The ALT.NET Times for May 10th, 2008
This is the inaugural post of a series I propose to do over Saturday morning coffee. I hope to cherry-pick the posts on the ALT.NET mailing list, and record here for posterity (and my feeble, fallible brain) the best information of the week. Think of it as an ALT.NET Lazy Web distilled.
So, what did we learn this week? Well, if you're writing, thinking about writing, or desperately need an HTML parser, you should check out Hpricot. Incidentally, if you're not a fan of Ruby, beware! The usage syntax of this library might make you a convert. If you're looking for a .NET library, SgmlReader is a great place to start.
Speaking of Ruby, Dave Newman let us know about his VS plug-in for syntax highlighting of Haml. Haml is a templating language for creating views in RoR.
A topic that frequently comes up made another appearance this week: "TDD: Where to Start?" Ah, a fine question and one the ALT.NET crowd answers rather well. A resounding chorus of alt.netters always seem to respond with one book title in particular: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. Starting out with TDD is hard work, says the crowd, and starting out with TDD on a brownfield project that doesn't utilize inversion of control is considerably harder. Another popular suggestion is to see TDD in action.
The Managed Extensibility Framework got some pixels towards the beginning of the week. To quote Krzysztof Cwalina, contributing author of ".NET Framework Design Guidelines" and PM of the Application Framework Core team at Microsoft:
MEF is a set of features referred in the academic community and in the industry as a Naming and Activation Service (returns an object given a “name”), Dependency Injection (DI) framework, and a Structural Type System (duck typing). These technologies (and other like System.AddIn) together are intended to enable the world of what we call Open and Dynamic Applications, i.e. make it easier and cheaper to build extensible applications and extensions.
This is exciting news for .NET developers. Incorporating these features into the BCL means we don't have to get permission from our clients and project managers to use them. We won't have to take dependencies on Unity, Windsor, Structure Map, AutoFac, or Spring.NET to get inversion of control goodness into our applications.
One classically "ALT" exchange about distributing configuration changes mentioned some technologies with which I was unfamiliar. ActiveMQ is a huge, mature Apache project for Message Brokering and Enterprise Integration Patterns. Under its umbrella are projects such as the .NET Messaging API which provides a common API for interacting with messaging providers (ActiveMQ, STOMP, MSMQ, and EMS). IKVM is, to put it succinctly, Java running on Mono. The OP was keen on using custom WCF extensions to make distributed configuration caching with Memcached transparent. Oren Eini posted some time ago about using Memcached with .NET, and it is definitely something you should check out, should the need for a distributed object cache arise.
That's all I have to report this week. Have a great weekend and to quote Joe Krutulis of Appirio, "Think & Enjoy!"
