Eric Polerecky

Help! Looking for a CSS DSL!

Update: Today Less CSS for .NET, or just .Less,  was released. Its a port of the ruby LESS library and exactly what I was/am looking for. I updated my question on SO already.

—– old post ——

I posted this on stackoverflow.com already…..

I’ve been working on a really large project for almost 2 years and the client requirements keep changing. These changes, of course, effect everything and I would like to find a way to work with the CSS in a more dynamic fashion.

I assume I could get one of the ruby or python CSS DSLs running under ironRuby/Python but this client is very very particular about what software/frameworks are installed.

I have not found a CSS DSL where the base programming language is vb or c#.

reference: http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/ and http://nubyonrails.com/articles/dynamic-css

I guess another question is has anyone got either of these frameworks working under IronPython or IronRuby?

Tags: c#, CSS, dsl, ironpython, ironruby, vb.net

AutoDeploy Rework

Tonight I reworked in workflow, persistence, mapping, and entities in AutoDeploy. The fire draft consisted of a single entity type with long descriptive janky attributes. The new core goes something like this

Deployment has a list of tasks. Tasks can be have a task type.

Example 1 Creating a new deployment:

   1:  var dep = new Deployment()

   2:  .AddTask(

   3:     new FluentTask()

   4:       .Source("")

   5:       .Destination("")

   6:       .Type(Task.TaskType.Subversion)

   7:       .Save())

   8:  .AddTask(

   9:    new FluentTask()

  10:       .Source("")

  11:       .Destination("")

  12:       .Type(Task.TaskType.AspnetBuild)

  13:       .Save()

  14:  );

Tags: autodeploy, c#

Loading DLLs at runtime

Use DllImport from using System.Runtime.InteropServices

Tools I want to use more

As a follow up to my tools post here is a list of the tools I’d like to spend more time with. The % next to the title is an estimation as the likelihood I’ll do any serious work with the tool/software/etc.

ReSharper – 20%

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Simply put, ReSharper is a must-have productivity tool for .NET developers. It fully integrates with Visual Studio to intelligently and powerfully extend the functionality that is native to Visual Studio. ReSharper provides solution-wide error highlighting on the fly, instant solutions for found errors, over 30 advanced code refactorings, superior unit testing tools, handy navigation and search features, single-click code formatting and cleanup, automatic code generation and templates, and a lot more productivity features for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, XML, and XAML.

NDepend – 10%

http://www.ndepend.com/

NDepend is a tool that simplifies managing a complex .NET code base. Architects and developers can analyze code structure, specify design rules, plan massive refactoring, do effective code reviews and master evolution by comparing different versions of the code.

C# – 70%

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/default.aspx

NHibernate – 80%

https://www.hibernate.org/343.html

NHibernate is a port of Hibernate Core for Java to the .NET Framework. It handles persisting plain .NET objects to and from an underlying relational database. Given an XML description of your entities and relationships, NHibernate automatically generates SQL for loading and storing the objects. Optionally, you can describe your mapping metadata with attributes in your source code.

NUnit – 20%

http://www.nunit.org/index.php

NUnit is a unit-testing framework for all .Net languages. Initially ported from JUnit, the current production release, version 2.4, is the fifth major release of this xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities. NUnit brings xUnit to all .NET languages.

MEF – 60%

http://www.codeplex.com/MEF

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can make the shift from being statically compiled to dynamically composed. If you are building extensible applications, extensible frameworks and application extensions, then MEF is for you.

DDD – 100%

Tags: c#, MEF, ndpend, nhibernate, nunit, resharper