Tag Archives: C#

WaitForMultipleObjects and WIN32 events for Linux/OS X/*nix and Read-Write Locks for Windows

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As every programmer worth his salt knows, synchronization primitives form the very building blocks of multithreaded programming. Without them, the world as we know it would cease to exist and chaos would reign free and unchecked.

All joking aside, synchronization objects such as mutexes and semaphores are essential to safe multithreading and are found on just about any platform under the sun. Mutexes and semaphores alike have one purpose: to keep different threads from messing around with bits and bytes at the same time another thread is, keeping your code free of segfaults and memory access violations alike. But that’s about where the similarities between the synchronization primitives on different platforms end.

POSIX-compliant operating systems with pthreads offer additional really neat synchronization primitives not found on Windows, such as condition variables and read-write locks (the latter is now available on Windows Vista+). And Windows programmers have at their disposal automatic and manual reset events, which make designing certain types of multithreaded software incredibly easy, abstracting away much of the hard-core synchronization logic that lies beneath the hood.

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My Thoughts on Sutter’s “C++ and Beyond 2011″

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Around a month ago, Herb Sutter gave a talk on why C++ is once more gaining relevance in the world of programming, and how after a decade of neglect and abandonment, it is set to pave the way into the future. I downloaded it a while ago and finally had a chance to watch it last night; the talk itself is most-excellent and is around 40 minutes long, you can stream it online or download it in a higher-resolution format on Channel 9. Or click below to watch:

As someone that’s been using both C/C++ and .NET extensively over the past years, I found there was one very important point that Sutter glanced on, danced around, and did everything short of actually naming in his talk and it’s that if you’re doing anything remotely intricate or complicated, leaky abstractions in managed languages will bite you in the ass, and end up lowering your productivity, some times (and if what you’re working on is truly complicated, often times) to a point where you’d have been more productive using C or C++ in the first place.

The concept of leaky abstractions isn’t anything new and I’m hardly the first to point out how it can turn a knight in shining armor into a harbinger of doom and destruction. It’s the number one problem fundamentally present in almost any framework, but even more so in managed languages where the framework is all you have, and you’re not allowed to side-step it and build your own foundations to work with (p/invoke and interop aside). But lately it’s becoming more and more of a problem as the “push” for innovation that Sutter speaks of has become a fundamental requirement in just about all corners of the industry.

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Intel C++ Compiler 12??

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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has been officially released for 3 months now (to the day), and to be pedantic, it has also been available in beta form since October 2008. Its bugs not withstanding, Visual Studio 2010 been a pretty successful hit. Besides the huge improvements to the .NET language and platform, big on the list of features for C++ developers is basic support for C++0x (the next standard version of C++, with lots of new & revolutionary features) and plenty of IDE enhancements. Intel’s C++ Compiler is the industry-standard with regards to performance and optimizations, still doesn’t support Visual Studio 2010 or C++0x.

As numerous postings on the Intel forums indicate, a plethora of users are in pressing need of an update to the Intel C++ Compiler. Questions on the matter are brushed-off, with short and rather-useless replies such as:

“This question has been discussed several times recently. The first such integration would come in a beta version of icc 12.0, which hasn’t yet been announced.”

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Microsoft’s .NET-Powered Windows Live Writer

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Believe it or not, Microsoft’s Microsoft .NET LogoWindows Live Writer is important in more ways than one. To most PC users, Windows Live Writer is simply the best tool that gets the “job” done. More importantly is how “job” is defined though, because WLW does things quite well and quite thorough.

Windows Live Writer has a huge range of options and takes advantage of almost all the features and functionality available via remote blogging/XMLRPC that make it almost pointless to even enter your blog’s administration center. You can upload images and movies, set categories and keywords, specify the slug/permalink to posts, modify the post date, set passwords on posts, send trackbacks, manually create an excerpt, and even specify whether comments are or aren’t allowed on any given post – all this without leaving your desktop client.

But what most don’t know about Windows Live Writer is more what it represents than what it does: Windows Live Writer is the first full-scale consumer product to ship out of Microsoft’s camp built on the .NET Framework.

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Complete .NET Portability with Wine & Mono?

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Mono is the open-source version of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. It implements most of the backend framework features, but unfortunately, falls flat on its pretty little face when attempting to display the user interface – which is what desktop apps are all about.

