Tomer Gabel's annoying spot on the 'net RSS 2.0
# Sunday, August 21, 2005
The game reviews I promised are still in the pipeline (it takes a lot of effort to get myself in the "reviewer state"), but I did post other stuff instead (mostly software- and development-related). Now it's time for tidbits:
  • I've been sorely lacking a "navigation" submenu in Microsoft Word. I use a lot of internal hyperlinks in my documents (and have been reading and writing quite a few of those for the past few weeks), and it's a pain in the ass not to be able to navigate back and forth. Apparently it's just hidden in the Web toolbar and is readily accessible using Alt+Left and Alt+Right keyboard shortcuts. Oddly enough the keyboard customization dialog shows a GoBack function as well as the WebGoBack-WebGoForward duo; I'm not entirely clear on the difference yet. Anyways it's amazing how much better life is all of a sudden.
  • There are numerous updates to the ReSharper 2.0 beta post.
  • Thanks to Ofer for introducing me to the kickass bugmenot.com. It's basically a user-contributed database of registration information for any and all websites (there's even an entry for Nectarine!) which should prove amazingly useful, particularly when complemented by services like DodgeIt. They also have a petition asking content providers to stop with the pointless mandatory registration procedures. Not sure if I'll sign or not, but the site itself is damn useful.
  • DevBoi seems to be a very useful development tool: it is a sidebar extension for Mozilla browsers offering easy access to online/offline documentation repositories for standards such as HTML, CSS and more.
  • Apparently them christian preachers weren't kidding around: pr0n can indeed make you blind. Consider yourself, er, warned.

Light load this time. More to come.

Sunday, August 21, 2005 5:38:01 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Personal
I always enjoy researching languages (a passion that's only intensified since I cowrote our internal C#->java source-level compiler), so when a colleague approached me with an issue he had while creating a design in C# I was immediately intrigued.

Consider the following scenario:

class a1
{
public virtual int ret()
{
return 1;
}
}

class a2 : a1
{
public override int ret()
{
return 2;
}
}

Now, suppose I want to create another class, a3, which overrides ret but instead of implementing it on its own, it calls the a1 implementation - effectively skipping two generations of inheritence. If I wanted to call a2's implementation I could write a simple base.ret() call, so for a1 it's a simple case of base.base.ret(), right?

Quite wrong. Apparently the C# language specification defines the base keyword in a way that simply does not allow this. I was curious of this is the case with java as well, and lo and behold: java doesn't support super.super.member constructs either.

While researching the issue, I've come across two particularly interesting notes: Mads Torgersen, the new Microsoft program manager on C# Compiler and Language, has this to say in an interview:

Q: why only the first immediate base class is allowed in c#? e.g. cant do base.base.ToString()
A: The behaviour of your base class is determined by the writer of that class. It would open up a hole for breach of contract if you could bypass this and access something that this writer has decided to hide from you.

I'm not sure I'm convinced by this; it assumes the person who writes the instance class is not the same person who wrote the base class, which is not always the case. Other people around the 'net have said that this is a sort of "OOP no-no"; I can't say I've ever thought about this particular issue very deeply so I'll have to do some more thinking. If anyone has any references (no books, please - they're expensive and difficult to get) I would be very interested in hearing about it.

Brian Maso, posting to a similar discussion regarding java, suggests that this limitation derives from the java virtual machine design:

"super" is not an object reference. It's a Java language fiction. It basically indicates to the compiler that the target method call uses the "invokespecial" bytecode, not the usual method invocation bytecode "invokevirtual". This is as opposed to "this", which is an actual object reference variable.

If that is indeed the case, I can imagine the CLR shares similar design limitations, however this is research I'll leave for another time. For the time being suffice to say that the only way to do this is to use reflection, which is a sloppy solution which hinders performance, readability and safety. Imagine accessing runtime information, creating class instances (generating additional work for the GC in the process) etc. instead of a simple vtable indirection - it's not even funny!

Sunday, August 21, 2005 2:05:41 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Development
# Wednesday, August 17, 2005
I was implementing a watchdog system over a certain system's XML configuration repository using System.IO.FileSystemWatcher. Annoyingly, changes to the file (such as saving it with Notepad) would often result in the change event being fired twice. The system is designed so that whenever the file is changed, it is reloaded and several parts of the system are suspended (via thread synchronization) while the information is being re-cached. This in itself wouldn't be a problem since changes to the XML files are manual and rare, the XML schemas and serialization metadata are already cached etc. so the reloading operation shouldn't take more than 100-200ms (and the lock itself is only obtained at the very end of said process) - however there is a drain on CPU time and memory resources which I certainly wouldn't want doubled.

