The Castle Project has finally released its version 1.0 RC3 today. It has been a long time coming but not for lack of work. I am on the development discussion list and there is a lot of activity, much work has gone into this release.
Details on the release from the blog of the Castle Project founder:
ActiveRecord
- Multiple db support without the need to extend ARBase
- Refactored validation support to use the new Castle Validation
- InPlaceConfigurationSource.Build() which is handy!
- Added HqlNamedQuery
- Lots of bug fixes
DynamicProxy
The RC3 is the first to include DynamicProxy 2 which has support for generics and is much much faster than version 1
MicroKernel/Windsor
- Support for generic collections
- Changed to use DynamicProxy 2
- Added some sugar to IKernel and IWindsorContainer add/resolve methods
- Child container support was improved, but still need some review – you?ve been warned
- Added a simplistic eval support, you can do <?eval $BaseDirectory ?> on your config
- Both DefaultKernel and WindsorContainer now implement IServiceProvider
MonoRail
- Added Cache support (see the new Cache attribute)
- Added IsPost/IsGet/IsPut/IsHead to Controller
- Added Auto Form Validation
- FormHelper is nearly perfection, still missing support for selects with multiple enabled
- Support to register several view engines at once (bye composite view engine) – this is not as good as I?d like it to be. There?s no co-op among them..
- Added handful of view components
- Added support to test controllers, viewcomponents, wizard steps without the need to bring the ASP.Net to the table
- Added JS generation support, and UpdatePage/UpdatePageTag view components
- Format support on set operations, for example $Form.Select(?price?, [1..100], ?%{textformat=?C’}?) is going to render the select elements with currency format
- Added PaginationHelper.CreateCustomPage which is the most optimized way to deal with pagination
- Added DiggStylePagination ViewComponent, based on Alex Henderson work
- Added the following members to SmartDispatcherController (validation related) ValidationSummaryPerInstance : IDictionary, GetErrorSummary(object instance) : ErrorSummary, HasValidationError(object instance) : bool
- Added ViewComponentDetails attribute (just like ControllerDetails)
- Added ViewComponentParam attribute which tells MonoRail to bind the arguments as properties on your view component – reducing repetitive code rules
- Added UrlHelper/UrlBuilder concept
Aspect#
Is out?
Components
- Added Castle.Validator
- Added Castle.DictionaryAdapter – still puzzled by this one
- Improved Binder (another re-write of its implementation)
Other
- Created the using.castleproject.org
- Created the api.castleproject.org
- Initial integration between the Castle.Services.Transaction with MS? System.Transactions
- Created Castle.Core
Well, basically that was it. We?ve been busy.
For those who don’t know what the Castle Project is, it is a set of libraries for implementing a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework in .NET. The key piece for this is MonoRail with ActiveRecord handling the models. Most of the time we hear about Ruby on Rails and its MVC implementation but Castle does this on .NET.
I did an interview with Hamilton Verissimo, founder of the Castle Project, for InfoQ last week. Hamilton is a sharp guy and has lead the core team to produce a great open-source project. I am working on a project using MonoRail and it is very nice to produce a web application this way.