Channel 9 - Discussions by TypeSpafe

Tech Off - Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 for developing?

TypeSpafe — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:15:07 GMT

Well, I installed it anyway just to see what it was like, and it's worth it just for SuperFetch.

Tech Off - Casting generic interfaces

TypeSpafe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:56:44 GMT

Yeah, I considered that, but it adds to the complexity of the code. There are going to be something like 250 business objects with an average of 20 properties in each, and even though they're generated, it's still a bunch more code.

If I hit performance issues I'll add overrides for the relevant classes, but since these indexers are used in fairly low-volume operations like web binding, I'm not worried at the moment.

Actually, even if I was doing that, I'd still be tempted to use Emit to generate the switch methods at runtime.

Plus, it's nice to have it built into the framework functionality instead of the generator.

Tech Off - Casting generic interfaces

TypeSpafe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:30:51 GMT

Sorry, you've either misunderstood my post or I needed a better example of a business object:

class Person : BusinessObject
{
    private string forename;
    public string Forename
    {
        get { return this.forename; }
        set
        {
            this.forename = value.ToUpper();
            // And some other stuff...
        }
    }
}
...
Person person = new Person();
person["Forename"] = "bob";
// person.Forename is now "BOB"

The indexer provides access to the actual property, with all the functionality therein. There are also helper classes to return information about the properties within the objects, which mean the application supports user-designed wizards, reporting and other features. None of this is possible without reflection.

Tech Off - Casting generic interfaces

TypeSpafe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:48:32 GMT

evildictaitor wrote:
If you have to resort to reflection to solve a problem, it means that you are approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

You should never ever ever ever ever ever ever use reflection. ever.

I'm creating a business object framework wherein the business objects provide string-indexed access to their properties. For example:

class Person : BusinessObject
{
public string Forename { get; set; }
}
...
Person person = new Person();
person["Forename"] = "Bob";

This gives me flexible runtime access to the object properties so the end user of the application can achieve all manner of runtime goodness. How would I achieve this without reflection?

Come to that, how should the Windows Forms team have written BindingSource?

Tech Off - Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 for developing?

TypeSpafe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:33:28 GMT

I use a virtual network for working at home as it keeps all the dev/debug gubbins away from my primary OS, which I also use for gaming. The PC is a quad-core 8GB thing with Vista Ultimate x64, so it runs the virtual environments quite nicely.

At the moment, I've got a virtual server running SQL 2005 and TFS 2008 which I spin up when I need either of those, and another virtual server running VS2008 Team System for Developers. Both have got 2GB of RAM assigned. They're all running in Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, and I remote desktop onto them to work.

Would performance get better or worse if I switched to Windows Server 2008? Or would it stay roughly the same?

Tech Off - Casting generic interfaces

TypeSpafe — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:46:28 GMT

In that specific instance, you should just have a non-generic base interface with an object version of the property:

interface MyInterface
{
object GetValue ();
}

interface MyInterface : MyInterface
{
T GetValue ();
}

Then you can

MyStringClass : MyInterface

MyStringClass sc = new MyStringClass () ;
...
...
MyInterface dc = sc as MyInterface;
if (dc != null)
{
object o = dc.GetValue () ;
}

Note also the use of the as keyword to perform casting...

Tech Off - Idle speculation about temporary files and such

TypeSpafe — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:48:30 GMT

I was watching the Mark Russinovich Win2K8 Deep Dive video on my way to work this morning, and he's talking about future directions for Windows and changes in hardware that drive those directions, and one of the things he mentions is Flash memory and SSDs and the issues with those.

There's been quite a lot of discussion about this lately, what with the Asus Eee PC and other SSD-based devices, and one of the things which keeps coming up is the limited number of writes you can do and how that relates to temporary folders/files. And I thought about my new PC and the 8GB of RAM it's got, which only cost £160(!), and how it could probably manage fairly well without writing temporary files to disk.

And then I thought, if those 4 2GB PC6400 DDR2 modules only cost £160, then older, slower volatile memory could probably be manufactured stupidly cheaply. At the moment it costs more because very few people want it, but if it became ubiquitous again, surely it would be cheap as chips.

I appear to be banging on quite a lot. What I'm basically getting at is, you could have volatile SSDs for temporary file storage, or build some onto the motherboard, with HD-style interfaces to get round the addressing limit, that would be seen from inside Windows (or whatever) as a disk, but could be used for temp files. Performance would be awesome and the limited number of writes to the Flash memory in the SSD would be preserved.