It's incredible how fast things can change if you turn off your developer technology radar for a few months.  I was pretty comfortable with my knowledge of what was out there around fall of '07.  I'd explored pretty much all the different tools and technologies that had tickled my fancy and even though I wasn't an expert in all of them, I knew that I could pick any one of them up pretty quickly if need be.  So down went my radar for awhile.

Holy cow.

Apparently not everyone has been as idle as I have been.  Here is a list that I compiled in a single afternoon of some things (I'm sure there are plenty more) that I'd like to try out in the not-too-distant-future to see if they can assist me in my daily chores.  What follows is not anything near a full review (basically I've pretty much only heard of them at this point), so my descriptions of what they are may be WAY off:

How about you?  What kind of technologies have you excited right now?

I'm not dissing MS Unity, Microsoft's new IoC Container - I'm really going to give it a chance.  Rather, I'm talking about the reaction to it on the Yahoo! [altdotnet] group.

I have just spent most of the morning following a thread on the [altdotnet] mailing list titled "Unity" Ioc from Microsoft has been released in CTP...  And it has.  But in retrospect, based on the thread, "Unity" was a very ironic name choice for the tool.  This is a very long thread that is involving dozens of folks.  It started off by comparing the functionality in Unity to functionality in other IoC containers, mostly Castle Windsor & StructureMap.  The Spring.NET crowd has been strangely silent.

Later in the thread, however, the "altdotnet"ness of the list has begun to show its colors. Passions have arisen and tempered.  Staunch defenders of each "side" (and there are more than two sides to this polygon) have held their ground while alternately being gracious one minute and on-the-attack the next.  It's the ultimate Reality TV... except that it's not TV, of course.

I've wasted too much time trying to follow this thread and I declare that I am DONE with it.  Not that the task wasn't worth it.  I've learned a lot about IoC that I hadn't know before.  I'm familiar with Windsor, and I've downloaded Unity and played around with it as well.  The really great gem that I have just discovered is StructureMap.  I just love the "fluent interface" it has - much like is available in Rhino.Mocks.  Fun, geeky stuff.

I thought it would be a useful exercise to compare "Hello, World!" scenarios between the big-four (and, yes, I'm including Unity as part of that):

The fluent-interface of StructureMap is so nice.  Yes, it's longer to type, but hey, that's what IntelliSense is fore, and that will make it easier for new developers to discover.

Incidentally, Unity looks an awful lot like Windsor in its syntax, and it was mentioned in the aforementioned thread that the PM on the Unity project is a big Windsor fan.

Apology: I just couldn't resist the lolcats thing, it was just too apropos.  This is my one (1), lifetime, self-imposed limit.

NUnit is my unit testing tool of choice. I remember a few years ago when I was trying to figure out all of this automated unit testing stuff and the problems I had learning without someone to show me how. I hope that this screencast can make the introduction to automated unit testing a little simpler and make testing in particular more prevalent with those who view it.

NUnit Basics