David DeWinter

Gael Fraiteur has released another release candidate of PostSharp, an Aspect-Oriented Programming solution for .NET. In my previous post on PostSharp, I discussed a way to work around some pesky Code Analysis errors that PostSharp incurs as a result of its post-compilation processing.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe adding the CompilerGeneratedAttribute (CGA), which was done before RC2’s release, to PostSharp-specific code fixed all of the Code Analysis warnings that our team received. After upgrading to RC2, Code Analysis warned us specifically about initializing our static fields inline in many of our classes and removing the explicit static constructors, as well as the cyclomatic complexity of some of our methods. It was the fact that we did initialize our static fields inline that tipped us off about the same problems that caused me to write my first PostSharp and Code Analysis post. The problem is that adding the CGA is not comprehensive enough to suppress all code analysis violations. For example, PostSharp effectively injects code at certain points in a program execution (join points in a method). You wouldn’t want the CompilerGeneratedAttribute applied to that code, because it could suppress other rule violations that come from your code, not PostSharp’s code. Fortunately PostSharp does not apply the CGA in those circumstances, but there needs to be a middle ground such that PostSharp code is totally ignored by code analysis.

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For my DBML Fixup project, I’ve really had to drill into the structure of LINQ to SQL—including how the data is stored in the .dbml file, how various changes in the designer affect the serialized XML (which is the format of the .dbml file), and what the various elements and attributes in the DBML file actually mean. (Honestly, what does the IsForeignKey attribute on the Association element imply as its meaning? I thought all “associations” represented foreign keys!)

At first I tried to dissect LINQ to SQL by keeping track of the various elements and attributes and their representations in the XML and the designer in big Excel tables. They quickly became unwieldy, and I decided to cut my losses and model the LINQ to SQL schema (DBMLSchema.xsd). Needless to say this was a very challenging exercise, but I gleaned a significant amount of knowledge about LINQ to SQL after finishing it.

The purpose of this post is to post the various pages of the LINQ to SQL model; I want this post to clarify the infrastructure of LINQ to SQL to others, so I would appreciate if you can comment on any inconsistencies or missing constraints you can see. I used Object-Role Modeling (ORM) for the model, so if you are not familiar with that, you may want to check out the following resources:

1. Object Role Modeling: An Overview, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa290383(VS.71).aspx
2. Halpin, T. 2001. Information Modeling and Relational Databases: From Conceptual Analysis to Logical Design.San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

The model starts like this…here’s the database page. The derivation rules aren’t on the diagram explicitly, as they are stored as part of the properties of the fact type. Other advantages of having the .orm file are that I’ve put definitions on all of the fact types to clarify their meaning, in the case that the predicate text is still not clear enough. If anyone wants the .orm file, feel free to contact me at david.dewinter AT (@) rev-net DOT (.) com. (You can open .orm files with Visual Studio after installing Project NORMA.) I will also put up a contact form soon…

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Since the new year I’ve been working on a project that attempts to solve the following problem:

How do I keep my generated entity classes in sync with the current database schema using LINQ to SQL?

For some people, this question is moot. It’s easy enough to utilize the current “resync” mechanism in LINQ to SQL by deleting all the entity classes and functions (the LINQ to SQL term for sprocs and UDFs) on the designer surface and then redragging and dropping the tables and functions of interest, thus updating the entity classes by regenerating from scratch. However, for others, this solution is not good enough for a few reasons:

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With JetBrains’ dotTrace and Red Gate Software’s ANTS Profiler, developers can find bottlenecks in their code as well as profile memory usage. Both tools also support tracing the Visual Studio (2005) Web Server out-of-the-box. However, tracing with Visual Studio 2008 Web Server is a little different.

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