Castle built for .Net

22.11.2006
, which is an open source project to ease development on Microsoft's .Net platform, is nearing its general release.

Spawned out of the defunct object-oriented framework, Castle is built as a set of programming libraries. In addition to .Net, it also will work with , an open source implementation of .Net.

"Castle's goals are avoid code repetition, use convention instead of configuration whenever it's possible, and handle common tasks on the programmer's behalf," said project creator Hamilton Verissimo, founder of the Castle Stronghold consultancy in Brazil.

A second release candidate of Castle 1.0 is available as of several weeks ago. A general release is targeted for January.

Castle can be used for enterprise and Web application development. It features tools including MonoRail, which is a Web framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. MonoRail uses the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern for application flow, data, and views. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is featured as well.

Also in Castle are ActiveRecord, for mapping objects to databases, and Windsor, which is an object lifecycle container for making code more maintainable.