Content that is all about the .NET (dotnet) ecosystem! Find examples of code often written in C# along with tutorials.
Should Every Class Have an Interface? This is part two in the sub-series of "Should Every Class Have an Interface?", and part of the bigger "What Makes Good Code?" series. Other Peoples' Code So in the last post, we made sure we could get an interface for every class we made. Okay, well that's all fine and dandy (I say half sarcastically). But you and I are smart programmers, so we like to re-use other peoples' code in our own projects. But wait just a second! It looks like Joe Shmoe didn't use interfaces in his API that he created! We refuse to pollute our beautiful interface-rich code with his! What can we do about it? Wrap it. That's right! If we add a little bit of code we can get all the benefits as the example we walked through originally. It's…
Are you interested in learning about interfaces in C#? This article explains the idea behind a C# interface by showing examples of interfaces in code.
Problem: Visual Studio and Unity Aren't Playing Nice! UPDATE: This is for older setups with Visual Studio and Unity. You may want to look at Assembly Definitions. I just started poking around in Unity 4.6 and I've been having a blast. I've made it to the point where I want to actually start hammering out some code, but I came across a bit of a problem: I want to start leveraging other projects I've written in my Unity solution while I'm in Visual Studio, and things are blowing up. So, what gives? Okay, so let me start by explaining why I want to do this. I understand that if I'm making a simple game, I should have no problem breaking out my unity scripts into sub folders and organizing them to be nice and pretty. The problem I'm encountering is that I…
C# Dev Connect 1: Intro to Threading In my last post, I mentioned we'd be hosting a C# Dev Connect meetup at our Magnet Forensics HQ in Waterloo. I figured I'd post to talk about how the event went so that if you couldn't make it, you'll have an idea for next time (and if you did make it, maybe you can comment on how you thought the event went). Our first Dev Connect was lead by a colleague of mine, Chris Sippel, who wanted to give a talk on threading basics in C#. Threading can quickly become a really complex topic, so Chris wanted to keep it high level and talk about the different approaches you can use to start threading in your C# applications. https://twitter.com/Chris_Sippel/status/557655585492328450 Dev Connect: Before the Talk Before Chris gave his talk on threading, we…
C# Dev Connect Meetup! About a year ago I had thrown around the idea of creating a C#-specific group that would meet at a regular interval with some of my colleagues. I saw that there was interest, but between all of the things we had going on in our personal lives and work lives, we just hadn't been able to co-ordinate something. I'm excited to announce that with some more solid planning over the last couple of months, C# Dev Connect will be able to host their first meetup! The company I work for, Magnet Forensics, has graciously offered our new office to host the event which will help tremendously. We'll have a group of people from Magnet Forensics their to help out, but the only thing "Magnet" about the event is really just that it's hosted at the office. What's…
MyoSharp If you haven't checked it out already, my friend Tayfun and I created an open source C# wrapper for Thalmic's Myo. It's hosted on GitHub over here, so you can browse and pull down code whenever you want. We've had some great feedback from users of our API, so we continue to welcome it (both positive and negative!) in order to improve the usability. Thalmic has plans to release a firmware update to allow more data to be accessible through their API. Right now, MyoSharp is a bit out of date, but once this big firmware update lands we'll take some more time to get it up to date again. Remember, it's open source so you can feel free to contribute! Troubleshooting The most common question I receive is "I keep getting an exception about not being able to connect…
Enforcing Interfaces This is my second installment of the series related to my small side project that I started. I mentioned in the first post that one of the things I wanted to try out with this project is coding by interfaces. There's an article over at CodeProject that I once read (I'm struggling to dig it up now, arrrrrghh) that really gave me a different perspective about using interfaces when I program. Ever since then I've been a changed man. Seriously. The main message behind the article was along the lines of: Have your classes implement your interface, and to be certain nobody is going to come by and muck around with your class's API, make sure they can't knowingly make an instance of the class. One of the easiest ways to do this (and bear with me here, I'm…
A few months ago I wrote up an article on using PyTools, Visual Studio, and Python all together. I received some much appreciated positive feedback for it, but really for me it was about exploring. I had dabbled with Python a few years back and hadn't really touched it much since. I spend the bulk of my programming time in Visual Studio, so it was a great opportunity to try and bridge that gap when looking at something like IronPython. I had an individual contact me via the Dev Leader Facebook group that had come across my original article. However, he wanted a little bit more out of it. Since I had my initial exploring out of the way, I figured it was probably worth trying to come up with a semi-useful example. I could get two birds with one…
Yield: A Little Background The yield keyword in C# is pretty cool. Being used within an iterator, yield lets a function return an item as well as control of execution to the caller and upon next iteration resume where it left off. Neat, right? MSDN documentation lists these limitations surrounding the use of the yield keyword: Unsafe blocks are not allowed. Parameters to the method, operator, or accessor cannot be ref or out. A yield return statement cannot be located anywhere inside a try-catch block. It can be located in a try block if the try block is followed by a finally block. A yield break statement may be located in a try block or a catch block but not a finally block. So what does this have to do with API specifications? A whole lot really, especially if you're dealing…
Background My position at work allows me a bit of freedom in how I code and more importantly, influence how others code. I was recently having a conversation with a colleague about what I think makes a good API, from a high level. The context of our discussion was pertaining to developing a C# based API, but this really applies to any object oriented API. I had two key points that I wanted to address, and while they're not the only important things, I believe they're often overlooked. The first thing is how people will use your API, so how they will call methods and use the results. The second point was about how people will implement your API should they want to extend your work and implement their own classes. Here's what I was trying to drive home: Usage: As a programmer,…
