Introducing PressSharp

Ever had a need to deal with exported WordPress XML data in a .NET project? I have, and since there wasn’t a good solution out there already, I decided to create one. The result is PressSharp. It’s a simple class library to provide an API to the exported WordPress XML data. It’s also available as a NuGet package:

Install-Package PressSharp

Check it out!

On github: https://github.com/benlakey/PressSharp
On nuget: http://nuget.org/packages/PressSharp

IL Merge

There’s a neat little utility created by Microsoft Research called IL Merge which takes multiple .NET assemblies and merges them into one. I’m not sure I have a practical use for it myself, but the availability of such a tool to do so is nice. There is also a chocolatey NuGet package available.

NDataStructure 1.0.1 Released

I’ve released NDataStructure 1.0.1 !

Grab it from codeplex: NDataStructure.codeplex.com
Or install the NuGet package: NDataStructure on NuGet.org

I also generated complete documentation here: NDataStructure Documentation

Release notes:

• XML documentation for sandcastle.
• Refactored WeightedGraph away from eventing traversal to IEnumerable
• Incremented version 1.0.0.0 to 1.0.1.0
• NuGet manifest for 1.0.1
• Improved DoublyLinkedList to support ICollection
• Minor rearrangement of a few files

NCLI 1.0

Today I released my simple C# command line parser. It’s available on both the Codeplex site as well as a NuGet package.

NCLI – A simple API for command line argument parsing, written in C#.

NCLI 1.0 NuGet

Codeplex Project Site – NCLI

NOrder 1.0 and NDataStructure 1.0

I released my first NuGet package today! It’s a very simplistic sorting algorithm library, nothing amazing. I wanted to learn how to create packages with NuGet. Check it out:

NOrder is a basic sorting algorithm library developed in C#, providing users the flexibility to choose how to sort data.

NOrder 1.0 NuGet

Codeplex Project Site – NOrder

Update 3/5/2011

NDataStructure is a library providing a handful of useful data structures omitted from the .NET framework.

NDataStructure 1.0 NuGet

Codeplex Project Site – NDataStructure

.NET Developer’s Association 01/24/2011 – ASP.NET MVC 3 with Brad Wilson

Every several weeks the .NET Developer’s Association in Redmond meets at Building 41 on the Microsoft campus to listen about the latest and greatest in .NET. Last night’s talk about ASP.NET MVC 3 by Brad Wilson was a really informative talk, and it motivated me to start blogging about the meetups after each one, starting now.

ASP.NET MVC 3 with Brad Wilson

Just over 2 weeks ago (Jan 13) Microsoft released a huge bucket of new goodies, including ASP.NET MVC3, WebMatrix, NuGet, IIS Express, SQL Compact Edition 4, Web Farm Framework 2.0, and Orchard.

ASP.NET MVC 2 used the ASPX/WebForms view engine by default, which looks a little like this:

  <ul>
    <% foreach(var thing in stuffs) { %>
        <li><%: thing %></li>
    <% } %>
  </ul>

Code nuggets! That’s pretty painful to have to open and close nuggets all over the place. It begins to look like tag soup, especially with complex output.

So ASP.NET MVC 3 ships using the Razor view engine by default (you can still choose to use ASPX/WebForms if you like pain though). Here’s what Razor looks like to accomplish the same thing:

  <ul>
    @foreach(var thing in stuffs) {
        <li>@thing</li>
    }
  </ul>

That’s much better. With Razor, things seem to just work. No entering and exiting code blocks needed, and in the rare scenario that you need to escape things, it is possible to by prefixing with the @. Some other great improvements in ASP.NET MVC 3 include:

• Validation with Unobtrusive Javascript and HTML5 goodness
• Partial page output caching
• Better support for Dependency Injection
• The new ViewBag to replace ViewData
• Html.Raw for outputting non-encoded text
• And more

So last night Brad Wilson walked us through the crash-course on the new features, and demonstrated some particularly cool features like the HTML5 validation additions, and even some object instantiation wizardry via URLs. All in all it was a great talk, and I’m glad to start getting my feet wet in MVC 3.

After the talk a small handful of us, including Brad (@bradwilson) and Ted Neward (@tedneward), went to Red Robin for some food and beers. I had a great discussion with Ted about his thoughts on Oracle, Java, and his work as an independent. He believes that the whole fiasco with Google about Android and Java is simply Oracle wanting a seat at the table, since both IBM and Microsoft have full stacks (rather than just being about the $), and I think that makes some sense, and jives a lot with what others are saying about Oracle wanting to consolidate the Java community under its banner. The Java community at the moment is very fragmented, and there are tons of different ways to do any one thing.

I also had a good talk with Brad Wilson about what he’s doing, and his experiences working at Microsoft. He’s essentially the lead developer on ASP.NET MVC, and came from the Patterns & Practices team. He shared some of his stories, and we talked about some of the people he works with, not least of which is Scott Hanselman of Hanselminutes, This Developer’s Life, and Hanselman.com. Brad himself was featured on episode 1.0.8 of This Developer’s Life, where he and Scott discussed what motives Software Developers to get up in the morning and keep doing what they are doing.

The thing I found amazing was how humble people like Ted and Brad are, given that they are very major figures in our industry. It was a great experience getting to meet in person with people whose talks I’ve watched, and realizing that I work on the same campus as giants like Brad Wilson, Scott Guthrie, and others.