[Netreflector-develop] Some ideas

[Szymon K. <s.k...@so...>]

Hello Owen and other NetReflectors,

Sorry for the delay. Here are some ideas for NetReflector:

1. Allow to  deserialize collection properties without setter. It is a 
common pattern (at least I use it very often) to implement a collection 
property with a getter only and initialize the collection by the parent 
class. Would it be possible to modify NetReflector that in such case it 
will only put deserialized items in the collection using Add or AddRange 
method?

2. The other area is error reporting. Often it is really hard to find 
the place where error occurred. I've already found a sample of 
XmlDocument implementing IXmlPositionInfo on all elements so this 
information is available at the time the error is found. I've changed 
the source so this document is used instead of normal one and it worked 
without problems. Now it is only a matter of extending the 
NetReflectorException to report line number and position of the error. I 
can try to code this if you think it's ok.

Here is the extended document 
www.gotdotnet.com/userfiles/XMLDom/extendDOM.zip
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconextendingdom.asp?frame=true

3. I was considering implementing serialization to other file formats. I 
hoped that it will make my files more human readable and cleaner then in 
XML (more like INI files). I already found some "standards" for that 
like YAML, OGDL or SDL (here is a whole list 
http://www.pault.com/pault/pxml/xmlalternatives.html, 
http://www.gadgetopia.com/2003/06/09/XMLAlternatives.html and here is 
some rationale to think about 
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-sbxml.html)

The problem is that none of these formats has a parser in .NET so this 
adds some additional work to the effort. Besides after reading some 
discussions (good one here if you are interested 
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-hivemind/NotXMLProposal) I came to a 
point that XML is not that bad at all (considerering support in many 
editors and other tools). Maybe you have different opinion on the matter ?

That is all I can think off at the moment. I'm using NetReflector for 
couple of weeks now and it does it work really well. You might be 
interested that I've compiled it on .NET 2.0 without any problems and it 
even supports generics. Good job!

Best Regards,
Szymon Kobalczyk.