After the shooting that happened last week and the subsequent revelation that online forums may have contributed to that bowl-cut-weirdo’s radicalization and subsequent rampage, several people I know have approached me to ask what website owners with discussion boards could have done that could have prevented radicalization. There are some options, but I’ll warn you, most of them are pretty terrible and have a tendency to be easily circumvented (or to backfire spectacularly). The architecture of the internet is intended to be able to route around damage (it was designed to assist with communications after one or more nuclear strikes, after all), and censorship mimics damage in an architectural sense. So, most fixes are not particularly useful, although there are some options.

This past weekend, I spent a great deal of time reworking some parts of our data access layer for Agulus that have been problematic in the past, mostly by trying to get rid of places where we are using ExecuteScalar and places where we are are working with DataTables, as both places are very sensitive to changes in the underlying database schema and the errors don’t surface until runtime, which really stinks. I managed to figure out how to get all the metadata I needed to replace this functionality (some things could be easier….) and proceeded to start editing my templates to achieve this goal. As I did so, I started reflecting on how much I’ve learned, mostly the hard way, about how to manage larger sets of T4 templates while keeping things maintainable. I’ve not seen a lot of guidance floating around on how to deal well with this stuff, so here’s a list of a few things I’ve figured out (so far). Most of the guidance below sounds very much like the guidance you’d expect to see when building something using ASP.NET MVC, which if you think about it, makes a lot of sense since both share many similar concerns. None of these are earth-shattering, but people tend to forget that code that generates code should be maintained at the same quality level as code that is actually being shipped.

I apologize for missing the last couple of weeks of blog posts, but I’ve been extraordinarily busy with product development on my side project. I thought I’d take a little bit of time to show off what I’ve been working on with my friend Matt Sanford.