Original Author: Carlos Sanchez, 2018
MonolithicExtensions is a general extension library for all the random bits of code I wrote which I felt could be reused. It creates four dlls with varying levels of portability.
There's "Portable" for anything that runs Xamarin, "General" for anything that runs Mono and is most likely a standard computer operating system (ie Windows/Linux/etc.), "Windows" for anything ABSOLUTELY specific to windows (like GAC registration), and "Android" for Android specific things.
Most of the functions have unit tests and they all passed when I last worked on the project, so use those as a baseline if anything breaks.
MonolithicExtensions follows a "global stateless function" ideology (most of the time). This means the functionality provided is expected to be simple and not change, and certainly not have side effects. Instead of creating interfaced services so functionality can be swapped out, I figured the tasks being performed (a) would never need to be changed and (b) not have any dependencies, so I did not use a complex model and instead settled for static classes with static, stateless functions.
I threw a lot of this stuff together and the naming conventions are inconsistent. Do not rely on the fact that some things are called "Service" and others "Extensions" to know what the code does. However, most of the functions should have summaries, so you should at least get intellisense to give a picture of what anything does.
DIFactory: An in-house implementation of a dependency-injection container. It provides methods for object creation and disposal, and has methods for profilerating global settings down through objects. It also supports merging of factories so you can have various "baseline" factories each for their own project, then merge all the required factories together into one for your given service/executable.
ILogger/Logging: There are many logging systems across all the platforms .NET runs on. They all BASICALLY work the same though, so they can all be wrapped to provide a common interface for classes to perform logging. This is the ILogger interface and the MonolithicExtensions logging system in general. There are implementations of the ILogger interface for log4net (used to log to files on Windows) and for Android's logging system.
In most of my classes, you'll see an "ILogger" object and code in the constructor to initialize the ILogger. They all create a proxy logger from a "default" logger, which is configured to wrap a real logging service based on how the logger is configured. Examples of configuration and logger usage can be seen in the Service1.cs file of MonolithicExtensions.TestService.
SerializationExtensions: The serialization services provided by .NET are great for simple objects, but not for complex ones. The default settings for Newtonsoft's json library aren't setup for this either, so SerializationExtensions creates functions that wrap Newtonsoft json serialization functions in order to serialize most objects for transport perfectly, including private/protected fields. If your use case only requires public fields (which many do) and not a perfect object recreation, you can use the default Newtonsoft json serialization and ignore these functions.
RemoteCallSystem: WCF made things more complicated, not less, especially when dependency injection was involved. The remote call system implemented in MonolithicExtensions is a simplified RPC system whose baseline implementation communicates over a lightweight Http server using JSON for serialization. You can make calls against a remote object's public methods, although it's a little more work on the client side in order to setup these calls.
If an in-house solution is not desirable, WCF is perfectly fine. However, this RPC system is being used in the IDNUpdate service, so it might be worth it to get familiar with it (or replace it with WCF).
MonolithicExtensions shouldn't have any external project/file references (they should all be included in the solution), however if you want all the unit tests to pass, you will need to install the TestService contained in this project. Simply run the "installService.bat" script in the MonolithicExtensions.TestService/bin/debug directory to install the service (assuming it still works) and you should be good. It doesn't do anything fancy, so if the script doesn't work, you can install the service manually.
Many of the unit tests require various files stored in the unit test project directory. These files may seem like garbage (and may be ignored in some .gitignore configurations), but they are definitely needed for the unit tests to pass.