Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I’ve been comparing Spring.Net and Castle tonight to try and form an opinion about which one is better suited to use at work. I’ve used Castle MonoRail and ActiveRecord in the past and I’ve recently figured out dependency injection by using Castle Windsor, so I know what Castle offers.

After scouring the Spring.Net site I don’t see much difference in terms of functionality from either project as far my interests lie.

• They both have an IoC container
• They both have web frameworks (granted the frameworks are different, but they’re both better than WebForms)
• They both have some sort of ORM capabilities

Spring.Net seems to use xml configuration a lot more than Castle and it also seems to have a ton more “stuff” in it, just based on sheer size of the documentation page. I’m not sure if this means that Spring.Net is a heavyweight framework or not. I definitely like Castle better when it comes to configuration (or lack thereof) and the availability of a programmatic API that can be used instead of xml, but that doesn’t mean that either framework has any functional difference, just a different way of getting there.

Can anyone tell me if theres something that I can do in either framework that can’t be functionally reproduced in the other? I’m mostly concerned with the Ioc, ORM, and web frameworks that each of these offer.

I’ve been using SlickRun for over a year now. It took some getting used to but now I can’t live without it.

I frequently have to use Remote Desktop at work to access our servers, especially in our dev environment, so I created a SlickRun keyword, ‘remote’ that opened up Remote Desktop.

This was great until I realized that I only really accessed a handful of servers, so I figured I could make life even easier by adding a keyword for each server into SlickRun and then pass the server name into Remote Desktop so it would just connect automatically. I’ve been using this method for about two weeks now, and its awesome.

Heres an example:

I’ve been trying to use the lastest FxCop release with CruiseControl.Net but I couldn’t get the output to work on the CCNET page with the FxCopReport.xsl file that comes with FxCop 1.36 Beta 2. The xsl file seems to get nearly all of the build report and writes it to the screen, which makes it unusable.

I tried the xsl file that comes with CCNET and it got a little better. The first assembly would show up in the list, but all the rules kept getting indented way too far, and none of the other assemblies showed up.

The CCNET xsl seemed to be closer to being correct so I decided to use that as a starting point and began mucking with the xsl to see if I could get the transform to work correctly.

The fix turned out to be as easy as commenting out the section titled “Rule Details”. That was hiding my other assemblies as well as messing up the indentation.

You can download the xsl file that I’m using if you’re having the same issue: FxCopReport.xsl.zip

UPDATE: Turns out the change I made was dumb and removed all the good details about the rules, I did a little more work and got that back in there correctly.

I kegged my latest beer a couple weeks ago but forgot to post about it. I went to Midwest Supplies and picked up two kits, Honey Porter and Java Stout.

The Honey Porter contains 2 lbs of honey, similar to the Honey Steam I made last time. I was hoping that the extra sugar that the honey added would make the beer more alcoholic, but the final gravity was still 1.020 (the closer to 1.0 it gets the better, as far as alcohol content). Since it was at 1.020 that means that there was still sugar left that the yeast didn’t consume, so the beer is sweeter. It still tastes really good, its deceptively dark as you pour it and it has a thick head.

• Beer: Honey Porter from Midwest Supplies
• Brewed on 9/30 hydrometer reading 1.051
• 10/7 transferred from plastic to glass fermenter
• 10/22 transferred to keg, hydrometer reading 1.020
• 10/25 hooked up co2 tank, up to 30 psi
• 10/26 tried first beer with Rett. A little under carbonated since it had only been one day, but drinkable for sure.

I’m going to try and brew the Java Stout this week so I can force myself to get the second keg setup in the fridge downstairs. This one should be interesting as its got actual coffee beans in the brewing process.