Introducing Formo – Dynamic Configuration

In the off-chance that I have to maintain your code in the future, I feel I should gamble and share this project with you. I created it, I use it, and I like it.

Something bothers me about seeing strings inside square brackets. It has always felt dirty and error-prone. Since C# is now being sucked into the universe of dynamic, I thought that was a good opportunity to use dynamic to avoid these strings. By no means does Formo fix all these issues, but it helps in a couple ways and makes me feel better when I need to reference configuration.

Given a configuration file:

<appSettings>
    <add key="RetryAttempts" value="5" />
    <add key="ApplicationBuildDate" value="11/4/1999 6:23 AM" />
</appSettings>

Formo can be used to:

dynamic config = new Configuration();

// returns 5 as a string (see app.config file)
var retryAttempts1 = config.RetryAttempts;

// returns 5 if found in config, else 10
var retryAttempts2 = config.RetryAttempts(10);

// returns 5 if it exists in config, else userInput if not null, else 10
var retryAttempts3 = config.RetryAttempts(userInput, 10);

As well as:

dynamic config = new Configuration();

// returns value as Strongly-Typed DateTime (config value: 11/4/1999 6:23AM)
var appBuildDate = config.ApplicationBuildDate<DateTime>();

Formo is lightweight, free to use, and has no dependencies. Use it now with NuGet:

Install-Package Formo

This covers the majority of use-cases I’ve come across. If you have improvements to Formo, or just ideas in general, please submit them as issues on the GitHub issues page.

Have an idea for a logo?! I’d love a pull request!

EDIT: Great logo from Tim G. Thomas: http://dribbble.com/shots/953675-Formo

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