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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I noticed that it uses some TimeSpans and I’ve been meaning to incorporate my pet project TempusReader into something of use. I combined the two and they worked just great together! I set up a tiny example like this, just to get going with them:

class Program
{
    private static int attempts = 0;

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Retry.On<Exception>().For("2.5 seconds".InTime()).With(context =>
        {
            Program.SendRequest();
        });
    }

    public static string SendRequest()
    {
        attempts++;
        Console.WriteLine("attempt #{0}", attempts);
        Thread.Sleep(456);
        throw new Exception("Oh snap!");
    }
}

Obviously the example isn’t real world, but you get the point. The code is actually all Palmer, the only part that is TempusReader is the .InTime() extension method. Alternatively, I could have used other methods to specify the TimeSpan:

new Time("1 hr, 5 mins and 8 seconds")
"50 milliseconds".InTime()

This takes a string and converts it to a TempusReader.Time object, which can be implicitly cast to a TimeSpan for use in the .For() method.

Both these projects are on NuGet (the current version of Palmer was giving me issues):

Install-Package Palmer -Version 0.1.4723.40614

Install-Package TempusReader

Visit the GitHub pages for both Palmer and TempusReader to learn more about how to use them!

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Read it first, it’s not long…

Done? Now my take on this:

Stop being lazy! I have been in places where the process has become one where you take the requirements from somebody else, do your best to deliver, and then throw it over the fence for QA, testing, or whoever. In my experience, this makes people less accountable for what gets pushed to production.

Own your work. Some of the best quality I have ever provided was in an environment where I was the one in charge of understanding problem, coming up with the best appropriate solution, and watching it all the way to production and eventually, the user.

The key ingredients to this recipe for success:

1. Quality tests – sometimes TDD, sometimes test first, and sometimes test after.
2. Refactor to your heart’s content – if you’re afraid to change code because it might break something, you have problems. Follow SOLID principles as best as you responsibly can and you’ll have fewer problems here.
3. Continuous integration – make sure everything is working all the time. It helps in the long run (and by long run, I mean tomorrow). Oh, and by CI, I mean CI done right.
4. Collective code ownership – everybody owns this feature; it’s not just my own. a.k.a. No silos. Also, your victories must be shared, but your failures are also not your own.
5. Deploy early and often – The best time to deploy a feature is the moment it’s declared “Done” (or Done, done, done). The longer the span between this time and delivery, the more likely it is to fail.

Your mileage may vary, but these have worked for me and I suggest you try them if you’re having trouble moving quality from concept to cash.

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Below is the code we’ve seen before, only slightly modified because we’re using Underscore’s extend function now.

var start = {
    id: 123,
    count: 41,
    desc: 'this is information',
    title: 'Base Object',
    tag: 'uncategorized',
    values: [1,1,2,3,5,8,13]
};
var more = {
    name: 'Los Techies',
    tag: 'javascript'
};
var extra = {
    count: 42,
    title: null,
    desc: undefined,
    values: [1,3,6,10]
};

var extended = _.extend(start, more, extra);
console.log(JSON.stringify(extended));

And the output:

{
    "id": 123,
    "count": 42,
    "title": null,
    "tag": "javascript",
    "values": [1,3,6,10],
    "name": "Los Techies"
}

This is the exact same output as our Ext JS example. Since there’s nothing new, I can’t go on about too many differences, but I can, however, bring up another related function in Underscore, defaults.

The defaults method is interesting in that it works very similarly, but turns our familiar objects into something new that the others haven’t yet done.

var start = {
    id: 123,
    count: 41,
    desc: 'this is information',
    title: 'Base Object',
    tag: 'uncategorized',
    values: [1,1,2,3,5,8,13]
};
var more = {
    name: 'Los Techies',
    tag: 'javascript'
};
var extra = {
    count: 42,
    title: null,
    desc: undefined,
    values: [1,3,6,10]
};

var extended = _.defaults(start, more, extra);
console.log(JSON.stringify(extended));

And the output:

{
    "id": 123,
    "count": 41,
    "desc": "this is information",
    "title": "Base Object",
    "tag": "uncategorized",
    "values": [1,1,2,3,5,8,13],
    "name": "Los Techies"
}

This one fills in missing properties and ignores any match applied after. Our start object was able to keep the id as 123, the count at 41 and so on. The second argument, more set the name property because it didn’t exit in start and finally the properties on extra already existed, so it had no effect on the final output.

