My short personal guide to CAB

We're involved in extending an application with WinForms 2.0 and CAB. I thought I would put the resources I used to learn about this framework in a single place, my blog :-p, as opposed to have the URLs saved on my bookmarks.

Here it goes, in other of preference:

• CAB PDF document by Sal Razzak
• CAB Application Start Up Sequence published on the CAB Wiki
• Architectural Journal Case Study. Very good for understanding how to divide your use cases in workitems while you're implementing your app.
• Best description of responsibilities in CAB
• Best CAB sample application, yes, the Hands On Labs are not the greatest samples to start with...Take a look at this PetStore version developed using CAB.
• Szymon Kbalzcyks' saga on understanding CAB
• The ultimate reference book on CAB

Later on, the online reference links for each pattern used in CAB.

Cheers!

@@identity not working after SQL Server 2005 upgrade

After our server upgrade to SQL Server 2005, some of the stored procedures stopped working. The reason, the change in behavior of the @@identity function in 2005:

The value of @@identity is not restricted by current scope and can be affected, for example, by triggers. I.e. if original 'insert' deals with table T1, and the table T1 has a trigger that inserts rows into table T2, then after the original insert is done the @@identity will show new value for the table T2 (not for the T1 as might be expected!!!)

The suggested solution is using SCOPE_IDENTITY()function instead of @@identity. This function IS restricted by the scope and for the example above it will return new identity value for the original table T1 (not for T2 or any other table affected by triggers).


It seems to me that SELECT MAX(T1) FROM T1 is not the best solution, because T1 (and any other) table can be updated simultaneously from multiple sessions and the maximal value is not always guaranteed.

If you have merge replication going on, be aware that now replication uses triggers that were not present in 2000:

For instance - insert trigger MSmerge_ins_5D17CE9EBD2142E3ADC630C47F017946 which does insert rows into other system table with identity column!!! We didn't see these triggers in SQL 2000 database which may explain why the @@identity worked fine in the same code under SQL 2000.

Hope this helps and happy upgrading!


PG