This is a review of the Northwind Starter Kit project, this review revision 94815 from Dec 18 2011.

In my previous posts, I focused mostly on the needlessness of the repositories implementation and why you want to avoid that (especially implementing it multiple times). In this post, I want to talk about other problems regarding the data access. In this case, the sudden urge to wash my hands that occurred when I saw this:

I mean, you are already using an OR/M. I don’t like the Repository implementation, but dropping down to SQL (and unparapetrized one at that) seems uncalled for.

By the way, the most logical reason for this to be done is to avoid mapping the Picture column to the category, since the OR/M in use here (EF) doesn’t support the notion of lazy properties.

Again, this is a problem when you are trying to use multiple OR/Ms, and that is neither required nor really useful.

Okay, enough about the low level data access details. On my next post I’ll deal with how those repositories are actually being used.