James Newton-King
Oct 2 2007

Utilities.NET 1.0 released

Homer: Listen, what would you say if I told you a woman did most of the work? Kent Brockman: I'd have this gazebo torn down and built into a coffin...for your manhood. Homer: (Shrieks) Kent Brockman: Why did my hypothetical scenario scare you so? Homer: Uh, like all manly men, I have a vivid imagination. Kent Brockman: Well said! Let's take off our shirts and wrestle. Utilities.NET is a collection of helper classes and components for quickly solving common .NET programming tasks.

The library is pretty large, currently 117 classes, 300ish unit tests and many, many methods. When I'm developing I have a habit of throwing what is generic in helper classes and Utilities.NET is a combination of many of them times nearly 5 years of .NET development.

The code in Utilities.NET is a rather eclectic mix. A lot is the result of other project's I've worked on (i.e. the reflection stuff comes mostly from implementing a serializer for Json.NET) while other parts come from experimenting with .NET features (such as a lot of what is under threading[:)])

There is no way I could summarize the functionality of every class and static method in one post so I recommend you download it and take a look for yourself. I plan to write some posts looking more closely at specific classes that I think are useful or interesting. In the meantime here is a brief summary of what Utilities.NET covers:

  • Collections
  • Configuration
  • Type converters
  • Database
  • Email
  • Files and streams
  • Events
  • Validation
  • Reflection
  • Resources
  • Services
  • Testing
  • Text
  • Threading
  • Web and ASP.NET
  • Xml

Documentation for Utilities.NET is currently quite light, with XML comments over about half of the library. In the future I plan to use SandCastle to generate help files but for now you are largely on your own [:)]

Utilities.NET CodePlex Project

Utilities.NET 1.0 Download - Utilities.NET source code and binaries

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