Andy Edinborough

I may be a nerd (that is, a geek who get’s paid), but I don’t enjoy writing stored procedures.  However, in working with the Entity Framework, I’ve found that doing complex and often repeated queries of my Entity Framework sets is rather inefficient.  My complete round-trip page loads (generate and execute query, then produce HTML) takes about 1,000ms on average.  So I wanted to replace this ugly query with a simple stored procedure—precompiled, ready to fire, and highly optimized for my specific query, while still having the ability to do ad-hoc queries.

So at PDC10 I made sure to talk to the EF boys and they pointed me to the System.Data.Objects.ObjectContext.Translate method.  This little bad boy will take a DataReader and create an enumerable of my objects from it—perfect.

Let’s walk through the “gotchas”.  In my example below, I have a class named Product.  I want to do… Read More →

The idea of implementing remoting will give most programmers instant heartburn.  Granted, I’m not an expert on all the existing remoting solutions, but I haven’t found one that works intuitively.

All the different solutions I’ve seen require just about double the code.  You write a method once, then write a wrapper for the method to implement remoting. 

Furthermore, they often require special handling to make sure the contextual variables are maintained.  For example, when I was working with CSLA recently, I was appalled to see:

customer = customer.Save();

The Save() method executes remotely, so the customer object that comes back has a separate memory reference.  Surely, we can get around this. 

So I set out to write my own.  I had 4 main goals.  I wanted to be able to:

// Remote any method with no code changes to the business object
Remoting.Execute(customer.Save);

// Executes remotely, and updates the object… Read More →

Sigh. 

These are text-based services… it’s not that hard, and yet all the projects I found out there were nasty—bloated and severely error prone.  So, I rebuilt one.  This is based heavily on xemail-net.  I simplified it quite a bit—created standard methods for repeated code blocks and implemented a base class to simplify the creation of the Pop3 client.

Yahoo doesn’t offer much help to .NET/C# developers when it comes to getting started with using their API’s and OAuth.  So I’ve put together a quick-hit starter pack.

1. Yahoo! YQL Console
   This is fun for all ages!  I just get all giggly when I see all that Yahoo has made available through YQL (Yahoo Query Language).  You can use this tool to perfect your queries and figure out just what you want to accomplish.  As a supplement, you can check out the PDF Documentation as well as the online version.
   
2. My Projects @ Yahoo Developer Network
   Once you’ve got your base application logic in place, you can request the keys you’ll need to communication with Yahoo using OAuth.  This will let you take advantage of the higher usage limit of 100,000 requests / day and 10,000 requests / hour.
   
3. Simple C# OAuth Code
   Unfortunately, the C# OAuth libraries listed… Read More →

AAAARRRRGGGHHH!!

I had to get that out of my system.  I’m not familiar enough with the exact specification of OAuth to know whether it’s Yahoo or Yedda that can’t read a spec, but the Yedda implementation of OAuth available on Google Code, doesn’t even begin to work with Yahoo’s YQL API.  Futhermore, the Yedda implementation is bloated and hard to follow.  Why is it that so many programmers feel the need to over complicate EVEYRTHING.

So… Here’s my rewrite of the Yedda implemenation.  It works out-of-the-box.  There are no objects to instantiate, just 4 very simple static methods to use.  A word of caution, System.Net.WebClient cannot be used to talk to Yahoo.

Update (1/29/2010): See a complete working example of C# / OAuth / Yahoo YQL.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Text;

namespace WAN.Lib {
    public static class OAuth {
        private static Random… Read More →

The lack of late-binding in C# has been one of my biggest gripes about C#.  Finally, in the .NET Framework v4.0, the dynamic keyword has been introduced (it could be argued that it is too loose—allowing for variant types).  But until it is released, the need still exists, and even then, not all clients will immediately support it.  So, in a bind, I wrote a simple class to allow access to objects via late-binding in C#. 

The trick to figuring out how to write the code came from using Reflector to decompile some VB.NET code… (I love reverse-engineering :]).  The answer is that the VB compiler makes use of an area of the .NET Framework within the Microsoft.VisualBasic assembly that is marked with the attribute [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] to prevent people from discovering it.

Here’s an example that uses my Late-Binding code to open an Excel Spreadsheet and convert it to a… Read More →