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

Anders Hejlsberg on Modern Compiler Construction | Seth Juarez | Channel 9

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/18

One of those “must watch” videos if you are remotely or more interested in how compilers influence our day to day coding activities.

The Red Dragon Book, first edition: Compilers. Principles, Techniques and Tools.

The Red Dragon Book, first edition: Compilers. Principles, Techniques and Tools.

It starts out with referring to the Dragon Book (well, actually the first edition of the Red Dragon Book, as there are three) describing the compilers as having front-ends consisting of a Lexer, Parser and Type Checker and back-ends consisting of Code Generator and Emitter. A full compilation is going through all five stages and there is an increasing cost using these traditional stages when going from syntax highlighting via collapsible regions to red squiggles and code completion will need to go further along those stages taking an increasing time – like seconds or even longer – whereas the user experience requires responses in ~ 100 milliseconds where his code might not even compile in the first place.

Then Anders goes on describing Roslyn, TypeScript and Compiler API JSON interfaces to them so you can run them as a service and keep compiler state, rebuilding just enough of the state on source code changes. He goes on talking about how Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Command-Line Compiler, Sublime Text and other tools (can) use these APIs to interact with the compiler so it keeps state of slowly evolving code of which the tools than can emit what they need.

Anders explains this much better and much more visually than I do: so it’s a highly recommended video.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 2 Comments »

[CMake] choose 32bit or 64bit in visual studio

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/03

This might be obvious for CMake regulars, but given the help, I would never have guessed this.

Generate x64:

cmake .. -G"Visual Studio 14 Win64"

Generate x86 is just leaving out the platform away:

cmake .. -G"Visual Studio 14"

In this case they are for Visual Studio 2015 (internally named 14).

The help:

The following generators are available on this platform:
  Visual Studio 14 2015 [arch] = Generates Visual Studio 2015 project files.
                                 Optional [arch] can be "Win64" or "ARM".
  Visual Studio 12 2013 [arch] = Generates Visual Studio 2013 project files.
                                 Optional [arch] can be "Win64" or "ARM".
  Visual Studio 11 2012 [arch] = Generates Visual Studio 2012 project files.
                                 Optional [arch] can be "Win64" or "ARM".
  Visual Studio 10 2010 [arch] = Generates Visual Studio 2010 project files.
                                 Optional [arch] can be "Win64" or "IA64".
  Visual Studio 9 2008 [arch]  = Generates Visual Studio 2008 project files.
                                 Optional [arch] can be "Win64" or "IA64".
  Visual Studio 8 2005 [arch]  = Generates Visual Studio 2005 project files.
                                 Optional [arch] can be "Win64".
  Visual Studio 7 .NET 2003    = Deprecated.  Generates Visual Studio .NET
                                 2003 project files.

–jeroen

Adopted from: [CMake] choose 32bit or 64bit in visual studio

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 11, Visual Studio 2002, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2014, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

instead of x86, msbuild is creating an x64 solution configuration via sln.metaproj – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/02

Sometimes msbuild will throw an error like this  for an x86 project:

"C:\Users\Developer\Versioned\libssh2\build\libssh2.sln" (default target) (1) ->
(ValidateSolutionConfiguration target) ->
C:\Users\Developer\Versioned\libssh2\build\libssh2.sln.metaproj : error MSB4126: The specified solution configuration "Debug|X64" is invalid. Please specify a valid solution configuration using the Configuration and Platform properties
form="Any CPU") or leave those properties blank to use the default solution configuration. [C:\Users\Developer\Versioned\libssh2\build\libssh2.sln]

Cause:

vsvars64.bat will set the environment variable Platform=x64 but vsvars32.bat will not empty this environment variable.

Easiest is to run set Platform= then run vsvars32.bat.

Adopted from MSBuild creating an x64 solution configuration via sln.metaproj – Stack Overflow [WayBack]:

If you are running this in the Visual Studio x64 command window it will set an environment variable Platform=x64 that will be used by msbuild. You can verify this by running echo in the command prompt you are using.

echo %platform%

So you will need to override the default when using x64 cmd, or run from the x86 cmd.

malexander

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C++, Development, Software Development, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio and tools, Visual Studio C++ | Leave a Comment »

How to secure memory? – Medo’s Home Page

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/03/15

Sometime you might want to protect your data in memory – the greatest example is when dealing with anything related to passwords. It is simply not smart to keep that data around in a plain-text. In .NET there are multiple methods you can use for this purpose, starting with SecureString, ProtectedMemory, and my favorite ProtectedData.…

Source: How to secure memory? – Medo’s Home Page

via: Found this via +Ilya S a post from +Josip Medved – Stuff like this should be way built into an OS, and RTL’s should have a secureMalloc()… – Joe C. Hecht – Google+

–jeroen

 

Posted in .NET, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, C#, C# 4.0, C# 5.0, C# 6 (Roslyn), Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some links on deciding if and storing your timestamps as UTC and time zone handling

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/03/08

Some links:

And a great library: nodatime/nodatime: A better date and time API for .NET

--jeroen

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

Windows 10 – language neutral batch file to start Windows Update

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/22

A while ago, I bitched that Microsoft moved away the Windows Update out of the Control panel into a language depended place (in Windows 10 1511 update broke the Hyper-V networking – Fix network connection issues).

