Flashback # The last time I used Unix-to-Unix format (AKA UUEncoding) was when USENET was still the big thing and Mosaic web browser was just coming out. That was until recently, when I had a requirement to encode and decode this file type.
Motivation # I had these flyweights that added a lot of overhead to the serialization process. They weren't really needed in the serialized payload either. In fact, I could recreate the flyweight in memory from just a single property on the object.
Motivation # I decided to use log4net for a recent project I had been working on. There is a concept of loggers and appenders. Loggers are composed of appenders and a log threshold. Appenders are consumers of logging information and provide specific implementations (eg. file, email, event log, database). You can configure the loggers and appenders either in the application configuration or at runtime.
Pitfalls in Production # Being able to monitor production services for potential errors is critical. Especially if the services are dependant on external resources which may become unavailable or exhibit unexpected behavior. Even if you follow good software development discipline, this is always a source of concern. Think network outages, unannounced third party API changes, hosted services becoming unavailable, etc.
The Creeping Problem # I recently found myself developing a request-response style system, where the lifetime of a request could be interrupted at any moment. For most same process execution, like your average desktop application, this is a concern, but arises more often when dealing with multiple coordinated processes. My case ended up being the latter.
Introduction & Scope # The PCAP-NG file format is used to store network captured data used by great programs like Wireshark. There are several API's available for both Linux and Windows but none that are ported to .NET. I decided to make one for my own use in building a network traffic replay agent.
Introduction # In some cases, you may want to read/write binary data from/to your relational database. This can be a problem when the data set size exceeds the memory address size (eg. 32-bit processes) or the managed large object heap cannot load it all without throwing an OutOfMemoryException. In those cases, you will need to load the data into memory in chunks. Fortunately, the T-SQL syntax supports this operation.
Introduction # Microsoft introduced native image mastering support in Vista, going forward. The library itself is not too complex but the latest version of the image mastering API (IMAPI) has some quirks. This is well documented by Eric Haddan in his article describing how to build an interop file and use it from .NET.
Motivation # One of the main concerns in any licensing implementation is that authored license files are coming from the trusted authority (ie. your company) and not some third party. This can be accomplished in software by encrypting and decrypting the license with a single key, but symmetric key storage can be cumbersome and have added complexity.
Background # Unlike most sensors used in data acquisition, thermocouples do not have a linear mapping between their voltage and celcius values. This means that instead of factoring some scalar value against the data, in order to scale it to engineering units (eg. volts to acceleration), an experimentally derived equation must be created to approximate the temperature at specific voltages. This non-linearity is primarily due to the materials being used to discover the temperature difference.
WPF & Multithreading # In designing applications, it may be advantageous to run data processing methods on a separate thread from the UI. This allows greater responsiveness in the application and takes advantage of concurrent computation.
I just started using the Entity Framework recently to employ persistence for an already established code base. Initially I was using the "Model & Database First" paradigm where a designer is used to layout the data model. Although, this ended up being tedious since my POCO instance had to exactly match the POCO proxy instance in my model designer view. After upgrading to EF 4.1, I realized the "Code First" paradigm was the way to go since I had to adapt the persistence model to my already existing code.
One of the earliest problems that I ran into was having more than one property on a class that referenced the same class type. This example was taken from a great site that explored the different EF properties.
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I was tasked recently with writing a parser for TEDS bit stream data. There is an IEEE published paper with an overview of the standard but it doesn't give any examples for implementation. I was finally able to find a paper that gave examples but still had trouble parsing the data. I finally realized there is not only 2 selector bits after the basic TEDS block but selector bits inside the standard template (2 in the case of template 25). Here are my main findings:
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I always like when a post gets to the point (especially after searching in Google). In short, if you perform an operation that waits to acquire a lock, the thread doesn't actually stop.
In concrete terms of .NET coding, if you call the WaitOne method on a thread, it may still process events that the CLR deems "high priority". This can be a big problem if the event handlers go into the critical region you are trying to protect.
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