flickdotnet.de » 2008 » January

ECO for VS: Great blog available to getting used to short cuts and other "different" things in the Microsoft IDE

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:23:00 +0000

Borland’s IDE have been a part of my life since I am 9 years old. I got used to the short-cuts and thus know the IDE by heart. In school we had to look at different versions of VB, but I never really got used to the different approach to do things and I also got confused as Microsoft used different short-cuts. Now with ECO IV for VS being in the beta stage, I am stepping on VS territory again. The F5 key is definitely worst. In Borland IDEs (and now in CodeGear’s) the F5 key sets a breakpoint whereas in VS you run the application in debugging mode. Of course, in the Borland IDE there is a setting to change the shortcuts to the MS-style and there is a plugin available for VS to make the shortcuts work like in a Borland IDE.

All great. However, there are so many things that are not related to short-cuts and be it as simple as docking and undocking a window. It works very differently in VS. Yesterday, I found an awesome blog. Sara Ford writes one tip per day on Visual Studio 2008 on her blog. Actually, she sometimes blogs more than once a day and if you are just interested in the VS 2008 tips, use this URL to access them: http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/tags/Visual+Studio+2008+Tip+of+the+Day/default.aspx

Sara Ford works for Microsoft and is part of the Visual Studio core team, so she definitely knows what she is talking about. Thanks for the great blog!

IEnumerable<> - the "difference" between Count<>() and Count()

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:33:00 +0000

After posting my last blog entry regarding LINQ, Jonas Högström pinged me on Skype. He asked me, why I had used Count() instead of Count(). As IEnumerable<> already was only carrying string objects, there was no need to do that. I agreed, but said that I fell into a trap with Intellisense. Visual Studio makes it so easy to enter code that you sometimes make your code too verbose. However, I waondered if there was a performance penalty to be paid as I definitely was calling a method that seems to be more complicated. So I used my good old friend the ildasm and asked him what he thought.

I wrote a short test case which called Count() and then Count(). This is the reply he gave me:

  int32 [System.Core]System.Linq.Enumerable::Count(class       [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1)
  call       void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(int32)
  nop
  ldloc.1
  call       int32 [System.Core]System.Linq.Enumerable::Count(class      [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1)
  call       void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(int32)
  nop

Thus, we can see that both calls to Count() and to Count() result in the very same intermediate assembly code. So, the compiler makes the choice for us. There is absolutely no performance penalty involved as the same method is being called internally.

Free e-Books from MS Press

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 12:14:00 +0000

Thanks to Lex Li (http://lextm.blogspot.com/) I found a link to three great e-books from MS Press. The topics are not outdated what one may think when reading “free”. Only the LINQ book is complete, the rest are restricted to some essential chapters.

The books are:

Introducing Microsoft LINQ
by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo
Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX
by Dino Esposito (Chapters
Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0
by Laurence Moroney

Using LinQ in your ECO Models

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:56:00 +0000

LinQ is much more than just being able to write database applications easier. People, who say that LinQ is limited to databases, should really have a look at it first. The strength of LinQ is that you can apply SQL-like queries to framework objects. Mostly, those are the same people who say that WCF is a new framework from Microsoft to force users to use new protocols invented by MS — which is just as wrong. But back to the topic.

Assume, I have a class named “Person” and a person can have write documents. Thus, I add an one-to-many association to the class “Document”. I also add a method named “GetDocument” to the class “Person”. Every document is identified by a name, which is unique. The previously mentioned method “GetDocument” has exactly one parameter so I can specify the name of the document I want to retrieve. I make sure that the name is unique by always using “GetDocument” which uses LinQ to get the document I want.

It becomes very simple as the class “Person” already offers a list of “Document” with all the linked documents. I just need to find a document with a certain name. LinQ can be used with list classes in the .NET framework that implement IEnumerable and thus, you can use the following code to find a document. Furthermore, the following method creates a new document and hooks it up to the instance of person if there is no document by the name one is looking for.

As my previous blog post indicates, you can use this comfort with VCL.NET and RAD Studio 2007 just as long as you build your models with the Visual Studio version of ECO. Sadly, there is no Delphi .NET support for LinQ yet.

For the people, who are 100% certain that LinQ is just something to make database access easier… where is the database in my example?

ECO for VS and ECO for RAD Studio 2007 … are they compatible?

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:50:00 +0000

As blogs are supposed to be matter of fact style and without suspense: yes, you can use ECO Models that have been created with Visual Studio 2005/2008 in RAD Studio 2007 and vice versa. It even works if you target .NET 3.0/3.5 in Visual Studio 2008. You just have to add “System.Core.dll” from .NET 3.5 to your Delphi project that references the model and ECO will be able to pick up all the packages inside of the assembly.

What advantages does that bring me using models from VS in RAD Studio 2007? Personally, I prefer the VCL to Winforms quite a lot and this way one can write client applications in VCL.NET without having the drawback of not being able to use LinQ! Linq is being used in all my models by now and I simply cannot compile them in RAD Studio 2007 as Delphi for .NET has no LinQ support at this stage.