The extend and defaults functions work almost opposite from each other, but are great to have side-by-side when you need them.

For more information: extend and defaults.

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Let’s discuss mixin, this is more like what we previously saw with previous libraries’ methods:

var start = {
    id: 123,
    count: 41,
    desc: 'this is information',
    title: 'Base Object',
    tag: 'uncategorized',
    values: [1,1,2,3,5,8,13]
};
var more = {
    name: 'Los Techies',
    tag: 'javascript'
};
var extra = {
    count: 42,
    title: null,
    desc: undefined,
    values: [1,3,6,10],
    dojo: true
};

var extended = dojo.mixin(extra, more, start);
console.log(JSON.stringify(extended));�

And the output:

{
    "count": 41,
    "title": "Base Object",
    "desc": "this is information",
    "values": [1,1,2,3,5,8,13],
    "dojo": true,
    "name": "Los Techies",
    "tag": "uncategorized",
    "id": 123
}

If you remember from the previous posts, we extended our start, more, and extra objects from left to right. Using a Dojo mixin, our arguments are passed to the function in the reverse order; this is by design. Everything in our output of the extended object remains as it was in our start object. The only difference is that more added the name property and extra added the dojo property. This works just like you’d expect a mixin function to work and just like our previous extend and apply from jQuery and Ext JS.

The dojo.extend function works on an object’s prototype and doesn’t follow the same patterns of this series of blog posts. For that reason, I’m going to skip it and let you do your own homework if you’re interested. ;)

For more information: dojo.mixin (Yes I know this way to reference dojo is deprecated, but the old version worked better in my tiny example.)

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var start = {
    id: 123,
    count: 41,
    desc: 'this is information',
    title: 'Base Object',
    tag: 'uncategorized',
    values: [1,1,2,3,5,8,13]
};
var more = {
    name: 'Los Techies',
    tag: 'javascript'
};
var extra = {
    count: 42,
    title: null,
    desc: undefined,
    values: [1,3,6,10]
};

var extended = Ext.apply(start, more, extra);
console.log(JSON.stringify(extended));

And the output:

{
    "id": 123,
    "count": 42,
    "title": null,
    "tag": "javascript",
    "values": [1,3,6,10],
    "name": "Los Techies"
}

You’re welcome to click back or open a new tab to compare this to the previous post, but this is different from the jQuery example. The single difference is that the desc property doesn’t exist in our extended object. Ext JS has decided that a property with a null value will overwrite a previous value (see title), but an undefined value will in effect erase the property.

For more information: Function-method-apply

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For instance:

Output:

Again, remember that the last one in wins. It is also worth noting that anything extended with an explicit `undefined` will keep its original value. If you want to override a value with a “falsy” value, use `null`, `false` or anything else that makes sense in your case.

Arrays are always overwritten by the last object passed in.  The objects inside them are at mercy of their parents. It doesn’t matter if they are values or objects, the last object passed in, gets the last call.

For more information: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.extend/

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It didn’t take long before I realized that object extension is very powerful in dynamic languages and JavaScript pretty damn good at this. Here are my notes on extending objects in JavaScript with various frameworks:

1. Extending Objects in jQuery
2. Extending Objects in Ext JS
3. Extending Objects in Dojo
4. Extending Objects in Underscore

I hope this series of posts is helpful to you too. If not, leave me some feedback and I can modify it to better, thanks!

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1. To be able to parse some plain English and make DateTime and Timespans objects.
2. To try out Parsley (because I have a not-so-secret urge to write a language)

After a quick spike a while back I had something I named TempusReader, working code which I posted on Github. I don’t think something like Parsley was absolutely necessary for me to do what I wanted, but most importantly, I was able to acheive both of my goals.

While working on this code, I wanted to provide documentation on how to use it. In my experience, looking at tests is one good way to understand how something works. The odds of somebody looking in a test file are slim, but looking at the readme file are almost necessary when visiting a page on github.

I could just output some text to my readme files directly from my tests, right? This was actually a fun little task and potentially quite helpful. I’d like to explore this area more in the future, maybe a simple file to pull from Nuget, configure, then be off to the races. It’s pretty raw as it sits, but I thought I’d share the idea.

Here is the file that’s doing the work:

https://github.com/ChrisMissal/TempusReader/blob/master/src/Tests/DocumentationBuilder.cs

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You can find more information here: Configuring a Custom Domain Name for a Windows Azure Web Site

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