pek.com

Performance counter provider in C#

2005-08-17T22:05:43Z

Chris Sells (www.sellsbrothers.com) posted a command line parsing utility class (in C#) a while ago. I can't find a link to it now so here's the source.
Based on its use of reflection I created a base class for performance counter providers. Download the source here.

SmartGrid.NET website

2005-03-28T14:45:27Z

SmartGrid.NET is something i am involved with, independently from my current employer.

SmartGraph.NET website

2005-03-20T09:54:19Z

finally managed to put together a website for something i worked on a while ago. its a C# implementation of graph scheduler engine toolkit called SmartGraph.NET

NOTE: until the site comes back up the SmartGraph.NET source code can be downloaded from here.

orca.msi for download - without the whole SDK

2005-02-18T15:26:29Z

i have started using msi installations for our project. one thing that i found useful is the orca msi tool, which seems to be part of some Microsoft Platform SDK. you cannot download it separately though, unless you go here ;-)

C# explorer context menu handler

2005-02-17T18:25:57Z

here's some code that shows how to implement a Explorer Shell Extension in C#. it allows you to create custom context menus in directories you want. download source code here.

references for this implementation:

http://www.codeproject.com/shell/ShellExtGuide1.asp

http://theserverside.net/articles/showarticle.tss?id=ShellExtensions

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/ratingcolumn.asp

once you build it, use 'regasm /codebase' (i try to stay clear of the GAC as much as possible) to register the assembly for COM interop, that's it!

CComBSTR's changed behaviour (VC2003 ATL)

2005-02-14T13:47:33Z

i have just noticed that in ATL shipped with VS2003 CComBSTR ToUpper() and ToLower() ASSERT when called on an empty (not NULL) string. i have to say i don't understand why that makes sense? surely it is desireable that a conversion to upper/lower on empty string yield an empty string and not an assertion.

fortunately we use our own CComBSTR wrapper, so the fix for this is as easy as:

   HRESULT ToUpper()
   {
      if ( ::SysStringLen(this->m_str) > 0 )
         return CComBSTR::ToUpper();

return S_OK;
}

wrapper for the ATL::CUrl class

2005-02-13T01:20:37Z

some useful code for manipulating url-type strings. uses ATL::CUrl and allows non-standard url types. examples provided show how to implement a COM url:

com:///Clsid=0002df01-0000-0000-c000-000000000046&ClsCtx=CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER

and a PubSub url:

pubsub://localhost:1234/Queue=A.B.C

download sources here.

soa2wsdl part II

2005-01-30T11:38:44Z

i decided that soa2wsdl is going to be very useful in helping me deal with web service development (see previous posting on this). i created a simple C# console app which does the transform and which can also execute the 'wsdl.exe' utility to generate C# code from WSDL.
the zipped project is here.

smartgraph.net

2005-01-26T15:29:45Z

some of my spare time (away from my current employer) is used up developing various ideas, mainly in C# on .NET and C++.

one of the concepts that i frequently re-use is the Directed Acyclic Graph or DAG. this is a simple DAG implementation, part of smartgraph.net (soon to go on-line hopefully :-).

soa2wsdl

2005-01-23T20:48:14Z

i never really liked WSDL, but, because of its interoperability, i use it frequently. in my current work on service oriented architecture (SOA), i stumbled onto an article on Clemens Vasters' blog. it shows how metadata attributes can be used to embelish an XML Schema. taking Clemens' hint, i created an XSL Transform which generates WSDL from 'embelished schemas'. an example of such a schema (soa-sample-getprice.xsd) is given below. download the other files:

xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xs:schema targetNamespace="urn:soa:sample:price-service"

            xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

            xmlns:soa="urn:soa:metadata"

            xmlns:tns="urn:soa:sample:price-service"

            xmlns="urn:soa:sample:price-service"

            elementFormDefault="qualified"

            soa:service="GetPriceService" soa:url="http://soa1.soahost.net"

    <xs:complexType name="GetPriceRequestType">

        <xs:sequence>

            <xs:element name="SessionId" type="xs:string"/>

            <xs:element name="Ric" type="xs:string"/>

        xs:sequence>

    xs:complexType>

    <xs:complexType name="GetPriceResponseType">

        <xs:sequence>

            <xs:element name="SessionId" type="xs:string"/>

            <xs:element name="Ric" type="xs:string"/>

            <xs:element name="Value" type="xs:string"/>

        xs:sequence>

    xs:complexType>

    <xs:complexType name="GetPriceFaultType">

        <xs:sequence>

            <xs:element name="SessionId" type="xs:string"/>

            <xs:element name="Ric" type="xs:string"/>

            <xs:element name="Reason" type="xs:string"/>

        xs:sequence>

    xs:complexType>

    <xs:complexType name="GetPriceMethodType">

        <xs:all>

            <xs:element name="GetPriceRequest" type="tns:GetPriceRequestType"

                    soa:message="GetPriceRequestMessage" soa:message-type="request"/>

            <xs:element name="GetPriceResponse" type="tns:GetPriceResponseType"

                    soa:message="GetPriceResponseMessage" soa:message-type="response"/>

            <xs:element name="GetPriceFault" type="tns:GetPriceFaultType"

                    soa:message="GetPriceFaultMessage" soa:message-type="fault"/>

        xs:all>

    xs:complexType>

    <xs:complexType name="GetPriceInterfaceType">

        <xs:all>

            <xs:element name="GetPriceMethod" type="tns:GetPriceMethodType"

                    soa:method="GetPriceMethod"/>

        xs:all>

    xs:complexType>

    <xs:element name="GetPriceInterface" type="tns:GetPriceInterfaceType"

                    soa:interface="GetPriceInterface"/>

xs:schema>

bulenka

2004-07-22T08:18:52Z

image of my granny's portrait can be found here. my uncle painted it...

XmlDiffUtils

2004-06-29T22:30:04Z

.NET utils (written in c#) for comparing xml files using the Microsoft.XmlDiff api.

Added benefits:

files, before being compared, can be filtered using an XPath. The XPath can be used to ignore or select nodes
target of comparison can be a (pattern-matched) list of files in a directory or a single file
create equivalence classes for a given set of xml files

Download the source code here.

bialowieza

2004-06-16T18:31:03Z

here's some pictures i took in bialowieza, a national park in poland

the camera: canon ixus i, 4Mpx

an interesting threading implementation

2004-04-17T15:23:29Z

This is an implementation of ideas presented by Kevlin Henney (kevlin@curbraland.com) at the Spring 2004 ACCU conference in Oxford, UK. Kevlin's presentation can be found here, in pdf. Check out Kevlin's website for more information.

NOTE

This is just something that compiles and runs. More work is required to make this usable.

fsynk .net

2004-04-14T20:08:46Z

fsynk is a command line utility, written in c#, which recursively synchronizes files between 2 directories. download the source from here.

i use it to synchronize (ie back up) my mp3 collection onto a removable usb harddrive.