DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by plinth

The Future of Programming Languages

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:31:16 GMT

In this article I'm going to focus on Dynamic Typing and Metaprogramming in particular. It's interesting to consider what the impact on the maintainability of our code from their increased prominence might be.

Tidying Up Old Blog Entries (Cleaning up MS Office HTML tags)

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:16:33 GMT

Looking back it seems like complete lunacy. For a period of time my method of choice to create blog entries was to write them out in Word 2003 and then export html. The almost unreadable text has been haunting me for a long time and I've finally gone back and fixed them. Along the way I built a small utility for doing this and here it is

Late Binding in C# using Dynamic Compilation

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:16:02 GMT

Steve goes through his approach to using reflection, making the code easier to read, making it easier to maintain, discusses the "middle-class multiple inheritance", and provides a zipped project of the AdapterCompiler.

F# at Code Camp 10 In Waltham, MA

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:01:14 GMT

Richard Minerich presented functional programming and concurrency in F# at Code Camp in Massachusetts

Embeddable C# Compiler

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:46:05 GMT

Manuel de Icaza created an embeddable C# compiler for Mono.

VSX Conference

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:31:13 GMT

Lou Franco's recollection of events at the VSX Conference last week. (Visual Studio eXtensibility)

Tidy Things Up

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:16:16 GMT

Ever wanted to have one assembly, but be able to manage your code in separate assemblies?

Some Managed/Unmanaged Exception Tricks

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:01:23 GMT

I just spent 5 days tracking down a Heisenbug. Historically, I've tracked down a lot of these but not because I create a lot of them, because I'm good at finding them. In this particular case, I had a set of unit tests that were failing on our build server but did not fail consistently on my machine. This is not a good sign to start with.

What if it's not in Environment.SpecialFolder?

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:31:02 GMT

The correct way to find the location of system folders not listed in Environment.SpecialFolder.

Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings on the Fly

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:01:12 GMT

.NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you programmatically manipulate the way your garbage collector acts. This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you through this new property and the different effects of each of it's possible settings.

Multilingual OCR

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:46:06 GMT

The challenges of accommodating multilingual OCR engines - and what does "multilingual" really mean anyway when it comes to technical implementation?

Managed C++ and IDisposable

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:01:10 GMT

Quick fix for IDisposable compiler error

Debugging Code in the GAC - the best thing since sliced bread

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:31:08 GMT

"[...] I read a lot and one thing that caught my eye was that any assembly that is to be used as an add-in needs to be signed and installed in the GAC. This is troublesome as I always assumed that debugging code built this way was going to be, well, a pain in the GAC." Steve Hawley from Atalasoft gives a great little tutorial on this would-be problem.

Developer Error or TFS Shortcoming?

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:01:03 GMT

Steve summarizes a recent experience where he had to reinstall his system and apps to eliminate a problem with unmanaged debugging. Source control ended up not having all of his code which could have been a disaster. Steve was able to successfully restore his machine but it took longer than it should have - couldn't TFS have helped with this?

Menu item usability vs. learnability

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:16:02 GMT

Lou Franco gives his take on application UI, inclusion/exclusion of menu items, etc. "A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would."

How to Build a Managed/Unmanaged Library

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:46:03 GMT

Working with an unmanaged static library - with that, you can build a managed C++ wrapper that exposes the functionality that you need. The C++ compiler does some fairly amazing things in terms of knowing when to do unmanaged/unmanaged transitions, but sometimes it does some surprising things that will cost. [Sample code included in the post]

Free WPF Image File Viewer with Annotations

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:01:03 GMT

This post includes a free image file viewer application complete with annotation controls - source code for the project is also included - this is a Windows Presentation Foundation application, 100% .NET, and was built using the DotImage toolkit from Atalasoft.

A Safe & Asynchronous One to Many Stream Copy Through IL & Inheritance

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:46:03 GMT

This post discusses ways to manage or work around problems arising from the statefulness of .NET Streams, including an explanation about how this is possible both through traditional inheritance and also through some indulgence in hacking of object protection levels by emitting custom IL.

Queuing up Your Remote Invokes

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:01:03 GMT

Serializing requests for remote invoke or multiple requests at will? Here is some sample code and a free download that can help with setting this up.

The Cursed History of Smalltalk in .NET

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:01:04 GMT

Digging up the history of Smalltalk for .NET - none of the 5 are currently in development

Visual C++ Compiler Bug Discovered

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:16:03 GMT

This bug exists in the optimizer in VC 2003 and 2005. It does not exist in VC 2008. Code, etc. included.

ompiling, Linking, and Linq-ing

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:31:04 GMT

Thoughts about LINQ vs. flat files

FlingScan - Free Searchable PDF Service

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:31:08 GMT

This web application generates a searchable PDF from any standard image such as a multipage TIFF or JPEG. The searchable PDF is emailed back to you where you can save it to your file system and search the content with one of many PDF search filters available for Microsoft's Desktop Search or Google's Desktop Search.

Color Scheme Generator Web Application

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:16:02 GMT

This application will generate a color scheme for you based on an image. After you upload an image, it will generate you a list of the most common colors that are significantly different from each other. Click anywhere on the image to pick other colors. There are zoom tools to pick the exact pixel you need. Web demo and Source Code Available

20 Years Later IRC is Still Useful; Are You Taking Advantage of it?

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:46:04 GMT

Why You Should Care About A 20 Year Old Protocol? IRC is much more than just a relic of an earlier age. It helps connect highly technical people, it has weathered the years better than any other high level internet protocol. It does not suffer from the spam and abuse that have overtaken other protocols and no Web2.0 technology has supplanted it.