MemBus 3.0

MemBus finally got the maintenance it deserves. What’s new?

Portable Class Library

The latest incarnation of MemBus requires .NET 4.5 to run. It targets a Pcl profile for standard Windows and Windows Store profile. Expect the WP8 to also be targetted in a future minor release. The only thing stopping me for now is the missing ConcurrentDictionary - I will need a replacement for that. There are some promising leads, but I need a proper testbed to see what performance impact a switch in that area of the code has.

To people sticking to previous versions of the .NET framework I am afraid that things will just stay as they were pre-V3.

New publishing features.

The IPublisher interface now provides additional publishing capabilities via

• An Observable - MemBus will start consuming the observable and feeding the resulting messages into its infrastructure.
• In an awaitable fashion. Here, configuration of how to process certain messages is short-circuited such that the awaitable pattern works as expected, i.e. the continuation will be called once all subscriptions have processed the message that was sent.

FlexibleSubscriptionAdapter

All possibilities to configure method registration has been merged into a single “RegisterMethods” call. This is because the signature of the method sufficiently defines what you want to happen. Allowed are the following method signatures…

• T Method(Z msg): This method receives messages and can send one out as a reaction. If the return value implements IEnumerable it will be enumerated and all messages will be put onto the bus.
• void Method(Z msg): Just accepts messages.
• void Method(IObservable<T> msgs) : Get an observable from MemBus much like you would call Observe on the Bus.
• IObservable<Z> Method(IObservable<T> msgs): Return an Observable after accepting one from MemBus. This is ideal to set up some transformations, e.g. with the set of methods provided by the Rx libraries.
• IObservable<Z> Method() : Provide observables to MemBus, much like calling Publish with an observable. Ideal to set up message sources with MemBus, e.g. a Timer.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new capabilities. Next on the roadmap is, as mentioned, the WP8 profile and then some investigations how well MemBus plays together with ReactiveUI