C#

MEF 101 - Part2

This is part 2 of a 2 part series exploring the MEF.We covered some of the basics in Part 1 In this part we'll cover the following: Catalogs Recomposition Export Providers Catalogs: Catalogs provide one way for MEF to discover components that it can compose. In it's most basic form it contains a registration of types. A container by itself is just an empty repository. The catalog is the one that collects and returns ComposablePartDefinitions i.e (objects of types that you have registered with MEF)...
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Posted On Sunday, October 30, 2011 3:27 PM | Feedback (0)

MEF 101 - Part1

The Managed Extensibility framework or MEF is a framework released as part of .NET 4 and Silverlight that provides a mechanism to dynamically compose an application at runtime out of loosely coupled parts and provides a variety of mechanisms to discovering these parts. You can think of this as an implementation of a plugin framework that enables plugging in functionality into a container, based on information available at runtime. The most notable example of a MEF client is the Visual Studio 2010...
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Posted On Saturday, July 03, 2010 9:03 AM | Feedback (4)

A simple Dynamic Proxy

Frameworks such as EF4 and MOQ do what most developers consider "dark magic". For instance in EF4, when you use a POCO for an entity you can opt-in to get behaviors such as "lazy-loading" and "change tracking" at runtime merely by ensuring that your type has the following characteristics: The class must be public and not sealed. The class must have a public or protected parameter-less constructor. The class must have public or protected properties Adhere to this and your type is magically endowed...
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Posted On Sunday, April 04, 2010 3:41 PM | Feedback (2)

Chunking a List - .NET vs Python

Chunking a List As I mentioned last time, I'm knee deep in python these days. I come from a statically typed background so it's definitely a mental adjustment. List comprehensions is BIG in Python and having worked with a few of them I can see why. Let's say we need to chunk a list into sublists of a specified size. Here is how we'd do it in C# static class Extensions { public static IEnumerable<List<T>... Chunk<T>(this List<T> l, int chunkSize) { if (chunkSize <0) { throw...
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Posted On Sunday, March 07, 2010 12:36 PM | Feedback (5)

Showing Progress in a .NET Console Application

Showing the progress of an operation is trivial in rich client applications using a progress bar control of some sort. But what about .NET console apps? The Console class offers 2 static methods Console.Write and Console.WriteLine to write out to the Console, but any subsequent calls to these methods will write the content out at the current location of the cursor.This doesn't really help when you want the progress percentage to refresh in place instead. The trick is to write out the "\r" character...
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Posted On Sunday, February 21, 2010 10:50 AM | Feedback (4)

Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0

C# 4.0 introduces the notion of Covariance and Contravariance of generic type parameters for interfaces and delegate types. Eric Lippert has put together a bunch of posts that goes into details of the why and how, an excellent read but not for the faint of heart. I would strongly suggest reading these posts to get a firm grounding and a better appreciation of this feature. It took me a while to get my head wrapped around this, especially since none of the VS2010 Betas were not out at the time and...
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Posted On Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:50 PM | Feedback (9)

T4 template consuming a WCF service

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged since things have been crazy busy. I finally decided to kick myself and do a post so without further ado, the problem at hand: A co-worker of mine asked me whether its possible to dynamically create a type from some data he is receiving from a WCF service (over HTTP). My natural response was, why would you need to do that since Visual Studio creates a proxy from the metadata exposed by the service and the return types would typically be DataContracts. Well, it...
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Posted On Sunday, October 18, 2009 12:06 AM | Feedback (17)

Why no Anonymous Iterators in C#

Yes I’m a language geek and yes the awesome Eric Lippert is my idol when it comes to anything C# and the CLR, I’ve been following his blog for a long time and recently Eric wrote an awesome series on the how and why of Iterator Blocks. The entire series is very well worth a read, but then again I’d read almost anything Eric writes from why the sky is blue to why the Falkirk Wheel has horns. I had posed a question on this post about why there are no anonymous iterators in C#. Eric provided a very...
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Posted On Monday, August 24, 2009 9:55 PM | Feedback (1)

Creating Higher Level APIs with TPL

The BCL has a bunch of APIs which provide asynchronous versions of operations in the form of either Beginxxx/Endxxx or XyzCompleted, the former known as Asynchronous Programming Model(APM) and the latter known as Event Based Asynchronous Pattern (EAP). TPL provides a nice abstraction for performing asynchronous operations as Tasks using delegates, but what can you do for working with these existing BCL classes which already have an async version? Here is an example. Let's say we need to download...
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Posted On Sunday, August 23, 2009 3:46 PM | Feedback (0)

CLR via C# 3rd Edition

Some book news…Jeff Richter is one of my favorite authors and I’ll read just about anything he writes. His last book CLR via C#, 2nd Edition left me wanting more, luckily Jeff has signed into a contract for writing a 3rd edition of the book updated for C#3.0/4.0 and .NET 4.0...
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Posted On Sunday, August 16, 2009 3:06 PM | Feedback (0)

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