The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘.NET’ Category

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NDC 2019 Keynote: Welcome to the Machine – Hadi Hariri – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/27

I am really glad this keynote got recorded. Still very relevant, it is as much about software development as it is about society.

Go watch it, as it gives you reason to think about your role in the software development process, and in the information fire hose at large.

Back in the days, David Intersimone was right when he created the regular blog post “Sip from the Firehose” (for early materials, see [WayBack] GetPublished – Author Information: Firehose).

The talk main thread is about current and ever growing overload of information which basically makes it disinformation, combined with the abundance of “AI” recording devices around you that basically make you the product.

Basically we reached all the tick marks of these books:

The session is not just about “how bad is the situation” (it is very), but also provides directions on how to get out of it for both people in the development process, as well as consumers, producers and sharers of information.

via:

–jeroen

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Posted in .NET, Development, Opinions, Power User, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Run your unit tests in parallel with NUnit

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/26

TL;DR

The examples in this post are specific for NUnit but, you can apply this pattern for safely running unit tests in parallel to any unit test framework that supports parallel execution.

To safely run tests in parallel, do the following:

  1. Mark your test fixtures with the Parallelizable attribute and set the parallel scope to ParallelScope.All.
  2. Create a private class called TestScope and implement IDisposable.
  3. Put all startup and clean-up logic inside the TestScope constructor and .Dispose() method respectively.
  4. Wrap your test code in a using (var scope = new TestScope) { ... } block

From [WayBack] Run your unit tests in parallel with NUnit, which also covers:

  • Background (on why you might want this)
  • How to safely run tests in parallel
  • Maximizing parallel execution with Visual Studio
  • Maximizing parallel execution with Azure DevOps

Via: [WayBack] Sander Aernouts on Twitter: “Run unit tests in parallel with NUnit without having one test interfere with another test. https://t.co/FC0fNocGov”

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

GitHub – drewnoakes/string-theory: Identify and reduce memory used by duplicate .NET strings

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/01/19

[WayBack] GitHub – drewnoakes/string-theory: Identify and reduce memory used by duplicate .NET strings:

Identifies opportunities to improve heap memory consumption by strings.

Finds duplicate strings and provides ways to see what object graphs are keeping them alive.

Once you identify a suspicious referrer, you can query to see what other strings it is holding across the whole heap, and the total number of wasted bytes.

Cool tool to help trim down .NET string memory usage.

Via: [WayBack] drewnoakes on Twitter: “This week I published #StringTheory, a tool for analysing and reducing the memory used by strings on the managed .NET heap. We are using it to improve @VisualStudio performance, with encouraging results so far. Try it on your apps!”

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

How To Write Unmaintainable Code: Ensure a job for life ;-) by Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/12/09

A great reference on how not to code still is

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Ensure a job for life ;-)

Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products

I am still amazed when browsing through code, how many people use one or more of the anti-patterns in it.

One example I came across was this piece of Delphi RTL code:

class function TMarshalUnmarshalBase.ComposeKey(clazz: TClass; Field: string): string;
begin
  if clazz <> nil then
    Result := clazz.UnitName + SEP_DOT + clazz.ClassName + SEP_DOT + Field
  else
    Result := '';
end;

So I did a quick search at in the Delphi RTL for clazz, then found these occurences, indicating not only the authors of them have been under a rock, but also the code reviewers:

  • 98 in data\dbx\Data.DBXJSONReflect.pas
  • 7 in data\dbx\Data.DBXTransport.pas
  • 97 in data\rest\REST.JsonReflect.pas
  • 3 in DUnit\src\TestFramework.pas
  • 22 in indy\abstraction\IPPeerAPI.pas

I have seen similar things in many environments, even run-time libraries of others, though this is one of the worst examples and falls under the anti-pattern:

Thesaurus Surrogatisation

To break the boredom, use a thesaurus to look up as much alternate vocabulary as possible to refer to the same action, e.g. display, show, present. Vaguely hint there is some subtle difference, where none exists. However, if there are two similar functions that have a crucial difference, always use the same word in describing both functions (e.g. print to mean “write to a file”, “put ink on paper” and “display on the screen”). Under no circumstances, succumb to demands to write a glossary with the special purpose project vocabulary unambiguously defined. Doing so would be an unprofessional breach of the structured design principle of information hiding.

