Wednesday, October 17, 2007

NValidate: Newest Developments

And here, you all thought I had just dropped off the face of the earth or something.

The truth is that between my work, my family life, having to put an epileptic cat to sleep, turning 40, quitting smoking, and trying to get NValidate ready for its initial Alpha release, things have been pretty crazy. There hasn't been a lot of time for posting on my blog. I've been terribly remiss, and for all of that, I apologize.

Now, enough about me. On to the good stuff.

Alpha Status. NValidate will officially achieve Alpha status tonight. I'm building the source files as well. This will be version 0.0.0.10177. (The build number reflects today's date; it's a nifty convention I'm borrowing from Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror.)

You can download the source code here and get the binaries here. Unfortunately, the source code is only available in a Visual Studio 2003 solution right now. I'm hoping to fix that by the next release. You should be able to upgrade the project to Visual Studio 2005 without any problems (I've done it myself with no problems on a test machine here). I have not tested it on Visual Studio 2008 yet.

The binaries consist of the DLL and the PDB file. This is a debug release; you won't want to be using it in production code. To use the framework, simply add a reference to it to your application and import the NValidate.Framework namespace. For more information, see the Quick Start, and peruse the API Reference

It is vitally important that you note that this is ALPHA CODE. Do not use it for production work.

Updated API Reference: Online & Downloadable. I'm uploading the updated API Reference to the web site tonight. If you want to peruse the API Reference, you can quickly get to it by clicking here. For those of you who like downloads, I've also created a downloadable Compiled HTML Help File that you can get here.

Community Forums. Over the last few days, I've managed to get the community forums up and running, so there are places for any interested parties to comment on the source code. I cannot begin to tell you how much I want to hear from you guys. Critique the code. Tell me all the ways that it sucks; tell me how to make it better. Suggest new tests, better techniques, ways to improve the documentation. Help me make it more extensible.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to market this thing. I'm hoping that it will survive and prosper on word of mouth. Aside from that, who knows?

Have fun with it guys. I certainly have.