Blogs and articles by Craig Dean
Articles relating to C# development.
In my last post I introduced the AsyncLock and AsyncDebouncedFunction. AsyncLock is a fantastic way of asynchronously holding a ‘lock’ without actually blocking threads. It is the natural go to class for resource synchronization, but there are alternatives (with caveats). In .Net 4.5 the ConcurrentExclusiveSchedulerPair was introduced, offering a powerful approach to concurrency control. Using this …
With the introduction of the async and await keywords, asynchronous programming has finally become achievable by any .Net developer. Building on the TPL, async and await extend the C# language specification to make task based programming relatively straight forward, and is a huge step forward from APM. However, being able to write code that runs …
In my last post I introduced Memory Mapped Files, and discussed how you could mark them as sparse. Today, I would like to talk a little about performance. Using LINQPad (my favourite tool!), I created a rough and ready test script which can be downloaded at the end of the article. The idea was to …
Memory mapped files are a powerful addition to the .NET framework in version 4.0. They’ve been a key part of the windows Operating System since Windows 95, but using them required a working knowledge of COM Interop, as they weren’t exposed directly through the framework. It’s well worth reading up on them, especially if you’re …
OK, so yesterday I returned with a really simple piece of code that’s convenient when building stack frames. After stacks, the next easiest/most convenient structure has to be the queue. No surprise then that .NET has a similarly generic Queue class. It seems appropriate to give it the same treatment – public class Queue<T1, T2> …
OK, clearly I have been remiss in my bloging duties and owe you all some code. To be fair, it’s because I’m head down developing a brand new platform that will form the basis of our future products and it really has been all go. One of the most fundamental structures in programming languages is …
For those interested in another sample of our in-house training here is a snippet where I introduce the singleton pattern: Related Images:
Every couple of weeks I give an ‘off the cuff’ talk on .NET fundamentals. Its always fast paced, irreverent, opinionated and completely unprepared (you can tell). Aimed at our developers – as part of their continuous professional development – the 1hr+ talks are recorded and used as part of our training regimen. It’s not for …
When it comes to my favourite ‘new*’ classes in the .NET BCL, one of my top ten is definitely the ConcurrentDictionary . So much so, that (after IEnumerable) it’s probably one of the classes I go back to most frequently to solve any particular problem (particularly caches). I still remember the frustration and failure I …
Well it’s been a while since my last post, frankly I’ve been heads down in a code rush (maybe I’ll let you in on it a little later), so I figured for my first post back I best make it a big one. Following, from the success of my guest lecture at Manchester, I was …