valerio.net

Have you ever needed to:

• Use a "plugin" architecture?
• Unload an assembly after using it?
• Execute arbitrary code with different security requirements in its own "sandbox"?
• Wanted to test multiple WCF services from the same process, but with different configuration files?

…then NSandbox is the utility library that you’ve always needed

NSandbox is a small library that I’ve thrown together that lets you create, manage, and unload any number of "sandboxes", or AppDomains. It abstracts away the standard .NET remoting infrastructure (MarshalByRefObject and friends), letting you easily invoke methods and subscribe to events on objects in other AppDomains.

Lately I’ve been using NSandbox to do quite a bit of WCF integration testing.  Typically this would involve building, deploying, starting, debugging, and stopping a number of services, possibly on different machines.  In a tight development loop this can be very cumbersome — sometimes I would spend more time deploying and starting/stopping the services than I would on development. In addition, I usually also had 4-5 instances of Visual Studio open at the same time in an attempt to set breakpoints in both client and server code.

I came up with a way that I could host all of my WCF services within the same process (only 1 Visual Studio debugger!) by separating each service into its own AppDomain. This is a natural match since each WCF service is (typically) configured by an App.config file, and each AppDomain can have its own configuration file specified. Granted, since everything is running in a single process a little more care must be given to the multithreading aspects, but in my experience using NSandbox has been an incredible productivity booster.

So, if you haven’t already, hop over to Sourceforge, download the MSI installer, and try out NSandbox. I’d love to hear any feedback that you have.

Included in NSandbox 0.1:

• bin\NSandbox.dll (reference this from your project)
• doc\NSandbox.chm (compiled documentation)

There are a few good example projects in the SVN code. In particular check out the NSandbox.Tests project. I’m working on incorporating the example code into the installer for the next version (hopefully soon). The examples are built into NUnit tests, though they are actually full-blown integration tests, not just unit tests of the service implementations.

I’ll be posting more about the integration testing soon

Enjoy!

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