How to handle persistence concerns? We like to use the open source solution NHibernate, the well known object-relational mapper for .NET. Last Friday’s release of NHibernate Profiler gained a lot of attention. Let’s have a look what goodies we can get.

A picture is worth a thousand words and still we express ourselves mainly in words, just like this blog post. Although many people will support the statement, we just think it is harder to express our thoughts with pictures. People claim that they are not artists. Anyhow, I guarantee that explaining your client what you want to develop with pictures leads to a much better end result. That’s why real estate developers use artistic impressions, it just sells better when people understand what they will buy. Software developers too often try to capture everything in functional and technical descriptions, but for a client it is hard to decide whether this will satisfy his needs. Unpleasant surprises might occur at the end of the project. Show a picture with your thoughts and the give rise to discussion.

yWorks products

If you are not an artist and you want to quickly draw nice diagrams I’ve found a very useful and light tool. Earlier I tried to use Visio or other heavy duty tools for my diagrams but their user interface is so complex that I really started to hate using them. Recently, I had to draw some graphs and then I found yEd – a JAVA graph editor application. I needed to give it a try.