Reuseable Building Block Development

If you haven’t paid attention to the development world, you might have missed the current movement called “Reuseable Building Block development.” You know, as a kid, we could get blocks are build anything with them. We only had to stack them. Well, having a n-tier stack is very common, now, so stacking isn’t the issue. It is having blocks that are easy to stack. Some are calling it the open source movement, and while most reusable building blocks are open source, not all of them are. Many of the building blocks don’t have to be open source, but can simply be well-documented and work well.

With NuGet and Npm, building blocks are being created and published daily. The problem now is helping other developers recognize this movement. Changing our mindset from, “we can’t use if it wasn’t invented here,” to something more like, “this is our unique stack of building blocks for a unique problem and this stack was invented here.”

I have created a bunch of building blocks for C#. Check out my github account at https://github.com/rhyous. You will see a few reusable building blocks:

• Rhyous.Collections – You know all those pesky extension methods your write for collections that are missing from the collections or from linq. I have a lot of them in here.
• Rhyous.EasyCsv – A simple tool for working with csv files.
• Rhyous.EasyXml – A simpel tool for working with Xml. (You might ask why I don’t have one for JSON, and that is because Newtonsoft.Json and fast.jsona already exist , so another one isn’t needed.)
• Rhyous.EntityAnywhere – Wow, have a full rest api and only have to create the model class. Are you kidding, this is probably the coolest project for Web Service APIs since the REST pattern was introduced.Rhyous.SimplePluginLoader – Easily load plugins in your app.
• Rhyous.SimpleArgs – Writing a tool with command line arguments? This tool allows you to configure your arguments in a model class and be done. It will output usage and force required parameters and allow for events when a parameter is set, etc.
• Rhyous.StringLibrary – You know all those pesky extension methods you write for string manipulations missing from .NET Framework. They are in this library, along with a pluralization tool. Every heard of the The oft forgotten Middle Trim, well, it is in this library, too.
• WPFSharp.Globalizer – The best localization library for WPF that exists, allowing you to change language and style (including left to right flow for certain languages) at runtime.

I actually have many more building blocks. Take a look.