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Rhino.Commons

Rhino Commons is a set of classes that I found to be useful in more than one project. It makes use of NHibernate, Castle, and various other tidbits that I have gathered in my travels. Rhino Commons is a library to help me do advanced stuff easier, and as such, it is advanced in itself. It is not meant to present a simpler layer, mind you.

What it does?

• Working with threads

  • Rhino Thread Pool which allows to:
    • Cancel pending work or abort executing threads safely - WorkItem.Cancelled = true, RhinoThreadPool.Cancel(), RhinoThreadPool.CancelAll()
    • Wait for work in the thread pool to be completed - RhinoThreadPool.WaitForAllThreadsToFinish()
    • Events for starting and finishing work items - RhinoThreadPool.WorkStarted, RhinoThreadPool.WorkFinished
  • Thread Safe Queue - Generic version of a class that Udi Dahan published long ago.
  • Countdown Latch - useful for producer / consumer scenarios, where the producer wants to wait for the consumer threads to finish.

• Working with NHibernate and Active Record:

  • Generic Respository interface
  • Expressions that combine with NHibernate Query Generator to make really natural queries
  • Unit Of Work implementation using NHibernate and Active Record (see Http Modules for implementation details)
  • PluralizingNamingStrategy - Makes it easier to get reasonable table names from the default NHibernate database generation script.
  • A quick way to delete a lot of records with NHibernate

• With:

  • With.Transaction
  • With.Caching
  • With.PerformanceCounter

• Http Modules:

  • Page Performance Module - Logs the time that it tooks to process a page
  • Unit Of Work Module - Correctly handle Unit Of Work in web scenarios
  • Ensure Max Number Of Queries Per Request Module - ensures that the number of queries per request is low.

• Inversion of Control:

  • IoC Helper class that makes it easier get the container to get the services.
  • Thin wrapper around Windsor that mainly gives nicer syntax
  • Binsor - a boo configuration DSL
  • Some work on extending it to support more complex configurations

• Local Data"

  • An implementation of a data store that is local to your current logical work (in web and non-web scenarios).

• Logging - Mainly log4net helpers:

  • Log the current request url
  • Log the current request id
  • Appender implementation to Log4net that writes to a local embedded database, and ensure that file size doesn't get out of hand.

• Testing:

  • Using Embedded Database for testing NHibernate / Active Record
  • Using In Memory Database for testing NHibernate / Active Record

• Validation - Common validation methods

• Static Reflection

  • Reflection helper that works statically and safely.

• Functional programming:

  • Generic definitions to all the delegates that you are going to need
  • Simple Collection util class to handle common tasks for collections, First(), SelectAll()

• Date and Time handling

  • Date Range implementation, including a host of useful methods
  • Date util methods

• Handling Resources:

  • A nice way to implement IDisposable pattern using anonymous delegates

• Property Indexer:

  • C# doesn't allow indexed property, but it is pretty easy to overcome that issue.

• Stuff that should have been in the framework:

  • SqlCommandSet that is public and can be used by people other than the ADO.Net team
  • EventArgs - not sure what the issue there was...

• MsBuild Tasks:

  • Active Record - Create Database: Takes an Active Record assembly and a connection string, and generates the database objects required to make it work.
  • Boo task - allows to run boo code as part of the build.
  • SQL Batch Execute - Run a set of SQL Scripts.

• Xml:

  • Easily read/write values from xml files by XPath, adapted from the MsBuild Community tasks, and mostly used to update config files in tests