Wine on the other-hand, is a Linux port of (major parts of) Microsoft’s Win32 library – the core dependencies of the Windows development libraries, and more importantly, the win32 interface elements. With Wine, you can run many traditional C++ win32 executables on Linux, with certain limitations.

Mono’s biggest stumbling block is the GUI and .NET programs that use P/Invoke to call native non-managed win32 dlls – Mono is a pure .NET environment, and can’t handle them. But from the description above, that’s exactly what WINE excel at… So can’t we use WINE + Mono to make just about any .NET program run on Linux fresh out of the .NET compiler?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Back when the Mono project was first starting out, the Mono development team considered using WINE to implement the System.Windows.Forms namespace of the .NET Framework (which is practically 100% native C++ unmanaged win32 code in .NET wrappers). But they made the right choice in deciding to not take the easy way and go that route, leaving the integrity of the Mono project intact and focusing on true cross-platform user interface libraries instead (the GTK# is now the UI Library of choice for cross-platform .NET applications).

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Managed Pointers to Managed Objects (or Aliases for Objects) in C# and Visual Basic .NET

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One of the biggest advantages of managed frameworks/platforms like Microsoft’s .NET Framework (and it’s Linux-counterpart, Mono), and Java is that you, as a developer, have a choice of not mucking around with pointers. To be totally honest, with Java you’re forced not to – in C#, it’s a choice you have to make.

There’s plenty of good reasons for not using (unsafe!!) pointers, but that’s not the issue here. The question is, what if you want something to “point” to another object, and synchronize it’s value automatically, without resorting to unsafe pointers? There’s actually a quite simple answer using just a single line of C# code.

Whereas in C++ you could write something like what appears below, in C# you’d have to declare it as unsafe, then jump through a hundred hoops to get it to properly point to a managed object:

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Please Microsoft, Stop Holding .NET Back!

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As dedicated developers, end-users, and champions of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, we’re making a final plea to Microsoft and the .NET Framework team to save .NET and make it a real multi-platform framework. Please!

Sun could (and did) do it with Java, so why can’t Microsoft just swallow the pill already and provide real support for the .NET Framework on all operating systems? Yes, that includes Linux and Mac too. It’s ironic, because the .NET Framework has so much potential as a platform with its unique multi-language structure, nifty features, excellent libraries, (relatively) well-performing output, and darn-good innovative technologies like LINQ coming-up and XAML already here. Yet Microsoft just doesn’t realize that if they truly want .NET to succeed, they’ll have to bite the bullet and stop pretending that only officially supporting Windows won’t make users leave Linux/Mac/BSD/Whatever and buy licenses for Windows instead.

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“People Hate Making Desktop Apps…” Since When!?

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What a crazy day for technology. It all started with Paul Graham’s ridiculous link-bait article “Microsoft is Dead,” earlier today. Since then, the web has been in an uproar – just how do you define success, innovation, power, creativity, and can companies just “die” anyway? Never mind that conversation – Paul Graham surprised us there though. He’s normally a sane and very much down-to-earth person with a lot of insight on Web 2.0 and what it takes to be a startup. But that’s not what we’ve taken up a problem with – what’s really gotten to us is how some people are using his article as grounds for an argument that Desktop apps are old, dead, and a pain-in-the-ass to make.

The particular post being referred to is Ryan Stewart’s “Why Do People Hate to Build Desktop Apps?” It comes in response to the article by Don Dodge and a conversation with Simon Bateman. Now that the background’s succinctly (hopefully) out of the way: While Ryan’s article makes a valid a point about the ease-of-use of Microsoft’s .NET Framework and Adobe’s Apollo and just how powerful-yet-easy these two technologies make desktop software development – his entire article is based on an invalid premise! People don’t hate making desktop apps!

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Image Lists or Resources?

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One of the nicest things about Visual Studio and the .NET language is choice. You have plenty of choices, plenty of options, and plenty of different ways to confuse and confound yourself. Take, for instance, icons/images as “labels” for buttons: what’s the best way to do that?

At face value, there are two options, either of which should theoretically work just fine, and get what you need: Image Lists and Resources (resx files). Technically, there’s even a third option: compiling local resources directly into your application. Anyway if this all sounds like Greek to you, no worries, here’s the low-down on these two (three) different ways of adding an image to your file.

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