James Simmonds

Update: 15th July 2008 - Project now hosted on Codeplex , links below updated. v0.3 is underway, check out the issues list on Codeplex; these will all be fixed in this next release. After creating WCFServiceWrapper I've been using it a fair bit to whip up wrappers to several existing business layer interfaces... (Recap: WCFServiceWrapper is a .Net application to generate the service layer code required to expose any existing non-WCF interface via WCF). I'm releasing v0.2 which includes... * New WinForms UI * Support for generating VB code. Console app cmdline switch /L:VB * Bugfix: Primitive datatypes and void return types from interface methods where not being handled correctly. * I have also refreshed the WCFServiceExample project to include this new version in the example zip. Version 0.2 application source code and example project can be downloaded from the new Codeplex project here (The example is a VS2008 solution providing a simple business assembly and an empty WCF se...

I've long been a fan (and sometime practitioner) of " Getting Things Done " (GTD) organisational approach. At the heart of being "organised" is having a good "todo" list...and for the last few months I've been using ToDo-ist to power my list. I'm also a recent convert to "the cloud" - using online applications and services...the availability and reach makes "cloud" based stuff just so useful....and Todo-ist also neatly ties these two things together...and the real plus is that ToDo-ist also has an iGoogle gadget/widget plugin. Usually I find a shiny new app/service/tool etc and post about it immediately only to find that it doesn't live up the hype or expectation - so this "recommendation" for ToDo-ist is based on several months of actually using it! I really like the level of flexibility ToDo-ist offers (it terms of list structures) and has some nice shortcuts too (like putting "tod" or "tom...

...hallelujah! What is Ninject ?! (taken from here ) " In 5 seconds Ninject is the ninja of dependency injectors. In 30 Seconds Ninject is a lightning-fast, ultra-lightweight dependency injector for .NET applications. It helps you split your application into a collection of loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive pieces, and then glue them back together in a flexible manner. By using Ninject to support your software’s architecture, your code will become easier to write, reuse, test, and modify. " One of my main bug bears with Spring.NET is the feature bloat (I really don't need 70% of the features) and the xml configuration hell (and the same can be said of many IoC/DI frameworks). I'm using Castle/Windsor at the moment and even with this lighter weight framework the configuration bogs you down. I have my own solution using "Assemblers" to construct preset object tree implementations of interfaces - the "assemblers" themselves are created using IoC so I c...

[Update: 21-Jun-08, v0.2 released...more info here ] I've recently had some hands on exposure with WCF. My initial impressions are that its pretty slick. However I was pretty perturbed to learn how invasive WCF is - specifically the "DataContract" attributes required to control the entity serialisation. When designing software I start in the middle - usually a vanilla interface that represents some activity - this activity is UI and Data layer neutral...its upstream clients could be a UI or equally a service, likewise I make no assumptions about the persistance (if any) that might be required. So I was pretty unimpressed to learn that to expose an activity via WCF I needed to retrofit some WCF specific attributes to my interfaces and data entities in order for them to be WCF friendly. This does not sit well with me. Suddenly a context neutral component needs to know that it *might* be part of a WCF service and therefore has to be attributed just in case it is....and what ...