There is a great other anti-pattern in the document too:

Delphi/Pascal Only

: Don’t use functions and procedures. Use the label/goto statements then jump around a lot inside your code using this. It’ll drive ’em mad trying to trace through this. Another idea, is just to use this for the hang of it and scramble your code up jumping to and fro in some haphazard fashion.

Enjoy reading the anti-pattern descriptions, which are now maintained at [WayBack] GitHub – Droogans/unmaintainable-code: A more maintainable, easier to share version of the infamous http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html, as it was originally a multi-page hard to maintain set of small articles:

A lot of comments were posted because of it: [WayBack] Responses to Roedy’s Unmaintainable Code Essay

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »

.NET: interfaces that inherit from multiple base interfaces

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/12/03

For my link archive:

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Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi spring collections

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/12/02

[WayBack] Spring Collections I have a list of elements, there are, for example, 100 of them. List : IList; I want to get 5 values greater than 10 and … – Jacek Laskowski – Google+

Q

I have a list of elements, there are, for example, 100 of them.

List : IList<Integer>;

I want to get 5 values greater than 10 and I do it like this:

result: = List.Where(ValueIsGreatThan10).Take(5);

Will the “work loop” be executed a minimum number of times and if, for example, the first 5 values in the list will be greater than 5, then only the five will be checked? Or maybe the Where() loop will scan 100 elements, and Take() will return the first 5 results?

A (by Stefan Glienke)

Where and Take are streaming operators and only execute as much as required.

Also the operations have deferred execution. So your statement does not materialize any collection yet. Only if you iterate it will.

They are designed after the operators in .NET so the table from [WayBack] Classification of Standard Query Operators by Manner of Execution (C#) | Microsoft Docs applies. If you find any difference please report it.

Example:

var
  nums: IEnumerable<Integer>;
  i: Integer;
begin
  nums := TEnumerable.Range(1, 100).Where(
    function(const i: Integer): Boolean
    begin
      Writeln('checking: ', i);
      Result := i > 10;
    end
  ).Take(5);
  Writeln('query created');
  for i in nums do
    Writeln('got number: ', i);
end.

This code will print:

query created
checking: 1
checking: 2
checking: 3
checking: 4
checking: 5
checking: 6
checking: 7
checking: 8
checking: 9
checking: 10
checking: 11
got number: 11
checking: 12
got number: 12
checking: 13
got number: 13
checking: 14
got number: 14
checking: 15
got number: 15

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

FeaturesShim: using ShimGen for creating a shim to a program either console or GUI so you need only one bin directory

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/11/17

[WayBack] FeaturesShim is a cool Chocolatey feature that uses ShimGen.

This allows Chocolatey to take only one directory in your search PATH, with a lot of small files, that link to the much larger actual executable files.

ShimGen (like many other parts of Windows and some other parts of Chocolatey) is not open source, but the mechanism is documented.

More information:

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

powershell – Format-Table forgets some properties, but Format-List shows them all. Why? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/11/12

Reminder to self: finish the script that initiated this 2013 question (yes ages ago!) [WayBack] powershell – Format-Table forgets some properties, but Format-List shows them all. Why? – Stack Overflow.

The question was based on code I was really happy I saved in the WayBack machine: WayBack: how-to: Print/List installed programs/applications sorted by date | Tech Off | Forums | Channel 9

So here the question and the answer.

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Posted in .NET, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Editors (including visual studio code – VSCode): insert tab character manually – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/11/11

Sometimes you are in search of a real TAB character, as most editors (except a few like the ones for Golang) I bump into are space-based. A great answer at [WayBack] visual studio code – VSCode insert tab character manually – Stack Overflow:

Quick-and-dirty solution: Find a tab somewhere else, then copy-paste.

Chances are that you already have a tab character in the file you are editing, but if not you can generate one in another application or text editor.

You can also generate a tab programmatically in a bash shell with the following command (the brackets are optional):

echo -e [\\t]

For your more immediate needs, I have inserted a tab character below…

    There is a tab character between these brackets: [ ]

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code | Leave a Comment »

My toolkit – Roald’s blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/22

Always interesting to see what others put on their Windows development systems, for instance: [WayBack] My toolkit – Roald’s blog

Everytime I (re)install my development computer I need to think about all the tools I need and use on a regular basis. For that reason, and maybe to inspire others, here’s my list of essentia…

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

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