Dump Environment Folder Paths
This is just a quick snippet to dump the value of Environment.GetFolderPath for all special folders on a machine (so I don’t have to write it again next time):
public static string DumpEnvironmentPaths()
{
var paths = Enum.GetValues(typeof(Environment.SpecialFolder))
.Cast<Environment.SpecialFolder>()
.Select(folder => folder + " = " + Environment.GetFolderPath(folder))
.Aggregate((line1, line2) => line1 + Environment.NewLine + line2);
return paths;
}
Also, I’m using the opportunity to give Rick Strahl’s CodePaste.NET service a spin: http://codepaste.net/uo7zx8.
“CodePaste.NET is a public site for pasting snippets of code and linking to them from social network sites.”
As for the code itself (envisioning potential rotten tomatoes flying my way), several things are probably worth mentioning:
- First, the code is written in a more functional style, being more explicit about its intent. I think it shows more clearly the input data and the output data, how the data flows and what operations are performed on the input data.
- Second, I have a temporary local variable instead of returning the expression immediately. This is for easier debugging, because if you don’t have a temporary variable, you won’t be able to view the return value of the method easily in the debugger. With a temporary local, you can put a breakpoint on the return statement and inspect the results of the query. Someday the tools will be improved and will allow to inspect the return value of methods.
- I’m using Aggregate instead of string.Join or StringBuilder because it composes better. On large data volumes, this approach is horrible because it will allocate a ridiculous amount of unnecessary intermediate strings. StringBuilder and string.Join are much more frugal in this respect, so don’t use Aggregate with strings this way. However, in this particular example, the number of strings is O(1), so I just picked the approach that composes better. Unfortunately, string.Join doesn’t compose well at all and was never intended to be used in a fluent API.
