Useless Inc. - Development Tidbits: October 6th

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Seeing that I don't have anything of value to write per se (with the exception of experiences from the LAN party, and Turkey, and a bunch of reviews, and some development-related rants, and some other stuff) I figure I might as well just toss everything I have here. There's quite a bit of development-related stuff so I've split this into two seperate posts:

Ilya linked me to this newsgroup discussion which is something of a revelation.
During the QA cycle for a product I'm working on I got a request to limit the logs for just the last 10 days. I use log4net 1.2.9 incubation release, which is an absolute pleasure to use (even the documentation is up to snuff these days); however I've found that there is simply no way to do that using the stock RollingFileAppender when you roll by date (as opposed to by size). Since I didn't have time to research creating scheduled tasks using the godawful Visual Studio 2003 Setup and Deployment Project I just hacked a RollingFileAppender-derivative, only to find that most of its protected methods are not declared virtual - meaning I had to copy the code for the class in its entirety and hack away instead of just inheriting and overriding behavior. If anyone's interested in the hack let me know, but be advised that it's probably not very stable nor particularly elegant.
I was looking for a way to execute an interactive process remotely (which can't be done easily, certainly not with my original research subject, WMI). Apparently the only practical way to do this under Win32 is to use a remote service with administrative privileges; security was a workable issue in this case, so I was left with having to research and write the service and deal with all the bugs, which given the project schedule was not an option. The first obvious option was to use SysInternals' PsExec tool; this would've been perfect except that PsExec's license forbids redistributing it without a license, which we were very inclined to purchase had there not been easier (and cheaper) options. BeyondExec is an equally solid solution that's distributed as freeware and is therefore useful for commercial purposes. Lastly, Jim Wiese has an interesting article up at The Code Project which might've saved us a great deal of time had BeyondExec proved irrelevant.
John Wood's SafeInvoke is a very elegant solution to the classic GUI thread invocation issue when programming for Windows Forms. He's not the first to utilize .NET Reflection for that purpose, but his solution is extremely elegant as well as performant (since his helper class caches the generated code, a performance hit is incurred only when a delgate is first used, and System.Reflection is supposed to be dramatically faster in the upcoming CLR 2.0). Two thumbs up.
One of my favourite writers, Reymond Chen over at The Old New Thing, wrote an insightful little tip on why you should never use sleep(0). The comments are equally informative. On a side note, I've recently become a very big fan of java and C#'s Monitor synchronization primitive along with its signalling capacity (in java it's part of the java.lang.Object API

Monitor

Thursday, October 06, 2005 3:04:30 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

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