February's Toolbox Column Now Online

Published 24 January 09 09:01 AM | Scott Mitchell

My Toolbox column in the February 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine is available online. The February issue examines two frameworks for implementing design patterns:

Castle ActiveRecord - the active record pattern is a common design pattern employed by data-driven applications for modeling a database table or view in terms of a class. In a nutshell, classes with both instance and static members are used to model tables, where the static methods operate on the entire table and instance members are used to work with a specific record. The Castle ActiveRecord project is an open-source library for using this pattern in .NET applications.
PostSharp - aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming model designed to help with those scenarios where functionality extends across multiple modules. AOP lets the developer build aspects, which are modules that handle some concern, such as logging or security. The aspect can then declaratively (or programmatically) be applied to other modules in the application with instructions to execute at some action point in the lifetime of the application, such as before a particular method executes, in the face of an unhandled exception, and so forth. PostSharp in a free, open-source library for implementing AOP techniques in the .NET Framework. (Note: Earlier this month the creator of PostSharp, Gael Fraiteur, announced a new commercial license for the product, although there will continue to be an open-source and free community edition.)

There are no Blogs of Note or book reviews in this issue.

Enjoy! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419658.aspx

As always, if you have any suggestions for products, blogs, or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them to toolsmm@microsoft.com.