Nuclei

Nuclei is a collection of libraries containing classes and functions for inter-application interaction via a command mechanism, diagnostics, configuration handling, exception handling and assembly location and loading.

The capabilities in Nuclei are currently divided as follows:

• Nuclei - Base classes and interfaces, mostly used by the other libraries.

• Nuclei.Build - Assembly attributes which can be used at build time to embed information about the specific build into an assembly, e.g. time and date of build or information describing the version control revision of the source code that was used to create the assembly.

• Nuclei.Communication - Provides classes, interfaces and delegates used to provide a means of interacting between two or more applications through one or more command interfaces (similar to a Remote Procedure Call (RPC)). Capabilities include:

  • Based on WCF. Currently implemented methods for using TCP and named-pipes as base network layers.
  • Discovery of communication sources on the local machine and the local network (using WS discovery).
  • Automatic exchange of connection parameters between endpoints, if endpoints desired to communicate on the same topics (i.e. using an API that is familiar to both).
  • User provides command and notification interfaces which provide asynchronous methods which can be called by remote endpoints. Command parameters and return data are transported over via a message based mechanism.

• Nuclei.Configuration - Provides an abstraction of a configuration. Build-in support for configuration via an application config file.

• Nuclei.Diagnostics - Provides classes for logging (using NLog) and and in-application measuring of performance.

• Nuclei.Nunit.Extensions - Contains a simple implementation of contract verification for NUnit. Ideas based on the contract verifiers in MbUnit. Currently only has verifiers for hashcode and equality.

• Nuclei.AppDomains - Provides classes for the creation of AppDomains with pre-set assembly resolve and exception handlers.

• Nuclei.ExceptionHandling - Provides exception filters for use in top level exception recording.

• Nuclei.Fusion - Provides methods for assembly resolve requests.

Installation instructions

All libraries are available on NuGet.org.

Note that Nuclei.AppDomains, Nuclei.ExceptionHandling and Nuclei.Fusion are source-only packages because of the capabilities they provide. For both top-level exception handlers and for assembly resolvers it makes no sense to provide binary packages because then it is possible that trying to load the respective assemblies may be the cause of the unhandled exception or assembly resolve request.

How to build

The solution files are created in Visual Studio 2012 (using .NET 4.5) and the entire project can be build by invoking MsBuild on the nuclei.integration.msbuild script. This will build the binaries and the NuGet package. The binaries will be placed in the build\bin\AnyCpu\Release directory and the NuGet package will be placed in the build\deploy directory.

Note that the build scripts assume that:

• The binaries should be signed, however the SNK key file is not included in the repository so a new key file has to be created. The key file is referenced through an environment variable called SOFTWARE_SIGNING_KEY_PATH that has as value the full path of the key file.
• GIT can be found on the PATH somewhere so that it can be called to get the hash of the last commit in the current repository. This hash is embedded in the nuclei assemblies together with information about the build configuration and build time and date.
• The Windows SDK 7 or 8 is installed on the machine so that the script has access to the strong naming utility (sn.exe) for the generation of the InternalsVisibleTo attributes that are used during the unit tests.