Thursday, February 21, 2013

INotifyPropertyChanged: Worst. Interface. Ever

As any .Net UI developer will tell you, INotifyPropertyChanged is a fundamental part of 'binding' an object to a UI control. Without it binding is essentially one-way: changes in the control change the object, but if this has a ripple effect on other properties, or properties are changed by other 'below the UI' processes, the UI can't know to repaint. This is essentially an implementation of the Observer pattern[1].

Unfortunately it's not for free - you have to implement it yourself - and that's where the problems start. So much has been written on the pain of implementing INotifyPropertyChanged (INPC for short) that I need not repeat it all here. It's generated so many questions on StackOverflow you'd think it's due its own StackExchange site by now.

The principal complaints are around all the boilerplate code and magic strings required to implement, so for the sake of completeness I'll summarize some of the solutions available:

Pick one of these, stick with it and you're done. Ok, there's still a bit of griping about separation of concerns, and whether this is an anti-pattern, but you're done right?

No.

It's so much worse than that.

Do you remember the first time you implemented GetHashCode(), and later when you realized you'd done it wrong? And later when you really realized you'd done it wrong, that there was no good way you could override Equals() for a mutable object, and the sneaking realization that this whole problem existed only for the benefit of Hashtables? It's a bit like that.

What we have with INotifyPropertyChanged is an implicit contract, that is to say that a large part of the contract can't be formally defined in code. Which means you have to validate your implementation manually. In this case the implicit bit is about threading. INotifyPropertyChanged exists to support UI frameworks and (bizarrely, in this day-and-age) they are still single threaded, and can only execute on the thread that constructed them – including event handlers. Think about this a bit, and you will eventually conclude:
An object that implements INotifyPropertyChanged must raise the PropertyChanged event only on the thread that was originally used to construct any registered subscribers for that event

Now there's a problem[2].

Clearly this is something that's just not possible to check for at runtime, so your design has to cater for this. Passing objects that might have been bound to business logic that might mutate them? UI thread please. Adding an item into a collection that might be ObservableCollection? UI thread please. Doing some calculations in the background to pass back to an object that may have been bound? Marshal via UI thread please. And so on. And don't even get me started on what you do if you have two (or more) 'UI' threads[3].

This is a horrible, horrible creeping plague of uncertainty that spreads through your UI, where the validity of an operation can't be determined at the callsite, but must also take into account the underlying type of an object (violating polymorphism), where that object came from (violating encapsulation), and what thread is being used to process the call (violating all that is sacred). These are aspects that we just can't model or visualize well with current tooling, at least not at design time, and none of the solutions above will save you here.

So there you go. INotifyPropertyChanged: far, far worse than you imagined.


[1] ok, any use of .net events could be argued is Observer, but the intent here is the relevant bit: the object is explicitly signalling that it's changed state.
[2] Actually I've over-simplified, because you can have whole chains of objects listening to each other, and if any one of them is listened to by an object with some type of thread-affinity, that's the constraint you have to consider.
[3] Don’t try this at home. There are any number of lessons you’ll learn the hard way.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Crazy reference leakage using extension methods and generics

It appears that if you have an extension method, that is in-scope (i.e. namespace included), even if you don't use it you have to reference all the assemblies that are part of the generic type constraint.

This kinda sucks.

Normally if you use a type from another assembly, and that type has as part of its interface another type in another assembly, you have to reference both assembly. Fine. But only if you use it.

eg: if you reference assembly 'Animal' and use a class 'Cow' that has a property 'Color', and the type of Color is defined somewhere else (System.Windows.Forms) you have to reference that too. But if you get the cow via the IBovine interface, and that doesn't expose Color, you don't need the reference (at least not statically).

If, however, in the same namespace, there's an extension method that you're not using, and that extension method has some type constraints, you have to reference all the assemblies for all the type constraint parameters.

For example, if you put this in one assembly, in a namespace you merely import:


  public static class NotUsed{
        public static void DefinatelyNotUsed(this TContext context, Action thing)
            where TContext : DataContext
        {
            
        }
  }
... then you'll also have to pull in System.Data.Linq to get the 'importing' assembly to compile.

Doesn't this strike you as odd? I'm sure I can hear a gestalt Eric Lippert in my head explaining why, but I was certainly surprised.

Get-Member on empty collections

PowerShell's pipeline just loves to unravel collections, with the result that sometimes, when you want to do something on the collection itself, you can't. Like with Get-Member:
$blah.Catalogs | Get-Member Get-Member : No object has been specified to the get-member cmdlet.
What happened? Did $object.Catalogs return null, or did it return an empty IEnumerable? This has bitten me a few times, especially when poking around in an API for the first time (ie: at this point I have no idea what 'Catalogs' is, whether it's ICollection or whatever).

The answer, I realize, is to avoid the pipeline:
Get-Member -inputObject:$blah.Catalogs TypeName: BlahNamespace.BlahCollection Name MemberType Definition ---- ---------- ---------- Add Method System.Void Add(Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.IntegrationSer... Clear Method System.Void Clear()
Much better

Monday, February 04, 2013

SQL 2012 Data Tier Applications explained

You: So what are these DACPAC things then?
Microsoft:
"A DAC is a database lifecycle management and productivity tool that enables declarative database development to simplify deployment and management. A developer can author a database in SQL Server Data Tool database project and then build the database into a DACPAC for handoff to a DBA"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210546.aspx 

You: Hey, that sounds familiar. How is that different from Visual Studio 2010 Database Edition aka DataDude aka GDR aka VSDBCMD.exe?
Microsoft: They're, like, totally different ok.

You: How so?
Microsoft: Well they just are. DACPACs replace all that GDR stuff. That was just crazy stuff the Visual Studio guys came up with you know. This is the real deal from the SQL product team. And we can package data too, in BACPACs.

You: Awesome. So this'll solve that problem about also upgrading reference data when I push out a new version of the schema?
Microsoft: Oh no. BACPACs can't be used to upgrade an existing database instance. Just to load data into new databases. They're for moving databases between servers.

You: Like a backup
Microsoft: Exactly like a backup, yes.

You: ...so... can't you just use a backup?
Microsoft: No. DACPACs and BACPACs don't just contain the database. They encapsulate the whole data tier application, so they include other items you'd need to deploy, like logins.

You: Cool. And agent jobs as well I guess?
Microsoft: Oh no. Just logins and ... well logins anyway. Try doing that with GDR. And you wouldn't be using sql_variant anyway would you? No.

You: Come again?
Microsoft: Oh nothing.


The author notes this conversation was imaginary, and any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental

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