wagnerblog.com

Yesterday I took part in a meeting with the technical management team of a customer. Picture a room full of about 12 people. Programmers, PM’s, Managers and even the CIO of the company in attendance. The purpose of the meeting was a presentation on the architecture and design of an application we are producing for this company.

I went through the slide deck and explained various aspects such as WCF, Dependency Injection etc. just humming right along.  Part of the presentation dealt with the notion of entities and object relational mapping. In a previous meeting I mentioned that a generic datatable or dataset is not the same as a business object. Companies derive a lot of value by modeling the intelligence and domain knowledge of their organization in the form of business objects.

The CIO stirred in his seat and became visibly agitated. He jumped in and made a bit of speech to the effect of ” I don’t care about business objects because they take so long to produce. Most of the time its much faster and efficient to produce a resultset and hand that resultset back from the database to the front end. “

This was my very next slide in the deck. Talk about irony.  But it also illustrates some of the difficulties faced by development teams who report to management that was raised on the predominant data access technology produced by Microsoft over the past 15 years. These are the fruits of sowing the seeds of Dynasets, Recordsets and Datasets. Life is funny though.

Anyway, I hope to convince this gentleman just through sheer productivity that there is another way…..