Crazy Enums

Few days back I got a great opportunity to talk with a senior thoughtworker, Chris. He told me few things related to Agile and NUnit. Apart from this there was one intresting thing that I want to share. Almost all of us have worked with .Net Enums. Let me show you something,
Create a project and add one Enum to it,

enum MyEnum
{
Orange=0,
Red=1,
Green=2
}

Now create another class where we will use this Enum,

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
MyEnum obj;
obj = (MyEnum)5;
Console.WriteLine(obj.ToString());
Console.ReadLine();
}
}

Did you noticed something? Our Enum only had 0,1 and 2 as valid values. I went on and assigned 5 to it. Now try compiling this code. Aha! no compilation errors. Now try running this. Everything goes well and 5 gets printed on console. Did you expected this?
I never expected this. Did Microsoft forget about type safety and type checking issues while copying from Java Enums? I think Java enums works fine.
If you ever worked with Bit Flags you will some how realize that all this is due to them. Bit flags can actually take up values which are a combination of values that are defined in Bit Flag Enum. Here is an example:

[Flags]
internal enum Actions
{
None = 0,
Read = 0X0001,
Write = 0X0002,
ReadWrite = Actions.Read Actions.Write
...
}

There are number of threads going on in forums related to this. Just keep this in mind before using Enums.
I am exited about playing EA Game's CRYSIS. I have the DVD and will be installing the game tomorrow. Actually I need to clean up my system a bit before I get on with the game. CRYSIS CD says, "Game needs 20 Gb of free hard drive space."

Currently listening to: Black or White - MJ
~nJoY CoDiNg~

Amazing Graphics..EA Rocks!!!

Check these screenshots of Need for speed Most wanted...amazing graphics...EA Games rocks..

C# 3.0 - What's new?

Hello! everyone. This is festive time here in India. Yesterday we all celebrated Diwali, festival of light. I must tell you that lot of things have changed, things like playing with crackers, going out with friends and watching the way people decorated their houses using lights and ribbons. Yesterday, after having our Diwali prayer I just watched a movie (CHUCK) @ home and slept at around 11. Nothing new for me and it turned out to be yet another holiday. I wish things remained the same way as they were before.

Now let's talk technology. Microsoft have another a new set of features to C# in its third avatar. There is complete list available at MSDN, but I just wanted to add my comments to it as I study new features one by one. What I am planning is, I'll study one new feature everyday, post it here with my comments.

1. Implicitly Typed Local Variables
• Type is inferred by the expression used to initialize the variable
• Only applicable to local variable
• Variable declared using keyword 'var'
• There should be no Type with name 'var' defined in scope. Only then type inferring will work
• We should initialize the variable where we declaring it
• Initialized must be an expression.
• Local variable declaration should not include multiple variables
• Initializer should not refer to variable itself
• Some Examples: [ <=> is Same as ]
  var i = 5; <=> int i = 5;
  var s = "Hello"; <=> string s = "Hello";
  var d = 1.0; <=> double d = 1.0;
  var numbers = new int[] {1, 2, 3}; <=> int[] number = new int[]{1,2,3};
• Some incorrect use of var:
  var x; // Error, no initializer to infer type from
  var y = {1, 2, 3}; // Error, collection initializer not permitted
  var z = null; // Error, null type not permitted
  var u = x => x + 1; // Error, lambda expressions do not have a type
  var v = v++; // Error, initializer cannot refer to variable itself
• for, foreach and using (resource acquisition) can also use var. Like,
  int[] numbers = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 };
  foreach (var n in numbers) { //Do some thing }
• COMMENTS
  Why do we need to use var? Everything should be Type Strict. I think this will impact performance as compiler will use some kind of intelligence to find out variable type and it will surely take up some time. This is no scripting language...man this is C#. It will just complicate things even more and add to huge list of keywords that we already have like sealed, virtual, override, abstract, new, internal etc. I don't see any use of this so called added feature. Please let me know your opinions.
  

Currently Listening To: Shadow of the day-LINKIN PARK
~eNjOy cOdinG~

Debug ASP.net apps on VISTA

There is a lot of criticism going around regarding debugging capabilities of Windows VISTA and Visual Studio 2005. A lot of guys that are using Vista Home (cheapest and all laptops comes with HOME) think that it's only a problem with Vista Home edition and MS must have done this as a marketing gimmick. I think this is not true. Last night I was not able to debug a simple web application on my computer, that's running Windows Vista Ultimate X86 edition. So I just googled for few seconds and solution was in front of me.

You can either go to msdn web Dev blog or check out steps and links given below. Actually all the content that you see below is just copy pasted from above link. So it will be much better if you check out the link.

The Visual Studio team has just released a down loadable hot fix, which fixes problems resulting in such errors, and also enables the ability for Visual Studio 2005 to F5 debug web applications on IIS7 in Vista Home versions.

The following steps should be done to properly configure your IIS7/Vista environment for building ASP.NET web applications using Visual Studio 2005:

1. Install Visual Studio 2005 SP1
2. Install Visual Studio 2005 Update for Vista
3. Install Visual Studio 2005 hot fix for F5 authentication errors
4. Configure required IIS7 components
5. Run Visual Studio using the "Run As Administrator" option on the right-click menu

Currently Listening To: What Have I done-LINKIN PARK
~eNjOy LiFe~

C# Optimizing Compiler

Let me share nice thing that I noticed about C# compilation model. What I did was, I created a small program to print an Int32 array to console. Then I went into IL and checked out various function calls that C# compiler has made. There was one nice thing that I noticed. C# compiler sometimes optimizes your code by itself. Let me show you,

using System;

namespace Optimization
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Int32[] arr ={ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0,11 };
for (Int32 i = 0; i<=arr.Length-1;i++) {
Console.WriteLine(arr[i]);
}
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}

This is the code that I wrote to print a simple Int32 array. Below is the IL generated by this code snippet.


Compiler stores the array length in line IL_0000. The you can see there is no call to Array.Length property [internally it will call the method get_Length()] which I have used in For loop. Only calls that C# compiler added were to Initialize array, WriteLine() and ReadLine(). C# compiler have optimized our code internally so that there is no need to call Length with every loop iteration. It uses the length that is stored in the beginning to provide a performance boost. So, if you are doing such thing in your code, don't complicate things by declaring a variable just before the for loop just to store array length and use that variable in loop condition. You will be doing that to improve your application's performance but doing such heroics is not needed in this scenario.

I have just started to read about ASP.net internals and currently I am dating HTTPSys driver :). I hope to get this done by November 2nd week.
Currently listening To: SHAGGY Feat. AKON - What's Love
...nJoy CoDiNg...