Tag Archives: ReSharper

Bing it on, Reactive Extensions! – story, code and slides

Posted by on 1 June 2013 2 comments

I held a presentation at UBISOFT Buchares headquarters for the RONUA local programmers user group recently as I’ve announced earlier.
Here’s the contents, step-by-step, final code and slides.

————- [scroll way down for the downloads]

I was recently tasked with rewriting an app component by leveraging Reactive Extensions. I knew little about Rx (the short form of Reactive Extensions) and all I remembered was that it has two interfaces IObservable and IObserver and it seemed dull at that time.

Basically the component enables search without needing to hit ENTER or a “Go!” button, although provides for these. After the user finishes typing an async request goes to the data store and searches for the phrase entered and fetches the results. In the original implementation the component used a lot of timers, event handlers, private fields all making up a nice spaghetti bowl of code.

Let’s do this step by step and see how our little (demo) app develops. Fire up Visual Studio 2012 and start a new WPF project (.NET 4.5 preferrably). The very next thing we’ll install Rx. Right click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select “Manage NuGet Packages” (you can also use the Package Manager Console if you like it better). Search online for “Reactive Extensions”.

In the result lists (this requires a functional internet connection) select ‘Reactive Extensions – WPF Helpers‘ (the nice thing about NuGet packages is that it automatically resolves and installs all the dependencies). Accept the license(s) (you know what’s the most common lie told these days? “I have read and accepted the terms of the license” :P).

In our demo we will use Bing as the data store which we’ll target through our searches (sorry, Google was too difficult to setup, offered less search requests per month and no C# demo code. Thanks Google, thanks again.). In order to do this you will need a Microsoft Account (I guess we all have one these days). Go to http://www.bing.com/developers/ and then select “Search API” -> Start now (this will lead you to https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/5BA839F1-12CE-4CCE-BF57-A49D98D29A44 ). There are paid subscriptions and a free subscription. Hit signup and go through the process (leave a comment if you are unable to go through this process).

In the end you will need to obtain the (Primary) Account Key and the Customer ID. These are available under “My Account” -> Account Information ( https://datamarket.azure.com/account ). We’ll use these later so save them. Also, don’t share them with other people because these are your credentials. Also visit “My Data” ( https://datamarket.azure.com/account/datasets ) and click on “Bing Search API”‘s “Use” link (far right, https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/explore/bing/search ). Capture the “URL for current expressed query” : “https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/v1/Web“. We’ll also need these later.

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Type check and inheritance – and a nice ReSharper tip

Posted by on 25 October 2012 2 comments

Let’s suppose you have three classes in a simple hierarchy :

public class A
{
}

public class B : A
{
}

public class C : A
{
}

Now suppose you receive an instance of one of these classes (you don’t know the exact type to which this instance belongs). How can you determine programatically if the instance is of a type inheriting from A or it is of type A exactly?

Normally I would do the following :

var instance = ObtainInstanceFromSomeWhere(); // this method will not return null
var instanceIsExactlyOfTypeA = typeof(A) == instance.GetType();
var instanceIsOfTypeAOrAnInheritingType = typeof(A).IsAssignableFrom(instance.GetType());

All these work and are nice and dandy. However ReSharper showed me a nicer alternative to the last statement :

var instanceIsOfTypeAOrAnInheritingType = typeof(A).IsInstanceOfType(instance);

Now, pro’lly, many of you knew about this method but I didn’t! 🙂
Hopefully it will help someone..

ReSharper hidden features – Generate Delegating Members

Posted by on 30 July 2012 1 comment

A frequently-used design pattern is the Decorator. This is also known as a mixin (or they might not be the very same thing but certainly they are related).

Typically you might need to create a class that implements a certain interface and uses another class that implements that exact interface but you need to provide some additional feature(s). An example would be a class that adds transactional behavior to an existing data-access class (a naive example) :


public interface IDataAccess
{
    void AddCustomerInvoice(Invoice invoice, User user);
}

public class DataAccess : IDataAccess
{
    public void AddCustomerInvoice(Invoice invoice, User user)
    {
        InsertInvoice(invoice, user);
        UpdateCustomerDebt(user, invoice.Total);
    }

    // ... the rest of the implementation
}

public class TransactionalDataAccess : IDataAccess
{
    private readonly IDataAccess _dataAccess;

    public TransactionalDataAccess(IDataAccess dataAccess)
    {
        if (dataAccess == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException();
        }
        _dataAccess = dataAccess;
    }

    public void AddCustomerInvoice(Invoice invoice, User user)
    {
         using(var tx = new TransactionScope())
         {
             _dataAccess.AddCustomerInvoice(invoice, user);
             tx.Complete();
         }
    }

    // ... the rest of the implementation
}

Another type of example would be the Adapter design pattern. An example would be providing access to a (static) class (that may be out of your control) in a mock-able manner. That is, implement another class, non-static, which implements a defined interface and eases unit-testing :

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Back to basics – object equality

Posted by on 5 April 2012 No comments

What do you think this piece of code will output?

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(GetValue() == (object)true);
            Console.WriteLine(object.Equals(GetValue(), true));
        }

        static object GetValue()
        {
            return true;
        }
    }

I won’t be like others and ask you not to run the code. Run the code if you feel like it. I’ll wait here.

…

Back already? Surprised?
I surely have been.. I’ve found a piece of code similar to this as I was cleaning up code in our repository. You have a method that is required to return object (as in System.Object) and you want to check if, unboxed, it holds the value of true (or not).

Why exactly does 

    GetValue() == (object)true

return false considering that GetValue() returns always a true value? Well… because you are comparing two instances of a System.Object and the ‘==’ operator is coded in a way that uses the ReferenceEquals (and not Equals) method on System.Object.

The author could have unboxed it to a local variable and do the check after but the speed of coding is so much important for some of us.. Thank you ReSharper for pointing this to us and fixing a potentially subtle bug.