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James Craig edited this page Mar 5, 2015 · 10 revisions

This repository actually contains two projects currently:

Craig's Utility Library is a lower level utility library. It's a bit more generic and designed for every day development. It can be used in windows apps, web apps, etc. But if you're running a windows app, it will currently bring in system.web. I'm trying to figure out how to break that portion out currently along with how to make it into a portable library. Which also means that if you're trying to run it in a Silverlight app, windows store app, or anything like that it's probably not going to work currently (for instance the file system uses FileInfo currently to get the various file information which doesn't work on certain platforms).

Ironman Framework, on the other hand, was originally called Batman Framework but apparently BatmanJS is a thing and people were getting confused... Like Anthony Vander Hoorn (one of the Glimpse dudes). I mean thanks for the shout out on Twitter back in May 2013, but hopefully the name change will stop this sort of confusion. Also I never check Twitter, haven't posted there in over a year, etc. So probably not the best way to contact me.

I'm getting off topic, anyway Ironman Framework is a work in progress designed to make MVC development simpler. Currently it offers better JS and CSS bundling, a series of ActionFilters, automatically hooks up Craig's Utility Library without you having to do anything, offers better serialization options over the default (for instance SOAP, JSON, JSONP, etc. are all the same function call and the system figures out which item the client was asking for), as well as a task system (basically makes WebActivator simpler to hook into), and an OAM (Object to API Mapper)... I have no idea if that last item has a real name or acronym but that's what I'm going with. I'm planning on extending this quite a bit in the future.

Where Can I Ask Questions?

You can ask here using the issue system or over at Codeplex's discussion forums.

Resources

Function/class level documentation can either be generated from the code or downloaded through NuGet:

Install-Package CraigsUtilityLibrary-Documentation

Documentation for Craig's Utility Library is also available online, here and updated nightly. Ironman is available here.

Contributors

For this release and previous versions, I've had a number of people help various ways. Here are some of the ones that I remember:

  • MBDTeam found a number of issues in 3.4 with regard to the SQL/ORM code. Thanks to him/her/them (not sure really), this version is a lot simpler/better.
  • zerosofadown added a Transverse extension method.
  • MatthewSteeples added a nice Average extension method for TimeSpans.
  • sharethl for finding a bug in the validation extensions and making some suggestions for name changes for extension methods to cut down on confusion on what they were doing.

If you would like to contribute, feel free to make a fork here, make your changes, and do a pull request. Some simple ways to contribute are adding external library plugins, extension methods, unit tests, and documentation. But pretty much anything/everything is appreciated.

Future Work Items

The best way to see the various items I'm working on or would like to work on is through the Trello board. I throw a lot of stuff on there though and some of it may never see the light of day. That said it's where all of my ideas go, even the bad ones.

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