Maybe there's something obvious that I'm missing or maybe not. Suppose I have a class that is just a representation with getters/setters and no logic. I'm going to use these structures for serialization/deserialization mostly. Suppose I use that object in many, many applications. Suppose I have dozens of these objects. What's my best approach to sharing these objects?
I understand that I can compile an object into a DLL and reference that DLL. But if I have dozens of these objects, do I compile them all separately so I can use just what I need or do I make and maintain a monster DLL with all of these objects in it. Both of those approaches seem bad. I don't want to create a class library for every single class (that's stupid) and throwing them into a giant package just seems like a bad idea.
Am I missing something simple? Doesn't java have a convention where one can create jar files of one to many classes? Does .Net do something like that?
You need a happy middle ground.
You should be grouping related objects into individual namespaces.
You can then compile each namespace into a seperate DLL. That way, whoever is using the libraries only needs to reference a single DLL per group of functionality.
You can have a master assembly containing all objects. Then also create separate assemblies for the different applications where you only add the ones you use as links.
You would then use Project->Add Existing Item, and then on the Add-button click the down-arrow and select "Add As Link" when you add the classes you want.
Related
We are starting to develop a new asp.net mvc 5 application that should be multilingual.
I found a very nice tutorial how to get this working. The only thing I wonder about this tutorial is, that the author suggests to create a separate project inside the solution for the resources.
Now my question: Is this recommended?
I usually create a folder called Resources inside my MVC project. Although if you wish to reference your resources from other projects, you may wish to create them inside a separate project.
I then sub-folder based on my controller names and change the 'Custom Tool' property to 'PublicResXFileCodeGenerator'.
When I use the resource strings in my Views, it looks like:
<title>#Resources.Home.Index.PageTitle</title>
Personally, I prefer to use a folder rather than a project, as this forces me to not generate UI strings in my application layers and forces me to find better ways to solve problems where I might end up generating strings in my business logic that might end up in the UI.
We have resource files in projects where they are most relevant.
We have a component that handles the translation of resources on different levels
( also for Winforms and WPF...)
and we group resource files according to functional importance,
bussiness level messages in a project for the Bussiness layer,
a project for common translations used by our standard code.
A .NET ResourceManager can handle one resource file, so our manager keeps a list of ResourceManagers.
At runtime you just try them all ( or work with logical category names to speed up the lookup)...
I am new to ASP.Net MVC. I have a couple of controllers and models. They all use a set of static functions and constants which I call common code.
In my MVC project I have folders for Controller, models and view etc,
Where is all the common code supposed to be put ?
Is is OK to create a Common folder and create new class for my static functions and same for global constants ?
If you reuse this common code often across solutions, you might want to consider compiling it into its own class library and simply referencing the assembly.
Another thing you'll want to consider is the nature of the common functions. Are they truly just helper functions (like manipulating strings and stuff like that) or do they make more sense mixed into your business layers?
Basic rule is to keep it organized be consistent. There's no right or wrong way to structure your application...only hundreds of thousands of opinions.
Exactly you can create Helper folder when you set your extension methods or another common utility.
But for constants suggest you to create Ressource File
Remarks : All text , warning or info messages, put theses elements in ressource and don't write in code, for gloabalization need(It's my case on project)
We're currently migrating our ASP Intranet to .NET and we started to develop this Intranet in one ASP.NET website. This, however, raised some problems regarding Visual Studio (performance, compile-time, ...).
Because our Intranet basically exists of modules, we want to seperate our project in subprojects in Visual Studio (each module is a subproject).
This raises also some problems because the modules have references to each other.
Module X uses Module Y and vice versa... (circular dependencies).
What's the best way to develop such an Intranet?
I'll will give an example because it's difficult to explain.
We have a module to maintain our employees. Each employee has different documents (a contract, documents created by the employee, ...).
All documents inside our Intranet our maintained by a document module.
The employee-module needs to reference the document-module.
What if in the future I need to reference the employee-module in the document-module?
What's the best way to solve this?
It sounds to me like you have two problems.
First you need to break the business orientated functionality of the system down into cohesive parts; in terms of Object Orientated design there's a few principles which you should be using to guide your thinking:
Common Reuse Principle
Common Closure Principle
The idea is that things which are closely related, to the extent that 'if one needs to be changed, they all are likely to need to be changed'.
