The last time I talked about iSynaptic.Commons was in July of 2008.  Basically I said that I was putting the release on hold.  Well, I’ve finally released it under the MS-PL license.

My reason for releasing it is by no means because it is complete.  It is no where near there.  I’ve got a lot of work yet to do on it, and I’ve got many things that I want to completely change or remove.  So my recommendation is that you don’t go use the code in a project you intend for it to keep stable, because it is going to be a moving target for now (i.e. there will be breaking changes).  Especially the Text.Parsing namespace and the Xml namespace.  Those were very naive and simplistic, and I will be replacing.

However, my primary reason for releasing it is to get feedback.  I don’t expect much at first, but I want it to be something I can talk about in this blog, and solicit direct feedback about specific parts of the framework.

Finally, I talked about iSynaptic.SolutionBuild and iSynaptic.Modeling in my previous iSynaptic.Commons post.  SolutionBuild exists and is in partially working order.  I will, at some point, be working on moving this into a public repository.  I may even change SolutionBuild to be based on PowerShell, and possibly psake.  As for the Modeling project, I’ve re-envisioned it under a different project I’m calling iSynaptic.Core.   Currently Core doesn’t exists (other than the repository being stubbed out), but what I wanted to accomplish with the Modeling project will be wrapped into the Core project.  Core will depend on Commons (Commons being a lower-level framework).  Likely, some of what is in Commons will be pushed into Core – I want to keep Commons lightweight, but useful.  Besides rolling Modeling into Core, details on what Core will be is something for a future post.  I don’t necessarily want to talk about it, until I have something to show.

Initially, my activity on all of these initiatives will be light.  I have numerous projects that are work related that I need to complete, and other non-development personal obligations as well.  This is just me taking the first step…

Back in April I mentioned that I was close to releasing my iSynaptic Commons framework - I've changed my mind on how soon I'm going to release it.  I've noticed a trend in short-changing my personal projects from certain quality practices that I am very strict about in my professional projects - practices such as unit tests with high code coverage, using a build server, well factored build scripts that compile, package, and publish builds, an active versioning policy,  code generation support (more on this later), etcetera.

The iSynaptic Commons framework represents my first public open source project envisioned and implemented by me.  As a result, I've become quite conscious of the missing quality practices mentioned above.  This in part of the reason why I chose to upgrade some software I've been using - I'm going to try to get strict about following all the best known practices with all of my iSynaptic projects, starting with the Commons framework.  I intend to get a build server up and running, and implementing all of these practices.

Towards that end, I want to communicate the inception of two other frameworks (extensions to the Commons framework):

• iSynaptic.SolutionBuild - This will be a suite of reusable MSBuild scripts and tasks, aimed towards having a componentized build system where you can pick and choose build functionality

• iSynaptic.Modeling - A set of class models, a XAML-like parser, and code generation templates for common infrastructure layers (e.g. db schema/data access, domain modeling, etcetera

The Commons framework will be dependent on the SolutionBuild framework.  This will not unduly postpone the Commons framework, but should present a higher quality release.

Thanks for your patience, and hopefully I can get a first release out soon...