Question

We are in a situation whereby we have 4 developers with a bit of free time on our hands (talking about 3-4 weeks).

Across our code base, for different projects, there are a number of framework-y type of code that is re-written for every new project that we start. Since we have some free time on our hands, I’m in the process of creating a “standard” set of libraries that all projects can re-use, such as:

1. Caching
2. Logging

Although these 2 above would rely on libraries such as Enterprise Library, each new project would write its own wrappers around it, etc, so we’re consolidating all these code.

I’m looking for suggestions on the standard libraries that you built in-house that is shared across many projects.

To give you some context, we build LOB internal apps and public facing websites – i.e. we are not a software house selling shrink-wrap, so we don’t need stuff like a licensing module.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated – our developers are yearning to write some code, and I would very much love to give them something to do that would benefit the organization in the long run.

Cheers

Answer 1

Some of the major things we do:

• Logging (with some wrappers around TraceSource)
• Serialization wrappers (so you can serialize/deserialize in one line of code)
• Compression (wrappers for the .NET functionality, to make it so you can do this in one line of code)
• Encryption (same thing, wrappers for .NET Framework functionality, so the developer doesn’t have to work in byte[]’s all the time)
• Context – a class that walks the stack trace to bring back a data structure that has all the information about the current call (assembly, class, member, member type, file name, line number, etc)
• etc, etc…

Hope that helps