I just released an update to my open source feature toggling library FeatureToggle.

Version 1.2.0 add support for using feature toggles in your Windows 8 WinRT .Net (C#) app. For this initial release, the NuGet package for Windows8 app installs the source code, rather than a binary reference. This is so it will always build to whatever architecture you are compiling against (Any CPU, x86, x64, ARM).

This release also provides a XAML value converter (FeatureToggleToVisibilityConverter) to make binding the visibility of UI element to a feature toggle easier.

What To Use Feature Toggles For

Typically feature toggles (sometimes called feature flags, flippers, etc.) enable you to keep one branch of source code and deploy code to production with “half done” stuff. This half done stuff is (typically) toggled at the UI level so it is not available to users.

With Windows 8 in-app-purchases (IAPs), you could also use the FeatureToggle library as a unified way of enabling those extra IAP features that a user has paid for.

Getting Started with FeatureToggle in a Windows 8 App

Install FeatureToggle NuGet Package

Create a new Visual C# Windows Store project (Blank App XAML is fine for this demo).

Install the FeatureToggle NuGet package by either:

• Right0click project, Manage NuGet Packages, search for FeatureToggle, click the Install button; or
• In the Package Manager Console window, type “Install-Package FeatureToggle” and hit enter.

You will notice two folders added to the project: “FeatureToggleCode” (which you don’t need to change) and “FeatureToggleSample” which contains an example toggle.

Create a Feature Toggle

Create a new class called “AwesomeFeature” that looks like this:

internal class AwesomeFeature : JasonRoberts.FeatureToggle.AlwaysOffFeatureToggle
{
}

More...

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FeatureToggle is now available via NuGet

Just search in NuGet Package Manager for FeatureToggle or in Package Manager Console:

The NuGet packages are the easiest way to get started, they will create an example feature toggle and app/web.config entries to help you get started.

Project home page: https://github.com/jason-roberts/FeatureToggle/wiki

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The FeatureToggle project has been moved to:

https://github.com/jason-roberts/FeatureToggle

The documentation will be moved shortly and a NuGet package will also be available soon...

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You can now take a first glance at my new open source project FeatureToggle

It's early days yet and I'm not quite what direction it will take.

The next thing I'd like to upload are some sample projects in WPF, WP7, ASP, etc so as to illustrate how to use FeatureToggle but also to help drive the design from the point of the consumer.

More info of the idea of feature toggle can be found at Martin Fowler's site.

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Scholar is now up on Codeplex. Scholar is a new open source project that will provide a starting point for developers to create distributed data processing such as the SETI@home project. It will use Azure to enable scalability and allow independent developers to get started without needed there own data centres. It's hoped that eventually it might be used to enable large medical and scientific data to be processed.

http://scholar.codeplex.com/

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