Tag: .net

Posted on

Generics in Java and C#

Today I was writing some interceptors in Java, and I wanted to be able to filter the input based on whether it implemented a given interface or otherwise. Class<?> exposes a very handy isAssignableFrom method for this, but it doesn’t look very nice, so I tried to go for something a bit neater, like: 

   1: Feature.<TargetFeature>isImplementedBy(interceptedInstance);

Neat, and much more readable. I didn’t quite make it there, but got close enough for my purposes, and had some (very little) deeper knowledge of generics inflicted upon me for my sins.

Continue reading “Generics in Java and C#”

Posted on

VS and SVN – Ignoring user specific files

Visual studio tends to create files that you don’t usually want to keep under source control, such as generated files, user option files, and so on. To avoid having to clean up every time you try to Add files, you can tell TortoiseSVN to ignore certain file name patterns. The following is what I usually use:

**/bin bin **/obj obj *.suo

You can set these patterns in the “Global ignore pattern” text box in the main screen of the TortoiseSVN settings dialog.

Posted on

Is this thing on?

Download sample code here (New window)

There’s been a project knocking around the back of my head for a while. I keep putting it off, doing some work on it now and again but never really settling down to really do it. This long weekend turned out to be one of those occasions; I’ve just finished playing Fallout 3 (Awesome game, the ending left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth though) and ended up with nothing to do. Visual Studio to the rescue…

Now what?

If you ever worked on an application that requires Internet connectivity, you will have had to handle situations where the connection may be unavailable for certain periods of time. Sometimes you can get by that by trapping an exception; I know I have, though I still find that particular solution to be somewhat inelegant. What I wanted was some way to monitor the state of the connection and keep track of it. This way, if you need to send a message for example, you can have your application decide whether it should try to send it right away, or whether it should stash it away till the connection becomes available. This post is about how to determine whether a connection is up or down, and notify the application when the state changes. Continue reading “Is this thing on?”

Posted on

Keep code behind clean

Download the sample code here

Last week, Marlon blogged about how to avoid adding command binding code to code-behind files. The idea is both simple and great, and allows you to keep your code behind nice and clean, and your layers separated. There’s only one (and yes, I’m being very anal here) thing that bugged me with it:

DataContext = new ViewModel(new SampleModel());

or, for that matter, “DataContext = anything”, is still in the code behind class. This can easily be sorted out with some easy data binding and a supporting class. Continue reading “Keep code behind clean”

Posted on

Dynamic proxies using Castle

The sample code can be downloaded here

This week I found myself with some time on my hands, so I knocked up a simple object pool. It’s fairly standard stuff… you call Fetch to get something out of the pool, and Return to put it back. Fairly standard.

The problem

The call to Return felt a bit annoying. If we forget to call that, we end up leaking resources as we create more and more objects, or get an exception thrown at us. Not good. I wanted something like the using (whatever) syntax, which I think is the most awsome thing ever.

To do that, we’d have to ensure that all the items in the pool implement IDisposable, have a reference back to the pool, and call Return in their dispose method. This isn’t really feasible; for starters, it would tightly couple everything with the pool, which is, like, all sorts of bad. A far better approach is, in my opinion, to wrap the object being pooled to add whatever behaviour I need. Not necessarily a great idea if you don’t know what’s going to be pooled beforehand. Continue reading “Dynamic proxies using Castle”

Posted on

A File Organizer

If you’re anything like me, you probably have a few thousand documents and files lurking around a small forest of New Folder(n) on your desktop. If you’re anything like me at all, you probably also lack the time, interest, inclination and attention span needed to track them down, go through them, and organize them. Now, it so happened that some time ago, a friend of mine had complained of being in a similar situation; worse in fact, since more than one person uses her PC, leaving the whole thing in a mush.

It so happened that I didn’t have much to do in the weekend (note to self: get a life. Naaah…), and had been wanting to brush up a bit on WPF for quite some time, so I sat myself down and started coding. The result is this organizer. Continue reading “A File Organizer”

Posted on

Reusing Cruise Control .Net Configurations on the Same Instance

The sources described in this post can be downloaded here.

This post follows up from my previous post, Configuring Projects on Multiple Instances of Cruise Control .Net. In one of the comments to this post, Elad asked if it was possible to reuse configuration files on the same instance of Cruise Control.Net. This would make sense in scenarios where you want to keep different branches of the same project integrated on the same machine without re-defining all the configuration for each. While this makes perfect sense, I couldn’t find any way to do this directly, so I tried to come up with a workaround that allows this. Please bear this in mind while you read the rest of this post. My knowledge of XML in general and Cruise Control configurations in particular is neither all-encompassing nor flawless in its brilliance, so there are probably, oh, a few million holes you could poke into this method. That said, I’m always open for comments, so if you have a better way, please share it 🙂 Continue reading “Reusing Cruise Control .Net Configurations on the Same Instance”

Posted on

Configuring Projects on Multiple Instances of Cruise Control .Net

A continuous integration server is an essential tool in the box of any team – even a one man team. I’ve used a number of different servers, but in the end I’ve always come back to CruiseControl.Net. It’s a solid, no-nonsense server which has great community support. Since it supports MSBuild scripting, it lets you use almost any tool on your controlled builds; MbUnit, NUnit, NCover, and FxCop are the few I use most often, and they’re a tiny subset of all the coding goodness that can be played with. Continue reading “Configuring Projects on Multiple Instances of Cruise Control .Net”

Posted on

Implementing the Undo feature for Jasema

This article describes the undo feature implementation for Jasema 2 using the PostSharp framework.  For a simple introduction, this is my article about AOP using PostSharp. You can also read an article on compile time validation of custom aspects on this blog.
In the previous post, we looked at how PostSharp’s CompileTimeValidate method can be overridden to make sure that it has been applied correctly in the code. What we did not do, however, was to look at the context in which these aspects can be used.

The example given previously is straight out of the source code for Jasema‘s undo feature. This sort of functionality is very, very, very useful in applications involving complex tasks such as drawing, or editing a document, but they can also be a pain to write – not only do you need to maintain a log of each action, but you also have to make sure that each log entry has a way of being rolled back. What follows is a brief description of the route we took when writing the implementation used in Jasema. It is essentially a bastardised command pattern implementation, with a fair sprinkling of AOP thrown in for extra added fun and games. Continue reading “Implementing the Undo feature for Jasema”