Corrugated Iron, the C# library to working with Riak, isn’t terribly old – OJ and I released the first version two and a half weeks ago. In the mean time, we’ve fixed a few bugs but haven’t pushed out major enhancements. The minor changes that we’ve pushed out, though, have been in direct response to user feedback. This next version is no exception.

When we first put the library together, we made some very broad assumptions about how people were using the library. We assumed that everyone would be using Inversion of Control containers to do configuration – that turned out to be wrong. We assumed that everyone would not be using load balancers – that turned out to be wrong (fix coming in v0.2). And we assumed that everyone would be using JSON to serialize their data – once again we were wrong.

I like being wrong because it gives me the chance to re-think what I’m doing and learn something new. In this case, a user was looking for examples using a different way to serialize data. I provided some sample code and it only halfway worked; OJ and I had made assumptions about how users would be reading and writing data. Thankfully the developer pointed out the exact code that was in error and I was able to quickly turn around a patch and get it pushed out the door this evening. Once we identified the issue, the turnaround time was about 17 hours. Not too bad for a few weeks on the job.

To get the latest version of CorrugatedIron, head on over to the download page and grab the latest version.