For the past couple of months I have been building a web based surveying application designed to allow employers to carry out lifecycle surveying of their employees (e.g. when they start, annual reviews, exit surveys). When I started building this application, I was given complete control over how it was to be built and I chose to use MonoRail. After a while I integrated Windsor, NHibernate and Rhino.Commons. All of my unit tests have been written using NUnit.
After spending the previous 5 or so years fighting working with ASP.NET and various incarnations of MVP and MVC, hand writing data access code and stored procedures and not really leveraging any kind of dependency injection, using this stack has been bloody marvelous and a true breath of fresh air. The learning curve is steep but rarely treacherous, and there is plenty of support in the community. Even better, I can peer into the inner working to see why something is (or isn’t) working.
To list all the contributors to those projects would require a rather long blog post (although you all deserve a huge round of applause), but there is generally one or two people who are “responsible” for these projects and spending large amounts of time and effort keeping them going. So here’s a thank you to Hamilton Verissimo aka Hammett for the Castle stack ( MonoRail / Windsor and a whole lot more ); Karl Chu and Sergey Koshcheyev for NHibernate; Oren Eini aka Ayende for Rhino.Commons ( although his name appears a lot in conjunction with both Castle and NHibernate ); and Charlie Poole, Jamie Cansdale and Gary Feldman for NUnit.
All of these projects are the results of a large number of people donating their time and expertise, so I just wanted to throw a resounding THANK YOU! out into the ether in the hope that they might see it and know my gratitude.