While it seems I wasn't the only one to encounter this behaviour, I've yet to see a proper solution to it; in the meanwhile I settled for a small hack where an update to the XML file are only processed if n seconds (2 in my case) have elapsed since the last update. Does anyone know of a cleaner way to solve this?

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 2:00:41 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Development
# Tuesday, August 16, 2005
I came across a fairly unusual situation today, where a referenced assembly contained XML schemas as embedded resources. The schemas may (and do) contain <xs:include> and <xs:import> directives, which could not be resolved when I was trying to compile the schema: the schemas were including other schemas by relative URI (for example, SystemConfig.xsd has an <xs:include schemaLocation="Base.xsd" /> directive), and when the schemas are loaded from a resource there are no URIs to speak of.

After a bit of reading I settled down to write a custom implementation of XmlResolver. It's used like so:

Assembly container = typeof( anyTypeFromTheResourceAssembly ).Assembly;
XmlResourceResolver resolver = new XmlResourceResolver( container );
schema = XmlSchema.Read( stream, new ValidationEventHandler( schemaValidationEventHandler ) );
schema.Compile( new ValidationEventHandler( schemaValidationEventHandler ), resolver );

Grab it here, and do let me know if you find this useful or have any comments/questions!

Update (18:58 GMT+2): Interesting. Apparently a developer called Jay Harlow wrote a similar class a while ago; his is VB.NET, mine is C#, but the similarity is staggering. So if you're looking for a VB.NET version of the class, there you are :-)

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 1:41:57 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Development
# Monday, August 15, 2005
I've been using NDoc a lot over the last couple of weeks and have found it invaluable. There is, however, one major hurdle I've encountered: it doesn't seem to support documenting of events. At all. Now I'm trying to generate documentation for one of our interfaces (which consists mostly of events) but can't :-(

I couldn't find anything relevant on the web (via Google or Google Groups). Ideas?

Monday, August 15, 2005 12:16:55 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Development

I've updated the lists of open source and proprietary software I use. I also consistently update the post about ReSharper 2.0 beta; finally, I've installed the new version of dasBlog.

The world is a better place, certainly.

Monday, August 15, 2005 10:48:27 AM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Personal
# Sunday, August 14, 2005
Check this out: How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less. I found this one particularly funny:
56. Time passes. It is getting dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I'll give a shekel (don't ask) to anyone who knows what that's all about :-) (well no, not really, but it's funny anyway).
Sunday, August 14, 2005 10:43:05 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Personal
I was about to download log4net 1.2 beta 8, which I've been using for almost two years now, only to find that the project's been moved from SourceForge to Apache and an incubation release it out.

1.2.9 beta looks extremely impressive and I will report my comments on the subject as I become more experienced with it.

From the list of features the ones that impressed me the most are:

  • The new logging contexts; NDCs was always thoroughly useful (never found any use for MDCs though) and an extensible, scoped NDC should indeed prove useful.
  • PatternLayout customization; combined with the new logging contexts this seems to be an incredibly powerful tool (consider: conditional object state dumps with no little or no code overhead/clutter!)
  • .NET formatting syntax. Trivial but necessary.
  • Customizable levels for finer debug message granularity.
  • Per-appender security contexts: 'nuff said.
  • Pluggable file locking for FileAppender; I'm not readily sure where this would be useful, but I bet I'll find it before long...
I'm always impressed by open source goodness :-)
Sunday, August 14, 2005 3:17:51 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Development
# Saturday, August 13, 2005
Scott's released dasBlog 1.8! I don't have time to install it just yet - will probably save that for tomorrow. Since all the bugs I filed were fixed the new version is bound to be da bomb!

Update (August 15th, 11:32 GMT+2): dasBlog 1.8 is up and running. Oddly enough it seems to be compiled, or at least set up, to run in debug mode (web.config is set to <complication debug="true"... />), so I changed that. Everything seems to be in order.

The new BlogXP theme is very slick, but it's going to take quite a bit of time to rework it to fit the site design (get rid of the calendar, change the title, add a bit of personality...), so I'll stick with my modified DiscreetBlue in the meantime.

Saturday, August 13, 2005 8:22:37 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Personal | Software
I went to see The Island in the cinema with a bunch of friends the other day. Hey, it didn't cost me anything so why not, right?

It's sort of 1984 (at least in the beginning) meets The Matrix (towards the middle). There are plenty of very high-profile actors who do a pretty good job with the mediocre script (including Ewan McGreggor, Scarlet Johansson, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi and Michael Clarke Duncan) - there's even a guest role for our own Noa Tishby.

Bottom line: harmless generic action movie; ten years ago it might've been considered innovative but nowadays it's just a cash cow. The acting is, as I said, pretty good (considering the amount of star actors), the eye candy is great - but the movie itself is really uninspired.

Saturday, August 13, 2005 6:17:35 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    -
Movies
Me!
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