Well, that was fun. After a couple of days of EU proposal writing, it’s back to Visual Studio. Installation went smoothly enough and, on first examination, it looks like a pretty impressive piece of software. There’s certainly a lot in it. Today has been quite a steep learning curve, although it is a testament to the quality of Visual Studio that anything works at all after such a short time. I now have an installation of SQL Server and my first ever C# program which uses Hibernate to save objects directly to the database. This means that I can now use code like:
// Open a database session
ISession session = factory.OpenSession();
// Create a new object
User u = new User();
u.Name = "Hugo";
// Save to the database
session.Save(u);
session.Close();
This may not look that great but, take it from me, it is a lot neater than messing around with SQL queries and keeping these up to date as the object properties change. This is a pretty important piece of plumbing, because my next step is going to be to come up with a basic set of objects to represent Users, Data, Experiments etc etc. After today, I am fairly confident that the database won’t throw up any show stopping issues. Probably.
