Code Motion
The code we write in C# undergoes many changes before it is finally executed. There's the usual stuff interviews are made of: C# source is compiled to IL into a byte code representation that can be...
View ArticleCIL Constant Literals
Sometimes you'll want to create constant literals in CIL code. Most of the time you won't, but when you do, you'll need this. There are multiple ways of representing a constant, such as a constructor...
View ArticleIdle = m + C1 + C2 + C3
There are a group of processor performance counters in Windows called "% Cx Time", which show the break down of processor idle time in which the processor goes into a low-power mode. Not all processors...
View ArticleEffective Aperture
Ever wondered what the numbers on an SLR camera's lens meant? My Nikon D80 has an 18-135mm 3.5-5.6 zoom lens. At the shortest focal length - 18mm - the maximum effective aperture is 3.5 f/stops; at the...
View ArticleMercator
There's a ship anchored in Oostende harbour named Mercator, after the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. I've seen it a few times and registered that there must be something vaguely interesting...
View ArticleSupersize Me
The Mac mini is not a great beast; its 120GB hard drive is very easy to fill. Seeing as it's smaller than my iPod Classic and there's no more space on the computer, I needed to upgrade - I needed to...
View ArticleGreat Zero Challenge
Don't just throw your old hard disks out (especially if they're still inside a laptop, as this only makes it easier for casual analysis) without first wiping them clean. A long time ago, according to...
View ArticleAsynchronous ASP.NET / SQL Server
We all agree that waiting is evil, right? Well, threads are evil too! Ok, we need a few threads to get the job done, but they (ideally) shouldn't ever block.Achieving high concurrency has never been...
View ArticleAsynchronous ASMX Web Services
To avoid threads from blocking in an ASMX web service, Microsoft have given us a nifty pattern to employ: instead of declaring your method with a signature like this [WebMethod]public ReturnType...
View ArticleAsynchronous ASP.NET MVC
Since ASP.NET MVC 2, Microsoft's thrown the AsyncController class into the framework, enabling asynchronous ASP.NET MVC applications without forcing developers to hand-craft their own weird and...
View ArticleExternal Sort
If you're ever tasked with sorting a data set larger than can fit into the memory of a single machine, you shouldn't need to panic. Put on your outside-the-box hat (pun intended) and get to work.First...
View ArticleAmbient Transactions
With a title like that, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the post was going to be about purchasing a beer at Cafe del Mar while watching the sun set. Unfortunately not.First, consider this sample...
View ArticleVersion Tolerant Serialization
Somewhere in the vast gap between version 1.1 and version 4 of the .NET Framework, Microsoft came up with a solution to the version intolerance problem of serialization. I may have been living under a...
View ArticleMonad
Don't expect a great answer from me as to what constitutes a monad; there's already a good question/answer on Stack Overflow.Basically, it's a bit of glue that joins two functions together. I decided...
View ArticleFaultException
If you're stuck trying to get WCF to play nicely with a FaultException<T> where T is a custom System.Exception-derived type, you may be interested to know that the exception needs to have this...
View ArticleMap Reduce Example in F#
A while back I blogged about the canonical map reduce example (as seen in the Hadoop user manual) of counting words. Today I noticed that an alias for F#'s List.fold function is List.reduce*. I had...
View ArticleReal World Scalability
Armed with [edit: never quite] all there is to know about solving scalability problems, it's just short of impossible to walk onto a client site and fix their poorly performing application. Changes to...
View ArticleCovariance / Contravariance
This is a little experiment to get your head around co- and contravariance, as applied to generic interfaces in C#. Covariance allows the result of a computation to vary, while Contravariance allows...
View ArticleMemoize
The first time I saw this word I thought someone had mispelled it. Instead - as I later found out - it's the name for a common pattern in functional programming. Memoize caches the result of a function...
View ArticleDiskette
I was emptying out a bunch of junk from my apartment and came across an old 3.5" floppy disk. My mind - being as it is - immediately wondered what the unit tests would look like if I were writing a...
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