This quick snippet will give you all the types declared in all the assemblies loaded, filtered by namespace.

List types = new List();
Assembly[] assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies();

foreach (Assembly asm in assemblies)
{
        IEnumerable asmTypes = from t in asm.GetTypes()
              where t.IsClass
                && (t.Namespace != null && t.Namespace.StartsWith(targetNamespace))
              select t;
        types.AddRange(asmTypes);
}

I actually got to this point because of the way NUnit wraps an assembly in another AppDomain.

The snippet need Linq so it’s for 3.5 or newer.

Some time ago I worked on some projects using ASP.NET that were mostly ASPX with some specialized ASHX’s (c# behind the scenes).
The handlers just generated some graphs or exported Excel files, regular code monkey style, no architecture, no plan, just write it fast – quick dirty hack, quick buck – and I always thought that these guys that accept .NET inferior stuff deserve what they get.

As time flew by, I started to get a taste of what .NET is all about, luring me to the dark side.

Photo by B-tal

At the beginning I felt like “this is what evil must taste like”, but I quickly got accustomed to all the new things and now, I’m playing with .NET stuff again, mostly C#, trying to level my skills and having a lot of fun in the process. I built things like the quick and dirty multi font viewer, buggy and poor, mostly because nobody uses it.

Now, I wanted to start something bigger, and nicer (I won’t say what) and I felt that I needed to do it the right way, you know, MAINTAINABLE.
I started looking for a DI container and I started with Spring and Pico. I’m pretty accustomed to pico and I’ve been using Spring since version 1 so I though I’d give them a try. Wrong, strange, alien, weird, huge, EVIL.

For what I wanted to do it really seemed this way. How’s about something that is 10 megs big because spring and dependencies is 7 megs big. And I’m not even going to use most of it, I just want some plain dependency injection and maybe some tooling , like fast i18n.

Problem solved, evil destroyed
I found the solution! Why not have some fun AND learn the inner workings of C# and .Net? Why not build my own? So I did!

NanoDI is a small dependency injection container and tooling for .NET C# projects that are small or that do not need the complexity of bigger IoC solutions.

NanoDI‘s goal is to be small, fast and clean.

Links:
Nano Dependency Injection home
NanoDI Ohloh.net project page
NanoDI Google Code project

The code is junky by my standards but I’m slowly refactoring as my c# skills get better. Next week I’m going to finish scoping and start working on proxies and interceptors. You can help too!

Have a taste, have fun!

Being a software developer sometimes involves more than just coding.
This time it was a logo and a splash screen I did a while ago and I had a problem – I couldn’t remember what font I used.

Of course, having a lot of fonts installed made it a nightmare.

I googled a bit and found a lot of shareware that allowed me to view multiple fonts and compare. I didn’t use any of it. Instead I used a nice piece of software called Opcion.

It solved my problem, although it acted a little strange plus, it was Java. I can handle it because I’m a Java developer.. but can anybody else?

After finishing the work I decided I could do something about it. So I did.

It’s called Multi Font Viewer and it’s free.

You can download it from: the Multi Font Viewer page at xandertools.com.

If you want to take a look at the code or contribute visit the Multi Font Viewer Google Code project.

Best of luck and happy fonting!