blogs.conchango.com

Updated 06/11/2006: If you are trying to locate the Netron Project see my post "What happened to the Netron Project?"

Due to current project commitments I haven’t been able to devote any time to updating TaskBuilder – so I’ve decided to release the code in its current format (0.0.0.1). I had hoped to dedicate my commuting time (nearly three hours a day) to improve and extend this application, but unfortunately it hasn’t worked out that way. So I’m releasing it, in the hope that people out there can modify it and bring some new ideas and an improved code base to the community at large.

I’ve managed to comment the important parts of the code base – to aid anyone who wants to delve into it. I’m also releasing the CodeSmith templates (see the CodeGenTools directory) I wrote to generate the Shape and Data Transfer Object (DTO) classes as these can easily be adapted to produce Shape and DTO classes for other XML config based applications such as WiX and MSBuild (as long as that application comes with a XSD schema for the XML file – otherwise you can use the great GDN infer application to generate the XSD).

Shape objects and DTO's implement a common interface - thus the ACL DTO in the Netron.GraphLib project and the ACLShape in the Conchango.Build.TaskBuilder.Shapes project both implement the IACL interface (contained in the Netron.GraphLib project), this is used so that during the save process - we can iterate through all the shapes on the canvas and downcast them to DTOs and then serialize them into the config file. Thus we can separate the UI and serialization needs of the shape object.

You can download the source from my ProjectDistributor workspace.

Thanks again to Francois for creating the awesome Netron Project and for all the 24/7 support he's given to me while I hacked away, trying to get this application to work.

I keep thinking how much more extensible this tool would be if it was written in .NET 2.0 using XAML to render the shapes...