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I’m speaking at Software Architect 2010 in October. I’m going to be delivering two sessions on Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0: the first explains the basic architecture and looks at using workflow as a Visual Scripting environment to empower business users. The second looks at building big systems with workflow concentrating on the WCF integration features.

In addition to that I’ll be delivering two all-day workshops with Andy Clymer: Building Applications the .NET 4.0 Way and Moving to the Parallel Mindset with .NET 4.0. The first of these will take a number of new features of .NET 4.0 and show how they can be combined to create compelling applications. The second will look at the Parallel Framework Extensions (PFx) introduced in .NET 4.0 examining both the rich functionality of the library, how it can be best leveraged avoiding common parallel pitfalls and finally looking at patterns that aid parallelisation of your code

I’ve been working with the Unity IoC container from Microsoft Patterns and Practices recently. Its mostly straightforward as IoC containers go but one thing had me puzzled for a while as its not really documented or blogged as far as I can see; so I decided to blog it so hopefully others looking will stumble across this article

Lets start off with a simple example: I have two interfaces: IService and IRepository that live in the Interfaces class library

1: public interface IService

2: {

3: void DoWork();

4: }

1: public interface IRepository

2: {

3: string GetStuff();

4: }

1: public class MyRepository
: IRepository

2: {

3: public string GetStuff()

4: {

5: return "TADA!!";

6: }

7: }

and MyService

1: public class MyService
: IService

2: {

3: private IRepository
repository;

4: 

5: public MyService(IRepository
repository)

6: {

7: this.repository
= repository;

8: }

9: public void DoWork()

10: {

11: Console.WriteLine(repository.GetStuff());

12: }

13: }

Notice that MyService needs an IRepository to do its work. Now the idea here is I’m going to wire this together via dependency injection and the Unity IoC container. So I have my application

1: class Program

2: {

3: static void Main(string[]
args)

4: {

5: UnityContainer
container = new UnityContainer();

6: UnityConfigurationSection
section = (UnityConfigurationSection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("unity");

7: section.Configure(container);

8: 

9: IService
svc = container.Resolve<IService>();

10: 

11: svc.DoWork();

12: }

13: }

Notice as we’re using IoC that there are no hard coded dependencies – everything is wired up via the container. However, there must be some information about how the interfaces map to concrete types and this is in the config file

1: <configuration>

2: <configSections>

3: <section name="unity" type="Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.UnityConfigurationSection,Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration"/>

4: </configSections>

5: 

6: <unity>

7: <typeAliases>

8: <!--
Lifetime Managers -->

9: <typeAlias alias="singleton" type="Microsoft.Practices.Unity.ContainerControlledLifetimeManager"/>

10: 

11: <!--
Interfaces -->

12: <typeAlias alias="IService" type="Interfaces.IService,Interfaces"/>

13: <typeAlias alias="IRepository" type="Interfaces.IRepository,Interfaces"/>

14: 

15: <!--
Implementations -->

16: <typeAlias alias="service" type="Services.MyService,
Services"/>

17: <typeAlias alias="repository" type="Services.MyRepository,
Services"/>

18: 

19: </typeAliases>

20: <containers>

21: <container>

22: <types>

23: <type type="IService" mapTo="service">

24: <lifetime type="singleton"/>

25: </type>

26: <type type="IRepository" mapTo="repository">

27: <lifetime type="singleton"/>

28: </type>

29: </types>

30: </container>

31: </containers>

32: </unity>

33: </configuration>

Now all of this works fine and is simple Unity stuff. We use constructor injection to get the repository implementation into the service constructor. However, I’ve decided the service needs a timeout that I will generally configure in the config file. However to make Unit Testing simple I’ll add another constructor to MyService so I can pass a specific timeout

1: public class MyService
: IService

2: {

3: private IRepository
repository;

4: TimeSpan
timeout;

5: 

6: public MyService(IRepository
repository, TimeSpan timeout)

7: {

8: this.timeout
= timeout;

9: }

10:

11: public MyService(IRepository
repository)

12: {

13: this.repository
= repository;

14: timeout
= GetTimeoutFromConfig();

15: }

16: 

17: private TimeSpan
GetTimeoutFromConfig()

18: {

19: return default(TimeSpan);

20: }

21: 

22: public void DoWork()

23: {

24: Console.WriteLine(repository.GetStuff());

25: }

26: }

Now I try to run the application and I get a pretty ugly error

Unhandled Exception: Microsoft.Practices.Unity.ResolutionFailedException: Resolution of the dependency failed,
type = "Interfaces.IService", name = "(none)".
Exception occurred while: while resolving.
Exception is: InvalidOperationException - The type Int32 cannot be constructed.
You must configure the container to supply this value. >

Now that’s weird – I have no types that take an Int32! This is caused by Unity’s default behavior where it will try to resolve on the constructor with the most parameters (on the basis that this one will have the most dependencies that can be injected). It tried to resolve the TimeSpan and so looks at the TimeSpan and tries to resolve its constructor which can take an Int32. I actually want to tell it to use a different constructor and I can do this in two ways: annotate the constructor I want to use with the [InjectionConstructor] attribute

1: [InjectionConstructor]

2: public MyService(IRepository
repository)

3: {

4: this.repository
= repository;

5: timeout
= GetTimeoutFromConfig();

6: }

But personally I don’t like this. It forces the services assembly to take a dependency on Unity and the service has knowledge about how its being constructed. What I really want to do is specify this in config. This isn’t very well documented from what I can see but what you do it specify the constructor and how to resolve the parameters against the type mapping in the config – i.e.

1: <type type="IService" mapTo="service">

2: <lifetime type="singleton"/>

3: <constructor>

4: <param name="repository">

5: <dependency/>

6: </param>

7: </constructor>

8: </type>

Announced today at TechEd – Windows AppFabric is now available

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/endpoint/archive/2010/06/07/windows-server-appfabric-now-generally-available.aspx

The Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools have just been released. There’s all sorts of goodness in here: new flexible tab handling in the VS shell (vertical tab groups, tabs grouped by project, dropping of rarely used tabs, etc); a new searchable Add Reference dialog; new editor enhancements to make navigation easier and much more

I’ve been playing with it for the last couple of hours and its very neat. Of course I don’t use Resharper or CodeRush (I use too many machines I don’t control to become dependent on them) so some of these features may be available in those tools. But for me the power tools are a welcome addition to the IDE

Myself and other Rock Solid Knowledge guys have had various talks accepted for Software Architecture conference this October in London.

Rich and myself will be spending a day talking about how to use various bits of .NET 4 technology to build a MVC, WF and  Entity Framework based application.  The aim to build the app live, so you really get to see how this tech actually ticks.

Through out the week I’ll be doing stuff on Patterns, and Parallel programming.

Finishing the week with another day with Rich talking about parallel programming, all using the latest bits of .NET 4.

Hopefully see you there…