[2005] Application Blocks from MS

[wild_bill]

My company is converting to the 2.0 framework (hopefully soon). This would be a good time to re-evaluate our N-Tier design. Currently we custom build everything. I thought it might be a good idea to check into Microsofts application blocks for some of our issues. The blocks that look the most benefitial to me are the data access block, the exception block, and the logging block. I would like to know if you use the blocks in your company, and if you do, which ones, and what you think of them. Thanks.

[mendhak]

We use DAAB, exception and logging blocks.

DAAB is fine. We don't like the exception and logging blocks though. The reason is, in a production environment, we have no access to live servers, and so if anything goes wrong, we cannot simply look at the event viewer. We'd like something better which could possibly email us about exceptions (in small apps) or write to a text file in a shared folder so that we can view it whenever we'd like.

[techgnome]

mendhack - check out the logger from http://www.kellermansoftware.com - I did the beta testing on it and it's far superior than anyother logging component I have ever used. You can target SQL Server, textfiles, the Windows eventviewer, Oracle... all sorts of things... even email... you can put a PushMethod call at the top of a sub, the PopMethod at the bottom, everythign in between is indended accordingly. The log can be set to roll over after X number of rows, or to never rollover.

It's pretty handy. I've used it in a couple of apps where I was having issues at a client facility but not in my dev...

That aside.... I've used the DAAP.... not sure I'll keep using it. It has some nice features built into it. But there are times I wish it could do more, or be easier to manage. I'd recommend it with the caveat of "if it makes sense." It's not a silver bullet. I've starting using DooDads and the myGeneration ORM and it's pretty slick, and gives me a base structure that is a little closer to my current needs.

-tg

[mendhak]

Nice, I've forwarded that to my team. If it doesn't work, we know who to blame.

[bgmacaw]

I used them on a Framework 1.1 project and found them to be bloated, difficult to debug, obtuse in places, and a source of difficulty during testing and deployment.

I looked at them again at the start of a Framework 2.0 project and determined that not much had changed. Instead, I wrote my own database and exception/logging layers that were bare bones extensions to the My namespace. This works very well for my situation.

I could see the DAAB working well in a situation where you had to work with multiple data sources, such as 3 SQL Server DBs and 2 Oracle DBs, but it is overkill for your average corporate IT project. Exception and Logging Blocks are often not practical because of the reasons Mendhak mentioned.