Following my previous article on a similar subject, Extend your VBA code with C#, VB.Net or C++/CLI, I’ve received an interesting feedback from a VBA developer who wanted to leverage the advanced support of the .Net framework for regular expressions.
This is clearly another interesting use-case for Excel addins and in this article I’ll quickly demonstrate how to build a wrapper which will close the gap between your VBA code and the .Net framework.
I’ve recently wanted to demonstrate the relevance of the .Net ReaderWriterLock[Slim] synchronization primitives.
It’s good to hear from the vendor that it’s better, faster, stronger, but when you can it’s always good to evaluate it yourself; not that I don’t trust vendors, but because I like to have hard numbers, particularly when I assert something that can be critical for my participants’ developments.
So I’ve built a small, simple and I hope relevant benchmark to measure the performance impact of ReaderWriterLock[Slim] compared to the naive and uniform use of a Monitor using the C# lock construct.
I wanted to check these two things:
In this article I’ll explain the rationales behind the benchmark, how I’ve implemented it and finally present the results.
First a warning, this is a difficult article which goes really deep inside the .Net machinery so if you don’t get it the first time (or even the second or third time…) don’t worry and come back later. 🙂
For a training session I’ve taught at the end of last year I wanted to demonstrate some subtleties of multi-threading, and more specifically some memory visibility issues that should cause a program to hang.
So I developed a small sample that I expected would be showing the issue, but instead of hanging as expected the program completed!
After manipulating the program further I obtained the behavior I wanted, the program was hanging, but it still didn’t explained why it managed to complete with my original version.
<SPOILER>
I suspected some JITter optimizations, and indeed it was the case, but I needed more information to completely explain this strange behavior.
As often, the StackOverflow platform was of great help; if you’re curious you can have a look at the original SO thread.
</SPOILER>
In this article I’ll “build” and explain the issue step by step, trying to make it more understandable than the SO thread which is indeed quite dry.
This is a small article about an issue I had recently trying to save some big documents represented as .Net objects in MongoDB using the MongoDB .Net driver.
While saving a “relatively” big document I’ve received the following exception:
System.IO.FileFormatException: Size 32325140 is larger than MaxDocumentSize 16777216. at MongoDB.Bson.IO.BsonBinaryWriter.BackpatchSize() in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Bson\IO\BsonBinaryWriter.cs:line 697 at MongoDB.Bson.IO.BsonBinaryWriter.WriteEndArray() in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Bson\IO\BsonBinaryWriter.cs:line 294 at MongoDB.Bson.Serialization.Serializers.EnumerableSerializerBase`1.Serialize(BsonWriter bsonWriter, Type nominalType, Object value, IBsonSerializationOptions options) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Bson\Serialization\Serializers\EnumerableSerializerBase.cs:line 408 at MongoDB.Bson.Serialization.BsonClassMapSerializer.SerializeMember(BsonWriter bsonWriter, Object obj, BsonMemberMap memberMap) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Bson\Serialization\Serializers\BsonClassMapSerializer.cs:line 684 at MongoDB.Bson.Serialization.BsonClassMapSerializer.Serialize(BsonWriter bsonWriter, Type nominalType, Object value, IBsonSerializationOptions options) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Bson\Serialization\Serializers\BsonClassMapSerializer.cs:line 432 at MongoDB.Driver.Internal.MongoInsertMessage.AddDocument(BsonBuffer buffer, Type nominalType, Object document) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Driver\Communication\Messages\MongoInsertMessage.cs:line 53 at MongoDB.Driver.Operations.InsertOperation.Execute(MongoConnection connection) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Driver\Operations\InsertOperation.cs:line 97 at MongoDB.Driver.MongoCollection.InsertBatch(Type nominalType, IEnumerable documents, MongoInsertOptions options) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Driver\MongoCollection.cs:line 1149 at MongoDB.Driver.MongoCollection.Insert(Type nominalType, Object document, MongoInsertOptions options) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Driver\MongoCollection.cs:line 1004 at MongoDB.Driver.MongoCollection.Save(Type nominalType, Object document, MongoInsertOptions options) in c:\projects\mongo-csharp-driver\MongoDB.Driver\MongoCollection.cs:line 1426
Well the message is clear: seems like I’ve exceeded the MongoDB max document size threshold which is 16MB, fair enough this is quite a sane design decision.
First I’ll explain why I had this issue, then how I’ve solved it.
As you may know event handlers are a common source of memory leaks caused by the persistence of objects that are not used anymore, and you may think should have been collected, but are not, and for good reason.
In this (hopefully) short article, I’ll present the issue with event handlers in the context of the .Net framework, then I’ll show you how you can implement the standard solution to this issue, the weak event pattern, in two ways, either using:
(The source code is available here.)
This article is the .Net part of a series whose main article is How to build a language binding for a web API which you should read before this one to get general background information about implementing a language binding.
This article is the Java part of a series whose main article is How to build a language binding for a web API which you should read before this one to get general background information about implementing a language binding.
Recently I’ve worked with a web API, the Cometdocs API, in order to use their converter of documents, particularly for automating some conversions from PDF documents to Excel spreadsheets for data extraction.
I wanted to use this API from my two favorite development platforms: Java and .Net/C#, so I needed to build what is called a language binding, i.e. a small library that acts as a proxy between the application code and the web API.
The development of these two bindings was really interesting from a technical point of view, and I’ve learned a bunch of things during the process.
I’d like to share the interesting stuff with you, it should be of interest even if you don’t have any plan for interacting with a web API because all the technologies and techniques I’ve used (the HTTP protocol, JSON data binding, SSL/TLS…) are applicable to other types of developments.
The following article is my response to “John” comment on my other post about native C++/C# interop using C++/CLI.
The initial request was rather simple: for whatever reason John wanted to use the C++/CLI wrapper from Python and not from native C++.
It seemed technically feasible because Python has a remarkable tool to interact with native code: the ctypes module.
The only issue is that ctypes only supports C interfaces not C++ classes so in this case it can’t directly use the YahooAPIWrapper class.
In fact it’s a minor issue because this kind of situation is well known and a well documented pattern exists to circumvent it: building a C wrapper around the C++ API.
This looks a little crazy because you now have 2 layers between the Python client code and the C# Yahoo API:
Python -> C wrapper -> C++/CLI wrapper -> C# API
So, while I don’t think this layering could have any usefulness in real-life, this was a challenging and interesting question.
Looks simple no? Well, as you know when you start to pile up heterogeneous layers unexpected issues can appear and this is exactly what happened there, and it has revealed one that is worth talking about.
So keep reading!
Today if you ever need to consume a web API, or produce one, chances are you’ll need to use JSON.
And there is good reasons why JSON has become so prevalent in the web world:
So whatever the language and platform you’ll use you’ll need a strong JSON parsing component.
In the Java world there is at least two good candidates: Gson and Jackson.
In this article I’ll illustrate how to use Gson: I’ll start with a (not so) simple use case that just works, then show how you can handle less standard situations, like naming discrepancies, data represented in a format not handled natively by Gson or types preservation.