Robert Horvick's Weblog

After spending several months working on this it is fun to hear people talking about it - thanks Doug! http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=112427

While I still work for the MBF (Microsoft Business Framework) team I've been "on loan" for a while helping to develop a source control proxy server for the Team Foundation source control system. Basically the proxy server reduces data transfer times...

As a kid I used to spend a lot of time in the car traveling from Minneapolis to the lakes country of Minnesota (near Detroit Lakes , if anyone cares). Two 4-hours trips a weekend was pretty normal. So what do you do with 6 kids crammed into a Suburban...

Tomorrow … next week … read: the next time I post. Specifying an integer range is one of the problems we need solve to have a reasonably robust task generator. It’s one thing to say that a property is assignable from an int, but...

Yesterday we generated the fields and initializers, so today let’s move on to the properties. Let’s quickly look at an example input: <? xml version = " 1.0 " encoding = " utf-8 " ?> < Tasks > < Task Namespace...

GenerateField is pretty straight-forward .. here, just look: CodeMemberField GenerateField( MBFTaskProperty tp) { string privateName = string .Format("m_{0}", tp.Name); CodeMemberField cmf = new CodeMemberField (tp.Type, privateName); ...

Now that we’re all good friends with the CodeDOM it’s time to look at the far less interesting reason for this whole series … generating MSBuild tasks. Since we’ve implemented ITask and ITaskProperty it’s time to implement...

For those that asked – on a Friday “tomorrow” means Monday. J And a few people have asked “what does this have to do with MSBuild” – yeah, I suppose I’m a bit off topic but I’m trying to lay a little...

Yesterday we introduced the CodeDOM and covered some fundamentals. Creating a namespace , a class , a member method and a method body. Today we’re going to cover conditionals. I know I promised loops too but conditionals is taking enough space that...

Yesterday we looked at a basic implementation of ITaskProperty – and I promised we start looking at the code generation today. We won’t be looking at the XML -> C# rendering but rather the CodeDOM and generating some basic expressions....

Yesterday’s post was … well … boring. But a lot of software is boring so this really isn’t a surprise. Today’s will have a little more to it but still – we’re laying the foundation before talking about the more...

Yesterday we introduced the ITask interface. Today we’ll look at a simple implementation of the ITask interface. I’m not a big fan of reading to be people what they can read for themselves so let’s move on to the code… ...

Last time we looked at the XSD file and a sample rendering from XML to C#. This time I’ll introduce the primary interfaces used in the rendering process. First we have an ITask. namespace GenTaskLib { public interface ITask ...

I'm still quite distracted by MSBuild. I'm also a big fan of code generation. Any time you can combine a few passions you should. If I could find a way to mix in some seafood, a Willamette Valley (Oregon) wine and a Dave Matthew's Band album believe me...

It seems that no matter how good at people (definitely including me) are at writing buggy code they are much less adept at creating good reproduction cases or using their existing tools to figure out what’s going on. A recent issue I saw involved...

Ok, I’m back. No defects this week though. I’ve been distracted by MSbuild. If you are not aware MSBuild is the new build platform for Whidbey. There is some great information about MSBuild here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv...

As always thanks to those that emailed responses. Please feel free to post them in the feedback area too! The biggest problem with this piece of code is that the stream is not being checked for errors after reading. Look at this block: int age;...

This is an easy one – something for the C++ 101 kids J When first learning C++ there are some fairly canonical samples people go through. Hello World, a simple address book, a simple game of adventure, etc. The name/age lookup sample...

This defect seems to have led a few more people astray then the last. While no one posted publicly several people emailed me solutions. Thanks to all who contributed! So let’s start with the hints: Hint #1: It is not only important to...

There are a few defects here ... ranging from a design issue to a potential buffer-overrun that could cause your system to be comprised and the attacker to be able to execute arbitrary code on your machine. Hint #1: It is not only important to test...

Since there was positive feedback on the last one - here is another. I will post hints and the solution next week. There are multiple defects in this code. I added the _tmain to give some context on how the function getVersionString might be called...

So the results are back – and that was some buggy code! First I want to thank everyone who played along. Both those that had the courage to post to the public comments and those that replied offline. Also - before I go further - is this...

When you read bad code you learn what not to do. You learn to identify the many classes of errors and the patterns that often lead up to them. When you read good code you learn how to write good code. You observe “tricks” of good programmers...

[migrated from my other blog] I can never leave well-enough alone. If I read “this is how this works“ then it's only a matter of time before I write my own example to proof what I just read. This post is another example of that... There...

[Since people asked - I re-posted this from my other blog. I didn't “steal“ it.] Recently on Raymond Chen’s blog he had a post about not trusting return addresses . Specifically to not use the _ReturnAddress() intrinsic and GetModuleHandleEx...