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I'm through most of the technical hurdles now. I have a working data layer again, with a slightly different implementation of the repository pattern. The old site used Castle Windsor for dependency injection (DI); I yanked that in favor of Autofac. Actually at first I tried to do without DI at all; why, I asked myself, introduce unnecessary complication? But while creating a proof of concept solution that simply read data from the database and dumped it out to a web page, I had problems maintaining an open database session for the lifetime of the page request. That's just the sort of things thing that DI containers do quite well, and Autofac does especially well. But that's another, longer story.
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