Refactoring tool for Spring.NET

Question

Hi all,

Currently I get to edit a lot of Spring.NET XML files, and I do find this work to quite repetitive and, frankly boring.

Most of the stuff I do is sort of 'refactoring' - generalising XML declaration for instances and "inheriting" from those generalised structures to declare more specific ones.

As I said, it's a no-brainier type of task but it does require a lot of attention and concentration and it's easy to make a mistake.

I would imagine that a lot of editing of Spring.NET xml files can be automated with a tool similar to ReSharper.

Can you recommend anything?

Thank you!

Answer 1

In the latest spring release (1.3-you can find files for ReSharper to help you with the XML files, though I haven't used them yet.

You might also want to look into Recoil which tries to avoid xml files and allows you to configure a Spring.NET powered application via code.

Answer 2

One of my clients uses Spring.NET quite extensively. I found the process of modifying the configuration files, starting the application and then getting a single, cryptic Spring.NET error at a time quite tedious. So I built a noddy validator that is now run as a post-build step on all executable projects. This will not help you with the actual refactoring itself but should let you identify any errors more quickly.

You can give it a bash by downloading it from BitBucket. I only developed the product until it catered for our use-cases so you may find that you will have to extend it to meet your needs.