DotNetKicks.com - published csharp stories

Object Pipelines

Fri, 25 May 2012 15:51:38 GMT

A pipeline is a chain of connected steps that process information. In object pipelines, each step receives an object and performs an action using it before passing an object to the next step. This repeats until every step is complete.

IoC & Convention over Configuration in an Agile world

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:44:39 GMT

James Kovacs (http://www.jameskovacs.com) is highly regarded figure in the .NET consulting community. The video linked in this kick is a great talk on how to simplify your codebase using Convention over Configuration with your IoC container. It also briefly touches on some other topics like testing, app bootstrap/initialization, and lots of details regarding the Castle container itself. To download the FakeVader application he uses in his talk check it out on github: https://github.com/JamesKovacs/fakevader

C#/.NET Little Wonders: Select() and Where() with Indexes

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:32:09 GMT

We've talked about the Select() and Where() LINQ extension methods before. The Select() method lets you project from the source type to a new type, and the Where() method lets you filter the list of items to the ones you are interested in. Most people know of these methods in their simplest form, where they simply take a projection and predicate respectively that operates on just an element. However, there are overloads for both of these methods that take a delegate that operates on both the element and the index of the element.

Post-increment Operator and Precedence

Wed, 16 May 2012 21:40:07 GMT

int i = 0; i = i++ + i--; Console.Write(i); What is written to the console?

Creating Type Aliases in C#

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:26:53 GMT

The using directive of the C# programming language is often used to create namespace aliases, allowing types with matching names that appear in separate namespaces to be easily accessed. A lesser known use of the directive is to create aliases for types.

Work Stealing | Passion of Programming in .NET

Sun, 13 May 2012 11:07:39 GMT

When working with multi threaded applications, we tend to spawn worker threads which can lead to ineffective code when not done correctly, for example threads will not get reused and will be recreated for each work items. The solution to all those problems is a ThreadPool which reuses threads and queues work items that are consumed by those threads. This sort of implementation while simple can have side effects as unless the pool Queue is immutable it will have to be locked each time an item Enqueued and...

Performance Tuning Visual Studio Builds

Fri, 11 May 2012 21:56:29 GMT

My findings after spending a day trying to bring our teams local build time down from over a minute.

Faking num lock, caps lock and scroll lock leds

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:53:58 GMT

Some time ago I came across a post where the author wanted to turn on and off num lock, cap lock and scroll lock led light without actually toggling their state. This sounded challenging and impossible but after some googling I found a piece of code in C for achieving exactly what I was looking for. In this post I show how it works and how to port it to C#

What JavaScript taught me about C# - Understanding 'Access to modified

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:49:11 GMT

This is how I finally came to understand fully 'Access to modified closure', plus details of a BREAKING CHANGE in C# 5 regarding this!

Using delegates, func and lambdas: a tutorial with soldiers

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:18:45 GMT

In this tutorial, written for beginning programmers, I'd like to show a little demonstration on the usage of delegates and how we can go all crazy by refactoring and magically see all our duplicate code disappear.

Creating Parallel Tasks with TaskFactory

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:48:56 GMT

The Task Parallel Library provides a number of ways in which parallel tasks can be instantiated. This article describes the use of the TaskFactory class, which uses the factory method design pattern to generate and start tasks with a single method call.

C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Enumerable.Repeat() Static Method

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:48:56 GMT

The Enumerable.Repeat() method performs the simple task of creating a sequence by repeating an element a specific number of times. While this is, in of itself, a trivial need, it can also be used to drive more useful results such as repeating a generator delegate, or creating sequences out of single items.

Compilify: Compile and run your .Net code in the browser

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:09:55 GMT

Compilify is a new website that lets you compile and run your .Net code right from the browser. Built on the Rosyln CTP, Compilify lets you write, compile, and observe the output of your code right from your browser. Now you can write and test code from anywhere, without the need for Visual Studio. It's fast too!

Building Expression Evaluator with Expression Trees in C# - Improving

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:45:38 GMT

Our expression evaluator has support for variables but it has a big disadvantage: values of the variables are bound by position and not by name. This means that you should pass values for the variables in the same order as they appear in the expression. On the other hand binding by name has following advantages: If you change the expression you do not have to worry about keeping order of the variables you pass in sync. In this post we are going to change expression evaluator to bind parameters by name. We will also add a new overload for better performance when we need to evaluate same expression with different parameter values.

NHibernate's inverse - what does it really mean?

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:37:29 GMT

NHibernate's concept of 'inverse' in relationships is probably the most often discussed and misunderstood mapping feature. When I was learning NHibernate, it took me some time to move from "I know where should I put 'inverse' and what then happens" to "I know why do I need 'inverse' here and there at all". Also now, whenever I'm trying to explain inverses to somebody, I find it pretty hard.

Delegates in c#

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:24:19 GMT

I have used delegates in my programming since C# 2.0. But I have seen there are lots of confusion going on with delegates so I have decided to blog about it. In this blog I will explain about delegate basics and use of delegates in C#. What is delegate? We can say a delegate is a type safe function pointer which holds methods reference in object. As per MSDN it's a type that references to a method. So you can assign more than one methods to delegates with same parameter and same return type.

Regular Expression for Email Address validation in C#

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:21:42 GMT

Provides a regular expression to validate standard email addresses.

Converting 2D arrays to 1D and accessing as either 2D or 1D

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:41:11 GMT

Article that shows how you can store 2D data in a 1D array using row-major order and convert locations between the two.

Using the DebuggerBrowsable Attribute

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:59:23 GMT

Visual Studio's debugging windows and tools allow you to examine in-scope objects and the values contained within their properties, indexers and fields. When this is undesirable, a class may change the way in which its debugging information is provided.

Quick and Easy Method to Remove Html Tags

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:03:51 GMT

Here's a quick and dirty bit of C# code that will strip tags from an HTML document.

Rx - Join

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:03:50 GMT

this post is an advance one so you haven't yet master the Rx basic practice you might want to start in here. the post will focus on the Join and GroupJoin operators and we will try to get a solid understanding of what does it really means to join multiple data streams. the Rx notion of join is quit different than the join we has used to know in SQL queries.

Refactoring PagedResult

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:52:29 GMT

One of my favorite frameworks to tinker with is Kigg. Inside it, I found a generic PagedResult class that appeared as though it could use a little touching up...

Async/Await Could Be Better

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 03:27:15 GMT

I think just about everyone is excited about the new async/await features in C#5. They make for cleaner code and easier multithreading. However, Paulo Zemek has thought of a few ways in which they could be better.

Using Reactive Extensions for Streaming Data from Database

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:10:07 GMT

You have probably heard about Reactive Extensions, a library from Microsoft that greatly simplifies working with asynchronous data streams and allows to query them with Linq operators. There are many different scenarios where using rx results in a much more simple and flexible code. This post demonstrates how to use reactive extensions for loading data from database asynchronously in chunks.

WIF and Colliding Namespaces

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:08:25 GMT

A short note of an approach to handle cases when you work with several namespaces containing types with the same names.