Last architecture chat was a fairly small turnout, and as such we ended up having a fairly focused conversation mostly around NHibernate, here's what we talked about on the day:

• The rise of interest in NHibernate recently.
• The NHibernate 3rd party tooling market and side projects.
• • NHibernate Profiler.
  • NHibernate Search, NHibernate Burrow etc. in NHibernate Contrib.
  • Fluent NHibernate.
  • ActiveWriter.
  • Linq for NHibernate and just how complete it is...
  • NHibernate Query Generator.
  
  
  
  
• What tooling / projects for NHibernate could increase developer velocity.
• NHibernate discussion around a number of points:
• • Single table / class table inheritance.
  • Can you mix both the types of inheritance together.
  • Can a discriminator cross multiple columns.
  • Discriminator mapping over a range i.e. CreatedDate < 2003, instantiate="" a="" goldcustomer,="" otherwise="" if="" createddate ="">= 2003 instantiate a premium custom (change in customer structuring post 2003).
  • Ability to support stored procedures in NHibernate where parameters are not in the expected order, or if multiple stored proc calls are required to persist an entity and possible work-arounds.
  • Custom column types, limitations etc.
  
  
  
  
• General ORM questions
• • Does the ORM with the best tooling with out long-term for .Net?
  
  
  
  
• Obfuscation and License Products.
• • Why is it such a problematic space...
  • The issues people have.
  • The pain of rolling your own.
  • References to the post from Ayende on his problems with XHEO.
  
  
  
  
• Refund policies of software product companies (especially components/libraries for developers).
• • Why companies get stubborn about refunds.
  • Just how many refund requests companies get (consensus - not that many).
  • The associated cost of bad service with considering reactions being represented in public (blogs, twitter etc.).
  • The point at which most companies should offer a refund, and should they offer it before the customer asks ex. if they can not resolve their issues in a timely manor (or at all) before eroding the money earned from the sale in the first place.
  
  
  
  
• Factor - briefly talked about it before we finished up, I think I'm going to give up trying to get other people interested in it :) postfix notation and stacks just seems to conjure up thoughts of assembler in most developers minds.

Next chat is this Thursday, 26th of February at 11:30am.