Updates to Courier

I finally managed to get a few colleagues of  mine to use the Courier framework in one of their projects.  The great thing about this is I get some free testing from them. Overall things seems to be working well for them (at least that is what they tell me). However, there were a few small changes they were interested in. So I obliged and added some minor features to the framework.

1. Opt out of cached messages – Previously, there was no way to opt out of receiving cached messages. If there was a copy of a message in cache and you registered for that message you would receive the cached message. This worked for me but the suggestion was to offer a way to opt out of receiving the cache. So I added a few overrides in the Register method to allow you to specify if you want cached messages or not.

2. Broadcast / Register for “no payload” messages - This one was a bit trickier to support. The idea is you want to simply send a “notification” that something happened but you don’t actually have data to pass. After some debate on where this scenario makes sense, and why you would use Courier for this operation I decided it was best to implement the feature. So now you can do something like this:

Int32 callCount = 0;
Messenger.RegisterForMessage("Foo", () => callCount++);
Messenger.BroadcastMessage("Foo");
Assert.Equal(1, callCount);

The arguments in favor of using Courier for this (as opposed to a normal .NET event) were. One, to keep consistency throughout the project as far as message passing. If you are doing Courier in some places why not do it everywhere. Two, Courier has the advantage of being able to broadcast messages across assembly boundaries without having to couple the two assemblies tightly. With a typical .NET event you would have to know about the type of event you want, which would mean you would need a reference to the assembly where the type is defined for both the sender and the receiver. In Courier, since the messaging model is decoupled, you can leverage it to send messages without needing the type definition in each assembly.

Also, one of my colleagues contributed a Visual Studio 2008 solution so you can build 2008 assemblies in stead of the 2010.

With these updates I have decided to make this the official v 1.0 release of the framework. The 1.0 release zip file contains the release builds of Courier.dll and Courier.Rx.dll assemblies compiled against .NET4.0 and the release build of Courier.dll compiled against .NET3.5 (called Courier-vs8.dll). PDB’s are also included for all assemblies.