Great question. I started to answer in the comments and then realized that the issue deserved a new post that explained it in some detail. Here you go…

http://unhandled-exceptions.com/blog/index.php/2008/12/11/on-choosing-an-identity-type/

Can you give any insight as to what life would be like, if I decided to migrate away from Guids as my IDs to Ints? (In the context of this application of course.)

Yes it will under the same ‘license’ as the Microdesk.Utiity.UnitTest.dll library: do-what-you-want-but-don’t-hold-me-liable-for-it (which is basically the BSD license AFAIK).

I didn’t intentionally avoid showing the IPersistentObject interface, the implementation of the GuidIdentityPersistentBase, or any other of the classes/interfaces in the assembly (there are more including an implmentation of ISpecification that provides easy implementations of the Specification pattern).

You actually point out that I failed to provide the code download for this screencast (a completely accidental oversight) so I will post that to the Autumn of Agile site in the next day or so.

The main reason that I’m not (as of now) focused on releasing the library is that I expect that I am adding to it on a frequent basis as my needs grow and so its somewhat unstable (in re: its content, not in re: the quality of its codebase ).

You almost showed it all…except for IPersistentObject

Cheers!

Ryan

Thanks for the insight Steve. Those are all very good reasons

Ben

That’s really a great question (and I thank you for pointing out that my prior-stated stance on NO BETA FOR PRODUCTION WORK seems in conflict with my choice of ASP.NET MVC for this series/project). I appreciate your keeping my honest

My reason for choosing ASP.NET MVC (even tho its still in BETA) is the same as my choices for other technologies: I am splitting the difference between ‘technology has to provide significant value’ and ‘technology has to be of interest to as many people as possible’. This is largely the reason for my choice of ASP.NET MVC over MonoRail (with which I also have experience I could share).

Sadly, although monorail had ‘first-mover advantage’ (or if not first, certainly gained the most traction IMHO among .NET developers interested in an alternate to ASP.NET Webforms), it never really saw terribly broad adoption. With ASP.NET MVC’s impending release, there is a chance that some of the mindshare that its getting will spill over into MonoRail when *some* will discover many things that MonoRail does better than ASP.NET MVC, but my sad expectation is that this will not manifest itself in a big way.

I don’t expect that the interest in ASP.NET MVC is going to significantly increase the adopters of MonoRail in the same way that something like Unity has increased the number of Castle Windsor, StructureMap, NInject, etc. adopters or that Entity Framework has increased awareness of NHibernate.

I actually think this is for several reasons:

1) EF and Unity aren’t really entire ‘platforms’ (despite MS PR to the contrary!) in the same way as ASP.NET MVC is

2) its very likely that a third-party product ecosystem (control vendors, etc.) will grow up around ASP.NET MVC in the same way its done around WebForms and this is not expected to happen to MonoRail anytime soon IMHO; this will further stiffle an increase in MonoRail from ‘dissatisfied ASP.NET MVC adopters’

3) The very real limitations of Entity Framework and Unity are things that any real-world dev would bump into almost immediately upon their first real-world/non-demo use of these technologies and so anyone serious about ORM or IoC quickly looks for another solution and usually finds it in OSS. The limitations of ASP.NET MVC are a bit less i-your-face and tend to be exposed only by less-common edge-cases and so adopters of ASP.NET MVC aren’t as likely to get dissatisfied so quickly and look for alternatives (MonoRail) in the same way

Sorry this is a bit long-winded, but if you regularly visit this blog or watch my screencasts, I’m sure you’ve come to expect nothing less from me but the answer to your last question of “do I think its stable enough to base a real application upon?”, the answer is YES. On my own team at my company we have two such projects underway right now that we are basing upon the ASP.NET MVC BETA platform but are expecting to complete 1Q2009 at which time we expect the final RTM bits to be completed.

The success of StackOverflow as a viable site on this technology (technically still based upon the preview bits and not even the BETA release AFAIK) has given us the confidence to proceed this way and I’m letting that confidence spill over into the SkillPortal project for this Autumn of Agile series too.

Thanks for another great series - I’m hooked.

I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Rhino.Commons discussion in the next segment.

Any particular reason you are choosing to use ASP.NET MVC over something else, say MonoRail? Do you think MVC is baked enough that you would use it on a real project? Just curious, since I know your stance on beta sofware…

Ben