This will do it:

    ParentSummary parentSummary = null;
    Child child = null;
    IList<AnotherChild> otherChildren = null;

    var result = session.QueryOver<Parent>()
      .JoinAlias(x => x.Child, () => child)
      .JoinAlias(x => x.OtherChildren, () => otherChildren)
      .SelectList(list => list
          .SelectGroup(x => x.Id).WithAlias(() => parentSummary.Id)
          .SelectGroup(x => x.Name).WithAlias(() => parentSummary.Name)
          .SelectGroup(() => child.Name).WithAlias(() => parentSummary.ChildName)
          .SelectCount(x => x.OtherChildren).WithAlias(() => parentSummary.OtherChildrenCount))
      .TransformUsing(Transformers.AliasToBean<ParentSummary>())
      .List<ParentSummary>();

Using net start servicename is problematic because your build will fail if you try and stop a stopped service, or start a started service.

Instead use a batch file which handles the error and returns 0 to indicate success:

@echo off
net start service1
if ERRORLEVEL 2 goto error
exit
:error
exit /b 0

At the interview there was a lot of interest in all things agile from a dev manager who is sympathetic to the cause but has not had the opportunity to explore these ideas.  And today it became apparent that there are arguments surrounding the proposed adoption of certain open source tools (though it look like there is budget for the paid ones).

As a .NET developer I’m a fan of TDD and Continuous Integration. I like NHibernate, IOC containers, and have rediscovered a hatred for Visual Source Safe.  I think Resharper should be mandatory for all Visual Studio users.  Resharper’s unit testing capabilities are complimented TestDriven.Net brings code coverage via NCover.  I’ve recently ditched a long time friend CruiseControl.Net in favour of Team City.  Likewise I am meaning to switch to Rake and say farewell to Nant (thanks for the recent update, but I think I’m done with XML now). And Git appeals to me though I feel comfortable enough with Subversion to be able to mostly avoid its pitfalls. I love tinkering with Rhino Mocks and NBuilder and can knock up Nunit tests almost as quickly as I can type.  I must confess that I have only scratched the surface of NHibernate the reason for this’ this dear readers the point of this post.  Resistance.  Developers, managers, companies that are so resistant to change, saturated with inertia and deeply mistrustful of anything not originating from the hallowed pages of MSDN.

Everywhere I look there are developers to whom it just never occurs to do anything differently, whose C# code is barely distinguishable from their VB code of ten years ago were it not for the angle brackets, semi colons and case sensitivity.  These people are yet to be convinced of the need for interfaces let alone design patterns or refactoring tools.  Copy and paste abounds, its really so much easier than all that inheritance.  Lets keep things simple eh?

So it was with great trepidation that I began my new contract and found myself being asked to demo some of the wondrous magic of which I had spoken. Until today.  Because tools such as Nunit, Log4Net, Rhino Mocks (the list goes on Alt.Netters) are not on the ‘approved product list’. A list so dull that I wonder if the architectural team that maintains it died circa 2001.  In fact if the architects (misleading term used in large corporations for people from IT who are quite high up in the organisation) are not putting progressive software tools on their list then I can only conclude that they do not have a passion for their trade and are most likely so out of touch that the only things that make it onto the list come from vendors who justify the high price tags with free lunches at each procurement milestone.

And there’s the rub.  If the guys at the top don’t care, then it follows that the guys in the trenches won’t care either.  Java doesn’t have this problem, open source projects are its lifeblood.  Hibernate is the defacto standard, whereas in my office the very download of its .NET equivalent is prohibited.  Large corporations suffer from expensive and often doomed software projects yet, with a few exceptions, refuse to embrace the answer to their problems identified by community figures and the software that nice open source developers write to make it easy to implement them.

And all of this indifference, fear and ignorance dominants the .NET landscape whilst some truly innovative tools are freely available to any who bother to look for them. But why do I care? Perhaps I should just leave it.  Resistance is futile…

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(1756,9):
error MSB3091: Task failed because "LC.exe" was not found, or the correct Microsoft Windows
SDK is not installed. The task is looking for "LC.exe" in the "bin" subdirectory beneath the
 location specified in the InstallationFolder value of the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A. You may be able to solve
 the problem by doing one of the following:  1) Install the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008
 and .NET Framework 3.5.  2) Install Visual Studio 2008.  3) Manually set the above registry key to
 the correct location.  4) Pass the correct location into the "ToolPath" parameter of the task.

Well, there was plenty of information around so it was easy to find a solution. I chose to add a registry key to my build server that matched that in the error message:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A]
"InstallationFolder"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft.NET\\SDK\\v2.0\\"

I set it to my .Net sdk install as we don’t have the windows sdk on the build server.

Next, I emptied the licenses.licx file that had been added to the properties directory of my web application. Then my build server happily compiled the source.

Unfortunately, you don’t seem to be able to get the settings dynamically from the config file of the service as it is not the service that is the running application during installation.

Instead you can supply the username and password as command line argument to installutil during installation as described here.

But installutil doesn’t take username and password parameters on the command line I hear you say…

Well, you can pass anything in on the command line and retrieve it like this:

serviceProcessInstaller1.Username = Context.Parameters["username"];

This is great for automated installs which I run as part of my cruise control build.

private void ProjectInstaller_BeforeInstall(object sender, InstallEventArgs e)
{
serviceProcessInstaller1.Username = @”domain\username”;
serviceProcessInstaller1.Password = “password”;
}

Works great.  Next up is to pull out the account details into my config file.

Recommends :
System.IO.Directory.SetCurrentDirectory(System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory);

So that your services don’t appear to run in the System32 dir.

C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\ReportingServices\Microsoft.ReportingServices.targets(24,2): error MSB4062: The “Microsoft.Reporting.RdlCompile” task could not be loaded from the assembly Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a. Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. Confirm that the <UsingTask> declaration is correct, and that the assembly and all its dependencies are available.

I downloaded the report viewer redistributable package from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BB196D5D-76C2-4A0E-9458-267D22B6AAC6&displaylang=en

and installed it on the build server.

Everything’s fine now.

I’m back using .NET after an almost three year spell of Java.  I’m back to ADO (with M$ enterprise building blocks) after an affair with (N)Hibernate.

So I just spent abouthalf an hour realising this.

If I set up a command object (via a Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Data.Database instance) with a stored procedure and its parameters, I should call ExecuteNonQuery(System.Data.Common.DbCommand command).

Unfortunately, I was calling ExecuteNonQuery(System.Data.CommandType commandType, string commandText).

The results in a new command object (with none of my lovingly created parameters) being created for the call, hence the failure of my db call.

Doh!