For all those who made it out the the Lansing DODN, Thank you for attending my session on Dependency Injection with Spring.NET. I hope I was able to set some folks on the path to IoC enlightenment, or at least break any barriers in your way to getting started. I also got to attend some other great sessions by Len Smith, Jay Wren, and Michael Eaton on NHibernate, Inversion of Control, and Active Record, respectively.

There were some good questions asked during the discussion so I've posted the question and answerers below. Please forgive me if they are not verbatim.

Questions Answered

Q - Do you have to configure every member of an object in the container?

A - No. Spring.NET will use a mechanism called Autowiring to infer the object instantiation and configuration. Autowire is set to 'No' by default and you are encouraged not to change this for large applications, since specifying your collaborators explicitly gives you a feeling for what you're actually doing (always a bonus) and is a great way of somewhat documenting the structure of your system. Setting Autowire to 'byType'  will resolve collaborators by type instead of by name.

See 5.3.5 Autowiring collaborators

Q - Does Spring.NET configure objects as singletons by default?

A - Yes. But turning this off is as easy as adding singleton="false" to the object definition in the configuration file.

See 5.4 Object Scopes

Q - So which is better, Castle Windsor or Spring.NET?

A - It depends what you're doing. You might find that you use Windsor for one thing and Spring.NET for a another. While both frameworks have some overlaps in functionality, there are also some stark differences that give each one it's place in the world. Why not try both? They're free to download, and if you follow good OO practices, then you shouldn't be tightly coupled to either framework.

Materials

I've also posted the slides, demo, and a video of the presentation for those who are interested.

1. Slides

2. Demo

3. Video

Lansing Day of Dot Net from Ryan Montgomery on Vimeo.

Thank you Matt for taking the video!

When developing our organizations Web Applications, most of us typically use Mozilla’s web browser; Firefox. Without going too in depth on why Firefox is or is not the best browser available, I believe its fair to say that Firefox has a wealth of Web Development tools that make developing applications quicker and easier to use. One could argue that IE 7 does have an IE Developer Toolbar that serves many of the same purposes, however, some features such as inline CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) editing are nonexistent in IE’s toolbar. As you may already know, Firefox and IE don’t always display content in the same fashion. Some CSS properties of a web page display differently across different browsers which may cause larger layout issues in the end. Even though I enjoy browsing and debugging in FF, the overwhelming majority of our visitors still use IE 7 or IE 6. This meant that those little browser differences needed to be resolved and I needed a better Developer tool.

A few weeks back I decided not to settle for the old “Save and See” method of making small tweaks to CSS to perfect a page in IE. The hunt was on. I needed to find an inline CSS editing tool that would work well with Internet Explorer. I came across a few small projects, but most were designed for IE 6.0 or earlier and didn’t play well with IE 7.

Finally, after several Google searches and forum perusing, I came upon DebugBar. This is a wonderful little addition to IE because it offers inline CSS editing and more. A feature packed DOM explorer, quick HTML validation, JavaScript Analyzer and Error Notifications, Color picker, the ability to send screen shots to email, and many more simple little features that make developing in IE easy again. One of my favorite little feature's is the ‘Layout’ feature which lets you visualize the margin, border, and padding effects on any selected element.  The Debugbar also features a handy little cross-hair for finding elements quick. This little tool is great for those times that your project has to look good in IE. It’s also a great solution for those of you that have ever experienced the traditional Dev Toolbar’s Stupid Ruler.

I had the opportunity to attend the Rapidparts Softball team's double-header this evening.  While the scoreboard unfortunately suggested that we weren't the winning team in either game tonight, we were definitely winners in my book.  The teamwork and dedication presented by our employees was phenomenal.  The fun, competitive spirit displayed at work was proudly carried out onto the field. 

Notice that the rest of the Rapidparts family was there in spirit captured by all the orbs in the photo! 

Great job Team Rapidparts and we look forward to a true win next week! 

So the day is finally here. Firefox version 3 is about to be launched and they are asking for as many people as possible to download it. They say they want to set a record. I say it's a marketing ploy, but what the heck, they got me to want to download it. As a matter of fact their marketing campaign was so effective, I emailed my colleagues and friends, and now I'm blogging about it. I don't even feel strange doing so, I mean c'mon, who doesn't want to set a world record? So kudos to the Firefox team for making something I want to use and getting me to use it.

Being new to blogging, I may be a little late to the game as far as blogging tools go.  However, a colleague of mine introduced me to Windows Live Writer and I have to say that I'm impressed.

Prior to Live Writer I was using the web-based editor in our blogging site.  It worked okay but still had all the common issues associated with web-based editors.  They WYSIWYG capabilities were limited; it didn't offer auto-save so occasionally it was possible to lose your post before it posted; it relied on an IESpell plugin for any spell checking (which meant that it didn't spell check in any browser except IE); and it didn't handle embedded objects like photos, maps, etc. very well.

Live Writer does a fantastic job of making blogging easy.  It works with nearly any blog provider and has built in spell checking; the ability to insert embedded objects easily; downloads your blog's styles and provides a "preview" and "edit" mode using those; and has a ton of other helpful plugins to make everything from entering code snippets to screen captures easier.

Overall it's a really solid product with a lot of great features that I would recommend to any blogger.