It looks as if yesterday’s entry about Castle Windsor went all over the Internet. Somehow it also got to the attention of Krzysztof Koźmic. He seems a rather smart fellow, being project leader of Castle Core and Castle DynamicProxy! He made a tweet in reference to my entry:
http://bit.ly/aSmqFy “So how do I expose my container to the application?” <– not, at all
Very helpful indeed! I will immediately accept that Krzysztof is a lot smarter than I am and that he knows what he’s on about. As eager as I am to learn new things, I’m hoping this entry will come to his attention as well. Secretly, I’m hoping that he will share his wisdom to enlighten the ignorant (aka. myself). If at all possible, in slightly more detail.
A while ago I wrote multiple entries about generic factories and repositories.
The ObjectFactory I created there was loosely based around the ideas of Inversion of Control. I’ve learned many new things by now and apparently it’s a reasonably common journey for anyone new to IoC to start out with a little ObjectFactory class and move on towards more advanced Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection containers, such as Castle Windsor.
Making the transition to Castle Windsor has been a bit of a frustrating one. There’s plenty of information to find on the Internet, but everywhere I looked it was only the basic sample of registering and resolving objects, using facilities and so on. The frustrating part was that none of the articles I could find dealt with using the IWindsorContainer in a large enterprise architecture.
A very practical question I had almost immediately after toying with the basics was: “So how do I expose my container to the application?” I found the Three Calls Pattern article on the Castle Project Wiki. Not that it is extremely helpful, it’s good to know how the Windsor developers meant the container to be used. It still didn’t answer my question though. I was nowhere closer to knowing how to expose my container. A lot of articles simply make the container available through a static property in the Global.asax. I’m sure this will work splendidly if the only thing I would need to worry about was a single web application project. However, I have an entire framework consisting of multiple class libraries and a client that consists of multiple web application projects and class libraries as well!
A little while ago I got the Going Postal DVD. It’s the latest film based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. As this is one of my favorite books set in the Discworld universe (Moist von Lipwig is such a fantastic character), I was eagerly anticipating the DVD release.
I had read a number of reviews and the opinions were rather mixed. People loved it and people hated it. I loved the previous two DVDs as well, so I felt confident I would love this film as well. After watching the DVD, I’m quite happy to say I haven’t been disappointed! I loved every minute of it!
Moist von Lipwig and Adore Belle Dearheart have been casted perfectly! They’re an absolute joy to watch and I think they match the characters of the book really, really closely!
A number of people seemed to think that Charles Dance was not casted well as Lord Vetinari. Despite one glaring issue, his hair colour, I think he played his role perfectly. They could have at least taken the time to dye his hair black, but other than this he’s everything that I came to expect from Lord Vetinari: a stern, immovable tyrant, going about his own business in his own way… no matter what.
Ian Bonar as Stanley, the pinhead geek turning into a stamp collector, is simpy fantastic as well.
There’s only one thing I really didn’t like about Going Postal though. I felt disappointed about the golems. I had always imagined them to be taller and more sculpted to the image of muscled men. Although there are mentions of the golems patching themselves up so often that their shapes are indistinguishable. I had still expected more of a robocopesque shaped golem.
In short: I simply loved almost all of it. As far as I’m concerned they can make a new film based on Discworld as soon as possible! Preferably with the plot of Making Money which I think is on of the best, perhaps even the very best, book of the entire series and, incidentally, also about Moist von Lipwig.
This film is rated 10/10 as far as I’m concerned!
A couple of days ago I wrote that I was looking forward to getting my hands on F1 2010 for the XBox 360. I went out and got the game yesterday evening, despite some of the dodgy things I had read about in reviews and comments from folks who had bought it already. My first impression isn’t quite flattering!
I wish they had simply not bothered with the entire ‘Live the life’ concept. It’s poorly implemented from what I read about it and personally it’s not what I’m looking for in a Formula 1 game. When starting up the game for the first time a friendly journalist asks you for your name and nationality and that’s how you create your personality for the career mode. They’ve created the menus exactly like in Dirt. I’m not a fan of those 3D menus and the trailer thing, but it’s definitely not game breaking.
While the graphics are decent enough (playing the game on a full HD screen), the framerate bums out a little. It’s far from a smooth driving experience and there are noticeable fps drops in certain spots at most tracks. For example on Spa-Francorchamps when coming down the back straight and breaking before the last chicane before start-finish, the framerate drops just enough to notice and mess up my cornering. Can’t imagine what it must be like with multiple cars ahead of me.
The sounds aren’t all bad! I don’t have anything to complain there. Actually, now that I think on it, sometimes the sound of the cars passing by sounds a little bit chopped up. It didn’t happen often to me though.
Driving laps however, is a different story. With all the assists on it’s a walk in the park! Very much an arcade game and not too challenging. I immediately turned off the assists and had another go. Wow! What a difference. I spent more time off the track than on it. I sighed at myself and went back in the menus to turn ABS back on and put the traction control back to Medium. The driving was a little better. It still comes down to precision though! It’s very easy to miss a breaking point or the apex of a corner. I can see lots of practice will be needed to crank out some proper laptimes.
The big question though… will I put in enough effort to actually get to grips with this game? My first impression hasn’t convinced me yet. The driving itself is good, but the choppy framerate at certain spots is a real issue for me. I don’t like messing up a particular hard corner because the game doesn’t feel as smooth as it was two corners earlier.
All in all, I guess it’s a decent game. Definitely considering how long we’ve gone without any non-Sony Formula 1 games. I’ll have to play it a bit more before I can decided whether I actually like it or not!
That’s a complaint I had from a certain someone last night!
I’ll admit it’s been a bit quiet with new entries from me. It’s not that I didn’t want to write anything, or didn’t have anything to write about. I simply did not have as much time as I would like to sit down and write something. When I did have the time, I simply forgot or did other things to fill the time with!
Ever since finishing The Templar Trilogy by Jack Whyte, I have wanted to write an entry about the Knights Templar. It opened my eyes to a few things, especially that they, as well as the Romans and Egyptians, might have sailed to America long before Columbus. I did a little research on it (I really mean it when I say little…) and found there are as many people supporting this theory as opposing it. I’ll look into this in more detail when I give myself a little time to pursuit my interests in the period of the Crusades and the Templars.
I’ve also just finished the fifth book in the Temeraire series. If you have never heard of these books at all, you’ve missed out on something! It’s about the war between the English and the French in the time of Napoleon. Except, it’s been dipped into a sauce of fantasy with both sides possessing an aerial force of dragons! Great books to read. More to come on this later as well, I suppose.
In the games department I’m eagerly awaiting the arrivals of F1 2010 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I think F1 2010 is set for release here in Europe tomorrow. It’ll be good fun to dust off my steering wheel again, hook it up to the XBox and get some laps in! AC: Brotherhood looks to be awesome as well. If it’s as good as its predecessor, which I think it is and possibly even better, it will give me many hours of entertainment!
Besides writing about my personal interests, I’d also love to rant a little about Castle Windsor. No, no. Not Windsor Castle, which is located just outside of London and is residence to the English Royal family (I think?!). Castle Windsor is a Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control container for the Microsoft .NET framework. Whichever resource I stumble across, everyone thinks its awesome and made of win. I’m sure it is, I just wish there was a more coherent resource available on how to deal with it in a large enterprise application architecture. Again, more to come on this later!
