Progress continues apace. I'm up to 50 working unit tests against ContentManager. Some of the changes and refactorings this week:

• Removed AllVersionsForTopic - the same functionality is available via AllChangesForTopicSince.
• Started implementing BuiltinTopicsProvider - untangling BackingTopics logic from ContentManager and content stores.
• Implemented ForwardingContentProvider as a convenience base class for providers that mostly just call the next link in the chain.

Built-in topics are topics like HomePage and _ContentBaseDefinition that have default content and need to "exist" even if there's no file behind them. In the 1.8 codebase (the more I think about it, the more I think when I finally share the code, it's going to be as "FlexWiki 2.0 Alpha 1") builtin topics are called "backing topics". I think "built-in" is a better name for them.

I had hoped to avoid implementing the BuiltinTopicsProvider during the rearchitecture. But they should factor very cleanly into the new provider model, as a provider that sits between the ContentManager and the content store and just synthesizes these topics if they don't exist in the underlying store. And if I don't separate them out, I have to make the ContentManager tests way more complicated, since I need to deal with all the combinations of actual vs. synthetic topics, in all the methods where it might make a difference. By factoring out built-in topics, I can test ContentManager and BuiltinTopicsProvider in isolation.

At any rate, we're still a long way out, but I'm starting to feel like I'm at that stage of the project where I've finally got a substantial pile of working code, and the number of major refactorings is starting to drop, leaving me more time to write unit tests and implement functionality. I do have one fairly major refactoring I'm considering implementing, though: I'd like to get rid of LocalTopicName.

A LocalTopicName contains a name (no namespace) and an optional version. It's the optional version that bugs me - sometimes you need it and sometimes you don't. I think it complicates the interface much more than simply having one or two parameters: a name and (when needed) a version. But LocalTopicName is fairly pervasive, even in the code I've already written, so "fixing" it would involve some work. Not sure what I'm going to do here yet. Advice welcome.

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