DigitallyCreated Utilities v1.0.0 Released

Daniel Chambers — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:43:39 GMT

After a hell of a lot of work, I am happy to announce that the 1.0.0 version of DigitallyCreated Utilities has been released! DigitallyCreated Utilities is a collection of many neat reusable utilities for lots of different .NET technologies that I’ve developed over time and personally use on this website, as well as on others I have a hand in developing. It’s a fully open source project, licenced under the Ms-PL licence, which means you can pretty much use it wherever you want and do whatever you want to it. No viral licences here.

The main reason that it has taken me so long to release this version is because I’ve been working hard to get all the wiki documentation on CodePlex up to scratch. After all, two of the project values are:

To provide fully XML-documented source code
To back up the source code documentation with useful tutorial articles that help developers use this project

And truly, nothing is more frustrating than code with bad documentation. To me, bad documentation is the lack of a unifying tutorial that shows the functionality in action, and the lack of decent XML documentation on the code. Sorry, XMLdoc that’s autogenerated by tools like GhostDoc, and never added to by the author, just doesn’t cut it. If you can auto-generate the documentation from the method and parameter names, it’s obviously not providing any extra value above and beyond what was already there without it!

So what does DCU v1.0.0 bring to the table? A hell of a lot actually, though you may not need all of it for every project. Here’s the feature list grouped by broad technology area:

ASP.NET MVC and LINQ
- Sorting and paging of data in a table made easy by HtmlHelpers and LINQ extensions (see tutorial)
ASP.NET MVC
- HtmlHelpers
  - TempInfoBox - A temporary "action performed" box that displays to the user for 5 seconds then fades out (see tutorial)
  - CollapsibleFieldset - A fieldset that collapses and expands when you click the legend (see tutorial)
  - Gravatar - Renders an img tag for a Gravatar (see tutorial)
  - CheckboxStandard & BoolBinder - Renders a normal checkbox without MVC's normal hidden field (see tutorial)
  - EncodeAndInsertBrsAndLinks - Great for the display of user input, this will insert <br/>s for newlines and <a> tags for URLs and escape all HTML (see tutorial)
- IncomingRequestRouteConstraint - Great for supporting old permalink URLs using ASP.NET routing (see tutorial)
- Improved JsonResult - Replaces ASP.NET MVC's JsonResult with one that lets you specify JavaScriptConverters (see tutorial)
- Permanently Redirect ActionResults - Redirect users with 301 (Moved Permanently) HTTP status codes (see tutorial)
- Miscellaneous Route Helpers - For example, RouteToCurrentPage (see tutorial)
LINQ
- MatchUp & Federator LINQ methods - Great for doing diffs on sequences (see tutorial)
Entity Framework
- CompiledQueryReplicator - Manage your compiled queries such that you don't accidentally bake in the wrong MergeOption and create a difficult to discover bug (see tutorial)
- Miscellaneous Entity Framework Utilities - For example, ClearNonScalarProperties and Setting Entity Properties to Modified State (see tutorial)
Error Reporting
- Easily wire up some simple classes and have your application email you detailed exception and error object dumps (see tutorial)
Concurrent Programming
- Semaphore/FifoSemaphore & Mutex/FifoMutex (see tutorial)
- ReaderWriterLock (see tutorial)
- ActiveObject - Easily inherit from ActiveObject to separately thread your class (see tutorial)
Unity & WCF
- WCF Client Injection Extension - Easily use dependency injection to transparently inject WCF clients using Unity (see tutorial)
Miscellaneous Base Class Library Utilities
- SafeUsingBlock and DisposableWrapper - Work with IDisposables in an easier fashion and avoid the bug where using blocks can silently swallow exceptions (see tutorial)
- Time Utilities - For example, TimeSpan To Ago String, TzId -> Windows TimeZoneInfo (see tutorial)
- Miscellaneous Utilities - Collection Add/RemoveAll, Base64StreamReader, AggregateException (see tutorial)

DCU is split across six different assemblies so that developers can pick and choose the stuff they want and not take unnecessary dependencies if they don’t have to. This means if you don’t use Unity in your application, you don’t need to take a dependency on Unity just to use the Error Reporting functionality.

I’m really pleased about this release as it’s the culmination of rather a lot of work on my part that I think will help other developers write their applications more easily. I’m already using it here on DigitallyCreated in many many places; for example the Error Reporting code tells me when this site crashes (and has been invaluable so far), the CompiledQueryReplicator helps me use compiled queries effectively on the back-end, and the ReaderWriterLock is used behind the scenes for the Twitter feed on the front page.

I hope you enjoy this release and find some use for it in your work or play activities. You can download it here.

DigitallyCreated Blog (Tagged: "Unity")

DigitallyCreated Utilities v1.0.0 Released