BlockLand

“Hang on, why am I reading this? Surely he hasn’t updated his blog?” Indeed, he has. Shock Horror. Anyway, I didn’t actually emerge from the murky clouds of the Blogosphere just to post some silly self-referential nonsense, so let’s just assume that all the fanfare is dealt with from this point onwards.

Nay, the real reason I started blogging was to tell you about the work I started doing on BlockLand. Those long in the tooth may have remembered my hype about BluemonkeyBlockLand some time ago, but for many reasons that never really got past a fanatical ideas stage. Finally, my development skills and motivation have improved enough that I am once again starting work on the project. I’ve decided to start from scratch rather than trying to sort out the mess from the original attempt.

So, yesterday and today I’ve been sorting out the rear-end of the application. So, after spending a few hours carefully considering storage schema for the database (I might blog about some of the more fascinating areas later) and an ORM to beautifully transform my database into object-oriented glory, it then came time to actually implement said schematics. And that’s when things got interesting.

Ok, so I’ve never actually used SQL before, apart from a few trivial SELECT statements in a Software Development project, so creating a complex database schema without guidance was going to be a challenge. Nevertheless, after a couple of one-on-one one-to-many (ouch, a SQL joke *cringe*) sessions with the Internet, I felt reasonably confident that I could create all the tables, columns, keys, and indexes required. That wasn’t so hard. I then proceeded to grind my head against the wall as I tried to make sense of Stored Procedures. Every time I tried to work something out, it was like I was being gently slapped in the face while someone was trying to compress a block of Smorgy’s jelly into my brain. The really solid, rubbery stuff.

Now, I said I had more motivation to develop BlockLand, but I didn’t mention anything about masochism, so I decided to temporarily jump ship and try a different solution. So, Visual Studio cranked up and it was time to make an Entity Framework. Frankly, I’m very impressed with these things, but I’m sure my readership won’t find then nearly as riveting. Anyway, I got some more work done, but realised I’ll need to make more Stored Procedures anyway. But that’s a job for tomorrow.

Anyway, I’ll try to think of something less computer-y to post about in the next installment of the blog, but meanwhile, just welcome my return.