Single Responsibility Principle
Don't try to have a component do to much.
I think you also need to look at you dependency structure more closely - as soon as you start getting circular references it's probably a sign that you haven't broken the various "things" apart correctly. Maybe you need to understand the problem domain more? It's a common problem - well, not so much a problem as simply a part of designing complex systems.
Once you get this sorted out it will make the second part much easier: system architecture and design.
Luckily there's already a lot of existing material on plugins, try searching by tag, e.g:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/plugins+.net
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/plugins+architecture
Edit:
Assets is defined in a different module than employees. But the Assets-class defines a property 'AssignedTo' which is of the type 'Employee'. I've been breaking my head how to disconnect these two
There two parts to this, and you might want to look at using both:
Using a Common Layer containing simple data structures that all parts of the system can share.
Using Interfaces.
Common Layer / POCO's
POCO stands for "Plain Old CLR Objects", the idea is that POCO's are a simple data structures that you can use for exchanging information between layers - or in your case between modules that need to remain loosely Coupled. POCO's don't contain any business logic. Treat them like you'd treat the String or DateTime types.
So rather than referencing each other, the Asset and Employee classes reference the POCO's.
The idea is to define these in a common assembly that the rest of your application / modules can reference. The assembly which defines these needs to be devoid of unwanted dependencies - which should be easy enough.
Interfaces
This is pretty much the same, but instead of referring to a concrete object (like a POCO) you refer to an interface. These interfaces would be defined in a similar fashion to the POCO's described above (common assembly, no dependencies).
You'd then use a Factory to go and load up the concrete object at runtime. This is basically Dependency Inversion.
So rather than referencing each other, the Asset and Employee classes reference the interfaces, and concrete implementations are instantiated at runtime.
This article might be of assistance for both of the options above: An Introduction to Dependency Inversion
Edit:
I've got the following method GetAsset( int assetID ); In this method, the property asset.AssignedTo (type IAssignable) is filled in. How can I assign this properly?
This depends on where the logic sits, and how you want to architect things.
If you have a Business Logic (BL) Layer - which is mainly a comprehensive Domain Model (DM) (of which both Asset and Employee were members), then it's likely Assets and Members would know about each other, and when you did a call to populate the Asset you'd probably get the appropriate Employee data as well. In this case the BL / DM is asking for the data - not isolated Asset and Member classes.
In this case your "modules" would be another layer that was built on top of the BL / DM described above.
I variation on this is that inside GetAsset() you only get asset data, and atsome point after that you get the employee data separately. No matter how loosely you couple things there is going to have to be some point at which you define the connection between Asset and Employee, even if it's just in data.
This suggests some sort of Register Pattern, a place where "connections" are defined, and anytime you deal with a type which is 'IAssignable' you know you need to check the register for any possible assignments.
I would look into creating interfaces for your plug-ins that way you will be able to add new modules, and as long as they follow the interface specifications your projects will be able to call them without explicitly knowing anything about them.
We use this to create plug-ins for our application. Each plugin in encapsulated in user control that implements a specific interface, then we add new modules whenever we want, and because they are user controls we can store the path to the control in the database, and use load control to load them, and we use the interface to manipulate them, the page that loads them doesn't need to know anything about what they do.
I have a program consisting of multiple SWF's. An AS2-SWF loads a bunch of AS1-SWFs.
It's a crappy program. I'd like to specify the GUI in MXML and perhaps refactor some code to AS3. However, converting all of the 300+ symbols to AS3 or whatever is undoable.
What are my options in converting to AS3/Flex/MXML? The app is very simple, only also quite large. It consists only of buttons, backgrounds and attention-texts. All the button texts are in XML files.
I want to turn this into pretty code ASAP but also controlled so the code becomes:
easily updateable/maintainable,
readable
learnable (so I can have the updating done by someone that can only script AS3 or even MXML).
Of course doing this is on my own initiative, if it'll take more than a week, I won't be able to find the time.
Regards, Jurgen
This might help:
http://flexman.info/2009/03/29/as3converter-an-ant-task-small-collection-of-as3/
It's mainly for AS2 code, so FLA editing is out of the question. But you should certainly look into JSFL.
