Dynamic proxies using Castle

The sample code can be downloaded here

This week I found myself with some time on my hands, so I knocked up a simple object pool. It’s fairly standard stuff… you call Fetch to get something out of the pool, and Return to put it back. Fairly standard.

The problem

The call to Return felt a bit annoying. If we forget to call that, we end up leaking resources as we create more and more objects, or get an exception thrown at us. Not good. I wanted something like the using (whatever) syntax, which I think is the most awsome thing ever.

To do that, we’d have to ensure that all the items in the pool implement IDisposable, have a reference back to the pool, and call Return in their dispose method. This isn’t really feasible; for starters, it would tightly couple everything with the pool, which is, like, all sorts of bad. A far better approach is, in my opinion, to wrap the object being pooled to add whatever behaviour I need. Not necessarily a great idea if you don’t know what’s going to be pooled beforehand. Continue reading “Dynamic proxies using Castle”

Implementing the Undo feature for Jasema

This article describes the undo feature implementation for Jasema 2 using the PostSharp framework.  For a simple introduction, this is my article about AOP using PostSharp. You can also read an article on compile time validation of custom aspects on this blog.
In the previous post, we looked at how PostSharp’s CompileTimeValidate method can be overridden to make sure that it has been applied correctly in the code. What we did not do, however, was to look at the context in which these aspects can be used.

The example given previously is straight out of the source code for Jasema‘s undo feature. This sort of functionality is very, very, very useful in applications involving complex tasks such as drawing, or editing a document, but they can also be a pain to write – not only do you need to maintain a log of each action, but you also have to make sure that each log entry has a way of being rolled back. What follows is a brief description of the route we took when writing the implementation used in Jasema. It is essentially a bastardised command pattern implementation, with a fair sprinkling of AOP thrown in for extra added fun and games. Continue reading “Implementing the Undo feature for Jasema”

AOP using PostSharp LAOS

Recently, I came across PostSharp, an excellent open source framework for .net. Among the great set of toys which it brings along is LAOS, an Aspect Oriented Programming solution which works very neatly.

Aspect oriented programming is quite a tricky subject to explain in short, so I won’t. While it’s an oversimplification, for the purposes of this post, we will just say that it is a technique where you intercept the control flow as it passes from one block to another, and attach non-default behaviour at these points.

PostSharp provides a mechanism which lets you define attributes to specify this behaviour; you can then decorate an assembly, class, method or field with these attributes. The specific methods you overload will then be triggered accordingly. Continue reading “AOP using PostSharp LAOS”