SubSonic - Part 1 - An Introduction

Manjula Perera — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:27:00 GMT

Overview

This is another interesting article about the new trends of the software industry. I would like to share the information I gathered while researching on this new toolset with the user group members and the readers of this blog. I thought of writing about SubSonic because it's another way of accessing/ Querying the database (Actually, SubSonic is a third party toolset to auto generate the Data Access Layer (DAL) of our application and maintain it when the database changes). This is just another handy tool for us as LINQ. Therefore I'll write about SubSonic in parallel to the LINQ articles. We can compare LINQ and SubSonic later on. Since this is the first article about SubSonic in this forum I'll start with an introduction.

What is SubSonic?

SubSonic, initially named as ActionPack is developed as an open source project by Rob Conery before he joined Microsoft, but who is currently working for Microsoft in the ASP.Net team under Scott Guthrie. The other team members of this project are Eric Kemp, Scott Watermasysk, Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, and Gavin Joyce. This project has got attention from Microsoft even though it is still an open source project. SubSonic will be developed on top of ASP.Net and the new MVC framework that Microsoft has given more attention of. (This information is true at the time of writing this article and as per the SubSonic Project & Rob Conery's comments)
We can download the latest source code here
SubSonic is a toolset that helps a website build itself. It brings some of the fun and elegance of Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET
This implements Active Record design pattern.
Helps us quickly build data driven websites without writing data manipulation code
Has a DAL generator that enables us to rapidly create strongly typed collections and CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) enabled objects, which represent the selected database tables
Has an object relational (OR) mapper which extends to stored procedures and views
Could also automatically generate the UI for the data manipulation tasks (scaffolding support). This is very handy when creating the admin panel of a data driven web applications. We don't need to worry about creating it from scratch
Has a dynamic query tool that let us use SQL Server, MySQL and Enterprise Library (Application Blocks) without having to know the underlying SQL syntax (Lets go into technical details in the next articles to follow)
We just need to give the reference to the SubSonic DLL and set SubSonic settings in the Web.config file to make use of the power of SubSonic (Lets go into technical details in the next articles to follow)
Saves lot of development time and that is the main objective of creating SubSonic. Will our bosses give more work for the time we save using SubSonic?

Summery

SubSonic is an open source tool set to auto generate data manipulation code and interfaces. This works on top of ASP.Net and the MVC framework. This gives an extension and a cool new addition to the strength of .Net compliance languages and most importantly this SAVES lot of development time.

Rule Of Thumb

I'm pretty sure SubSonic will not replace classic SQL, T/SQL or PL/SQL but it will extend the data manipulation capability of the programmer. IT saves lot of time. It's a pretty cool tool to be in our tool box. We as the programmers must decide when to use it and when not to.

References

Beware with Math.Round() in C#

Manjula Perera — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:44:00 GMT

Problem

Recently I found an issue with the Math.Round() function in C# while working on an enhancement project written in Visual Studio 2003. I.e. this function is using the Banker's method. The users of this system didn't like the way figures are getting rounded and they wanted the method used in Excel (Because they are used to Excel ). I.e. Symmetric Arithmetic Rounding method. E.g

Say we want to round 1234.50000 into the nearest integer value. Then Math.Round() returns 1234 whereas MS Excel gives 1235.

I also found a similar issue in SQL Server 2000 some time back. It seems that Microsoft uses contradictory methods of rounding in their products (Visual Studio, SQL Server, Visual Basic, Excel etc.)

Most of us learnt this banker's method while schooling. But it seems that there are many other ways of rounding. Click here to view all methods of rounding and how you can implement custom rounding procedures.

Solution

Visual Studio 2003 - If we want to use Symmetric Arithmetic Rounding method we have to write our own function instead of using Math.Round(). See below for a working function found in CoderSource.Net.

public static double roundNum(double num, int place)
{

double n;
n = num * Math.Pow(10, place);
n = Math.Sign(n) * Math.Abs(Math.Floor(n + .5));
return n / Math.Pow(10, place);

}

Visual Studio 2005 - This problem is sorted in this version of Visual Studio. We can now select the rounding method in;

System.Math.Round

Rule Of Thumb

Always ask from the users which method of rounding they want during the system requirements gathering stage. This will avoid us being using the default method of rounding in our chosen development language. In this case C#.

References

Wikipedia

Microsoft Help and Support

CoderSource.Net

Manjula's Blog : ASP.Net, C#

SubSonic - Part 1 - An Introduction

Beware with Math.Round() in C#