There are some pretty good scripts out there already dealing with something like this:
http://bumpslide.com/blog/2009/03/07/jsfl-class-generator/
What this command does is that it
looks through your library and finds
all library items that have a custom
linkage class name. If the class
extends flash.display.MovieClip (or if
the base class is blank), it checks to
see if a classfile exists, and if not,
it creates it for you. When it does
this, the script looks at all the
items on the timeline and adds
relevant properties to your class. If
these clips are instances of other
components, they will be typed as
such, and relevant import statements
will automatically be added to your
class. If your component is set to
extend some other class (for instance,
com.bumpslide.ui.Button), no class
will be generated. Class files will be
written to the correct package
location inside the first custom class
path defined in your publish settings.
Jurgen, I feel for you... it sounds like a lot of work.
What sorts of issues do you have? are all the swfs treatable as different classes? is there much overlap in the logic or does each object have a specific role?
I think having so many different SWFs may possibly lead to scoping problems> which swf talks to which. you may be able to set up something with as3 that uses the existing parts and then try making a facade over the existing code > use the existing logic in the swfs and do the visual part through mxml. other than that, all I can advise is a rebuild. you might find yourself in need of a swf decompiler too if you are missing some of the original fla's
I am VERY new to ASP.NET. I come from a VB6 / ASP (classic) / SQL Server 2000 background. I am reading a lot about Visual Studio 2008 (have installed it and am poking around). I have read about "reflection" and would like someone to explain, as best as you can to an older developer of the technologies I've written above, what exactly Reflection is and why I would use it... I am having trouble getting my head around that. Thanks!
Reflection is how you can explore the internals of different Types, without normally having access (ie. private, protected, etc members).
It's also used to dynamically load DLL's and get access to types and methods defined in them without statically compiling them into your project.
In a nutshell: Reflection is your toolkit for peeking under the hood of a piece of code.
As to why you would use it, it's generally only used in complex situations, or code analysis. The other common use is for loading precompiled plugins into your project.
Reflection lets you programmatically load an assembly, get a list of all the types in an assembly, get a list of all the properties and methods in these types, etc.
As an example:
myobject.GetType().GetProperty("MyProperty").SetValue(myobject, "wicked!", null)
It allows the internals of an object to be reflected to the outside world (code that is using said objects).
A practical use in statically typed languages like C# (and Java) is to allow invocation of methods/members at runtime via a string (eg the name of the method - perhaps you don't know the name of the method you will use at compile time).
In the context of dynamic languages I haven't heard the term as much (as generally you don't worry about the above), other then perhaps to iterate through a list of methods/members etc...
Reflection is .Net's means to manipulate or extract information of an assembly, class or method at run time. For example, you can create a class at runtime, including it's methods. As stated by monoxide, reflection is used to dynamically load assembly as plugins, or in advance cases, it is used to create .Net compiler targeting .Net, like IronPython.
Updated: You may refer to the topic on metaprogramming and its related topics for more details.
When you build any assembly in .NET (ASP.NET, Windows Forms, Command line, class library etc), a number of meta-data "definition tables" are also created within the assembly storing information about methods, fields and types corresponding to the types, fields and methods you wrote in your code.
The classes in System.Reflection namespace in .NET allow you to enumerate and interate over these tables, providing an "object model" for you to query and access items in these tables.
One common use of Reflection is providing extensibility (plug-ins) to your application. For example, Reflection allows you to load an assembly dynamically from a file path, query its types for a specific useful type (such as an Interface your application can call) and then actually invoke a method on this external assembly.
Custom Attributes also go hand in hand with reflection. For example the NUnit unit testing framework allows you to indicate a testing class and test methods by adding [Test] {TestFixture] attributes to your own code.
However then the NUnit test runner must use Reflection to load your assembly, search for all occurrences of methods that have the test attribute and then actually call your test.
This is simplifying it a lot, however it gives you a good practical example of where Reflection is essential.
Reflection certainly is powerful, however be ware that it allows you to completely disregard the fundamental concept of access modifiers (encapsulation) in object oriented programming.
For example you can easily use it to retrieve a list of Private methods in a class and actually call them. For this reason you need to think carefully about how and where you use it to avoid bypassing encapsulation and very tightly coupling (bad) code.
Reflection is the process of inspecting the metadata of an application. In other words,When reading attributes, you’ve already looked at some of the functionality that reflection
offers. Reflection enables an application to collect information about itself and act on this in-
formation. Reflection is slower than normally executing static code. It can, however, give you
a flexibility that static code can’t provide