Zen and the art of Castle maintenance

That’s counting from the day the project was registered on SourceForge.net, but I won’t be able to track when the project really started over the Avalon land, initially just as a Fortress container inspired port. It’s been a long road since then.

Reading up my old blog I’ve found some posts which depicts the project’s roots. If you like history, keep reading.

Microkernel Pattern (March, 2004)

“Nevertheless what came to my attention is the Microkernel Architecture Pattern suggested by the author. “The Microkernel Architecture Pattern is a useful pattern when a system consists of a core set of services that may be augmented at build-time with a variety of additional services.”"

Castle MicroKernel - The Revenge (March, 2004)

“Its on the avalon-sandbox now. Pay attention to handlers and how they try to satisfy the declared dependencies of a component. If it can’t satisfy, it will subscribe itself for a specific event in the Kernel. Once the other component is registered, the handler is notified.”

Avalon Castle is on the way! (March, 2004)

“The .Net (and hopefully Mono!) version of an Avalon Container is very close to get finished! Yesteday I just finished a problematic part, I named it ComponentBurden. That happens when your component’s dependencies are set up by the container. This create a problematic situation cause the decomission phase of these dependencies instances won’t happen alone. The container must keep a track of all instances and IHandlers that satisfied those kinds of dependencies and release them when the component itself is released.”

This is something that was not brought to the current MicroKernel version, I’m not sure it’s worthwhile.

Avalon Castle - Some design decision (Sep, 2004)

At this point, I’ve refactored (well, restarted) the project to use the MicroKernel pattern, and came up with the concept of facilities and subsystems…

Castle on Rails (Nov, 2004)

“I’ve finished my first port of Ruby on Rails to .Net. In fact, its not all the Rails but only the ActionPack. The rationale is to allow a superb intuitive way of develop web application - as you have in Rails - on .Net using ASP.Net as the default view engine (NVelocity is on my plans).”

Yes, that was the very beginning of the project…

Announcing the Castle Project (Nov, 2004)

And the project was born.

Castle Gently introduction (Nov, 2004)

At this point the project ambitions and goals were made public.

As I mentioned, it was a long road. Now, how many years we will have ’til Microsoft release its MS on Rails?