Since then I had to maintain too many locales running Windows 10. So here is the batch file:

for /f "delims=" %%A in ('PowerShell -Command "(Get-Culture).Name"') do explorer "%LocalAppData%\Packages\windows.immersivecontrolpanel_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Indexed\Settings\%%A\AAA_SystemSettings_MusUpdate_UpdateActionButton.settingcontent-ms"

It uses these tricks:

  1. Set output of a command as a variable (in this case a for loop variable)
  2. Execute PowerShell script in a .bat file
  3. PowerShell Get-Culture (which gets a .NET CultureInfo instance)
  4. CultureInfo.Name property (which has the nl-NL, en-US, etc codes in it)

It replaced this simple batch-file which has worked for like 10 years:

%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe url.dll,FileProtocolHandler wuapp.exe

–jeroen

via: Windows Update Shortcut – Create in Windows 10 – Windows 10 Forums

Posted in .NET, .NET 1.x, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Delphi and stuff: The strange limitation of 64 threads

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/21

… there’s no need to use WaitForMultipleObjects in Step 2. It’s fairly easy to keep a counter of active threads in the pool (interlocked-incremented when a thread starts, interlocked-decremented when a thread is finished). When the counter reaches zero (no more active threads), signal an event. With only one event to wait for, you can use WaitForSingleObject

So no more 64-thread (MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS) limits for pools…

Source: Delphi and stuff: The strange limitation of 64 threads

–jeroen

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

HashLib4Pascal is a Delphi/FPC compatible library that provides an easy to use interface for computing hashes and checksums of strings (with a specified encoding), files, streams, byte arrays and untyped data to mention but a few.

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/15

One day I will need lots of hashing in Delphi: Xor-el/HashLib4Pascal: HashLib4Pascal is a Delphi/FPC compatible library that provides an easy to use interface for computing hashes and checksums of strings (with a specified encoding), files, streams, byte arrays and untyped data to mention but a few. [WayBack]

via: Hello all,I made a port of “HashLib” (http://hashlib.codeplex.com/) “with some fixes, additions and modifications” for Delphi (2010 ( I hope ) and above)… – Ugochukwu Mmaduekwe – Google+ [WayBack]

It’s a port of the C# HashLib – Home [WayBack]

Another fork is at https://github.com/bonesoul/HashLib

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Delphi 10 Seattle, Delphi 10.1 Berlin (BigBen), Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Delphi XE8, Development, Encoding, FreePascal, Pascal, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Date format converter from Text or Unix/Mac/Filetime/Microsoft to virtually any readable form

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/09

Brilliant Date format converter from dates in Text (almost any format) or timestamp numbers in Unix, Mac, Filetime or Microsoft (which is the same as Delphi TDateTime) format to any of these formats:

Text Date:
Date in human-readable text
Wednesday, March 23, 2016 4:05:39pm
RFC 822:
RFC 822 formatted date
Wed, 23 Mar 2016 16:05:39 +0000
ISO 8601:
ISO 8601 formatted date
2016-03-23T16:05:39+00:00
UNIX Timestamp:
seconds since Jan 1 1970
1458749139
Mac Timestamp:
seconds since Jan 1 1904
3541593939
Microsoft Timestamp:
days since Dec 31 1899
42452.670590278
FILETIME:
100-nanoseconds since Jan 1 1601
131032227390000000
01D1851D:D7B58B80

Source: Date format converter

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, .NET, Apple, Delphi, Development, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Software Development | 1 Comment »

An exponential back-off implementation I used somewhere; probably room for improvement, but it works good enough.

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/01/17

I will probably need this again somewhere in the future: An exponential back-off implementation I used somewhere; probably room for improvement, but it works good enough.

It’s Delphi, but I’ve not seen practical implementations in C# either.

(the updated version thanks to Anders Melander).

–jeroen


function TryGetLocationLockWithExponentialBackOff: Boolean;
const
cBase = 2;
cMaxWaitMilliSeconds = 1500;
var
lWaitMilliSeconds: integer;
begin
Result := True;
lWaitMilliSeconds := cBase;
while (not TryGetLocationLock) do
begin
if (lWaitMilliSeconds > cMaxWaitMilliSeconds) then
Exit(False);
Sleep(lWaitMilliSeconds);
Inc(lWaitMilliSeconds, lWaitMilliSeconds);
end;
end;


function TryGetLocationLockWithExponentialBackOff: Boolean;
const
cBase = 2;
cMaxWaitMilliSeconds = 1500;
var
lIteration: Integer;
lWaitMilliSeconds: Single;
begin
lIteration := 1;
lWaitMilliSeconds := 0;
while lWaitMilliSeconds < cMaxWaitMilliSeconds do
begin
Result := TryGetLocationLock;
if Result then
Exit;
lWaitMilliSeconds := IntPower(cBase, lIteration);
Inc(lIteration);
Sleep(Round(lWaitMilliSeconds));
end;
Result := TryGetLocationLock;
end;

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 5 Comments »