This is a review of the S#arp Lite project, the version from Nov 4, 2011.

I was asked to review this project a long time ago, but I never got around to it. I had some time and I decided that I might take a look and see how it goes. I don’t like the S#arp Arch project, because it seems too complex and heavy weight for the purpose.

The project comes with a sample application, which is good, because it is easy to see how the framework is intended to be used. Unfortunately, it is yet another online store example, I am getting heartily sick of that. On the other hand, it is a fairly simple model and easy to understand, so I grok why this keeps getting chosen.

Review Rule, I look at the code. If I wanted to deal with documentation, I would write some for our products. I am doing this because I find it fun to look at other people’s code. So skip any comments about “if you read the docs…”.

We start from the project structure:

I am not sure if I like it, I don’t know if I agree that all of those splits are needed, but this is well within reasonable limits, so I am willing to let it slide on the grounds that this is personal taste more than anything else. Looking at the dependencies, we see:

The Init project contains two files, which are responsible for… well, starting up, it seems. Again, I don’t see any reason why this would be a separate project, but that is about it so far.

Next in line is the NHibernateProvider project, in this case, we have the following:

So far, I am cautiously optimistic. All of the files / folders marked with red are actually all about setting NHibernate up, not about hiding it. But then we get to the read me file, which reads in part:

This folder contains any concrete, NHibernate-specific query classes.
There should only be classes in here for any respective query *interfaces* found in
/MyStore.Domain/Queries/

This folder will usually be empty except for very exceptive cases.

This is… interesting. Can’t say whatever I agree or not yet. Looking at the QueryForProductOrderSummaries, we see:

Note the comment, there are better ways to do it, but we demonstrate an ugly way, and how to nicely encapsulate it.

That is enough for now, I think, next post, I’ll touch on the actual model…