criteria and how it affects Google Search, visit Google Webmaster Blog.

Log4Net Extensions End of Support

Modelus Log4Net Extension Support is ending June 12, 2015. To assist you with a transition, the Extension library and its source code will be kept in their original locations until September 12, 2015. Contact us if you need our assistance. Happy Coding!

Are you are considering a new offshore project?

I am flying to Minsk this December. If you are considering a new project with our offshore team, let me know this week. Thank you.

Modelus Specification 2.0 is released

We released a new version of Specification. Download it here. With this new release, we added support for .NET 4.0, .NET 3.5, and Silverlight and provided a number of pre-created collection specifications. Happy coding!

Installing Management Studio for SQL Server Express 2008 R2

I came across an issue trying to install SQL Server Management Studio on a computer with SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition. The installation program started fine but could not find any additional features to install.

The work-around is to choose New Instance during the installation. Everything runs smoothly after that. Happy coding!

VS 2010 SP1 available for download

Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010. Click here to download the installer.

For more news and announcements, follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/alehmatus.

Book Review: The Android Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the Android SDK

James Steele and Nelson To
The Android Developer's Cookbook

Smart-phone market and mobile web consumption are exploding. Within the next few years, more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktops. We are in the middle of the next technological revolution.

Android has recently overtaken iPhone in US market share and continues to enjoy widespread adoption among device manufacturers. James Steele's and Nelson To's cookbook helps get started building mobile applications for Android. Organized as a set of independent easy-to-follow recipes, it provides an excellent overview of the fast-growing Android development platform:

  1. Threads, Services, Receivers
  2. Activities, Intents
  3. User Interface elements
  4. Touches and Gestures
  5. Audio and Video support
  6. Communicating with other devices
  7. Location services
  8. Sensors

I highly recommend this book to all levels of the experience. Happy reading!

March Architect: Domain Model Structure - Part 4: Value Objects

In the Part 2 and Part 3 of the Domain Model Structure series, we continued our discussion around how to organize classes inside your domain model. We defined Entities, looked at their relationships, and reviewed options for loading them into memory. This month, we will take a look at Value Objects.

Discovering Value Objects

Value Objects are domain model elements with no conceptual identity. They represent descriptive aspects of the domain and are fully defined by their state. Their behavior depends on what they are, not who they are. If they need to be tracked, they should be tracked with the elements they describe. Thus, they do not need an identity of their own.

We prefer to keep Value Objects immutable, i.e. changeable by full replacement only. Immutable Value Objects are safe to share (which increases performance), and easy to understand (which allows you to build complex behaviors). Let me give you an example based on a classical OO problem:

Assume you have two buckets of paint: b1 and b2. The first bucket b1 contains 1 gallon of yellow paint. The second bucket b2 contains 1 gallon of blue paint. Without looking into the code, could you answer the following questions about the results of the operation b1.Add(b2)?:

  1. What will be returned by the Add method? Is it 2 gallons of green paint or nothing?
  2. What will be in the the first bucket b1? Is it 2 gallons of green paint or 1 gallon of yellow paint?
  3. What will be in the second bucket b2? Is it 1 gallon of blue paint or nothing?

If you notice, we do not have a requirement to track buckets of paint. Thus, I will assume that Bucket is a Value Object and should be immutable. Since both buckets are immutable, they will contain their original values of 1 gallon of paint each and the result of the Add operation will be 2 gallons of green. With no convention in place, it would be impossible to answer these questions without checking the code or better yet unit tests first.

You domain has many Value Objects, a lot more than Entities. If you are having troubles seeing them in your system, take a closer look at the Entities. How are they being described? What are their attributes and properties? How are they being searched for or ordered by? The chances are you will be talking about Value Objects.

Examples: Address, DayPoint, Money, Range, SSN, etc.

Domain Model Structure

Value Objects along with Entities are main elements of the domain model. Many of them are small simple classes that will be widely used in your application. Place them together in a sub-folder under the Domain Model root. We name this folder "Capability":

Domain Model Structure - Capability folder

You are likely to have a number of very complex Value Objects as well. I will try to discuss some of them in my future articles.

Summary and Additional Tips

  1. Never define an identity for a Value Object.
  2. Consider overriding equality operators to match Value Objects using object attributes rather than object references.
  3. Keep Value Objects immutable.
  4. Place Value Objects used across many applications into a dedicated Domain Kernel library.
  5. If you are interested in creating a simple base Value Object class, you can start with the one listed below:

    Domain Model Structure - Value Object Template

Happy coding! To be continued...

Videos from MIX10 conference available to download

Check out these session recordings from the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas (March 15-17, 2010): http://live.visitmix.com/videos/. Enjoy!

Welcome to ModelBlog

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