DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by igoro

Big Oh in the parallel world

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:09:51 GMT

Big-Oh notation is a simple and powerful way to express how running time of a particular algorithm depends on the size of the input. But, what about the complexity of parallel programs? There are several ways to incorporate this variable into the Big-Oh notation, and I am going to describe them one-by-one.

Skip lists are fascinating!

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:16:03 GMT

Skip lists are a fascinating data structure: very simple, and yet have the same asymptotic efficiency as much more complicated AVL trees and red-black trees. In this article, I discuss the asymptotic efficiency of operations on skip lists, the ideas that make them work, and their interesting use cases. And, of course, I give you the source code for a skip list in C#.

Overview of concurrency in .NET Framework 3.5

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:01:14 GMT

An easy-to-digest high-level summary of concurrency on .Net: what are the different pieces, where they differ and how they relate. If you want to know the difference between a Thread and a BackgroundWorker, or what is the point of interlocked operations, read this article.

New Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework CTP Released

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:46:02 GMT

Microsoft has released the latest CTP for Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework. Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework simplifies development by providing library-based support for introducing concurrency into applications written with any .NET language.

A neat way to express multi-clause 'if' statements in C#, C++ or Java

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:55:06 GMT

I stumbled upon a neat trick that works in all C-based languages. By composing ternary conditional operators in a particular way, we can express multi-clause if statements in a surprisingly concise and clean way.

Extended LINQ: additional operators for LINQ to objects

Mon, 26 May 2008 22:15:07 GMT

I put together a library of operators that extend LINQ to objects to add a better support for side effects, I/O, conversions, and more.

Memory control : Use GCHandle to pin down the objects

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:19:45 GMT

Shows how can you pin down an object in memory and described how pinning down works with GC

Read Properties from an MSI File

Tue, 20 May 2008 18:55:21 GMT

How to open an MSI installer file and read properties like the Product Version or Product Name from it. The code provided could be easily modified to read information from any table in the MSI database.

Lightweight Fiber/Coroutines implementation on C#

Mon, 19 May 2008 19:13:00 GMT

Fibers using .NET iterators...

7 tricks to simplify your programs with LINQ

Mon, 19 May 2008 09:31:03 GMT

Ever since I learned about LINQ, I keep discovering new ways to use it to improve my code. Every trick makes my code a little bit faster to write, and a little bit easier to read. This posting summarizes some of the tricks that I came across. I will show you how to use LINQ to: initialize an array, iterate over multiple arrays in a single loop, generate a random sequence, ...

JavaScript: Warning the user when CapsLock is on

Sat, 17 May 2008 22:16:02 GMT

Describes a method for warning a user that their caps lock is on using JavaScript. Also includes an ASP.NET control

Thinking in Concurrently in .NET

Wed, 14 May 2008 14:46:22 GMT

Matthew Podwysocki discusses several present and future approaches to handling concurrency in .Net. From the article: "We need not only a better way to handle concurrency, but a better way to describe them as well. This is where Pi-calculus comes into the picture... But before we get down that beaten path, let's look at a few options that I chose."

Credit Card number validation in C#. Visa and MC yet.

Mon, 12 May 2008 22:40:44 GMT

Simply class that performs credit card number check. Issuer check and MOD10 check.

Processing visualization language to JavaScript by John Resig

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:36:10 GMT

John Resig shows off his port of the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element..

How to break quicksort

Fri, 09 May 2008 08:04:15 GMT

Quicksort usually runs in O(N log N) time, but in special cases, it takes much longer: O(N^2). It is surprisingly easy to force any quicksort implementation to degrade into the quadratic-time behavior. This trick even works against a randomized quicksort! The article demonstrates how the trick works by applying it against the BCL Array.Sort() routine.