Matt Manela's Blog : Downloads

Visualizing LINQ

MattManela — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:52:39 GMT

I ran across an awesome code sample written by Jon Skeet. He realized that many people may have difficulty understanding how the lazy evaluation in LINQ (and programming with iterator combinators in general) works. His program/code sample is able make the lazy evaluation clear by animating it on the fly. He intercepts each step in the LINQ evaluation and animates that step. When the program runs you will see one element at a time be processed through the LINQ query.

I definitely recommend taking a look:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon.skeet/archive/2008/02/20/visual-linq-watch-query-expressions-as-they-happen.aspx

Kudos to Jon on a job well done.

FastSharp - Write it, Execute it

MattManela — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:30:21 GMT

Last year I wrote this program which I named FastSharp. It is a text editor which lets you compile and run C# code that would normally exist inside a method. The inspiration for this came from getting tired of opening up Visual Studio and creating a project when all I want to do is execute one line of code and see what it outputs.

A prime example of this happened today (which is what sparked me to finally post this program). My co-worker Bertan and I were talking about the System.DateTime object in .NET. We were wondering if the ToBinary() method would return the same value regardless whether the datetime object was in local time or in UTC mode. He was about to fire up Visual Studio and create a project just to write this two line program when I showed him FastSharp.

First I opened the program:

Then I entered this two line program and hit the run button:

I got an error because I forgot the capitalize the second t in ToUniversalTime(). So, I corrected that and then ran it again:

And then we had our answer. The to outputs are not the same so they do produce different results.

The way FastSharp works is pretty simple. It takes whatever you enter and wraps it in a Main method which is then wrapped in a class which then has a list of import statements appended above it (configurable through the settings dialog). It then compiles the code using the Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider class and executes it. Because FastSharp wraps the code inside of a method block you can only write code that would normally compile inside of a method. (No classes or methods).

Things To Consider and Future Consideration

FastSharp can only do console output not input. I was unable to figure out how to make Console.ReadLine() work inside the program. This will be an important future feature if someone can figure it out.
FastSharp compiles only C# code but it is not hard to make it work for Visual Basic, which would also be a nice feature upgrade.
FastSharp uses the out-of-the-box winforms RichTextBox control as the code editor. It would be nice to replace this with a code editor that color coded or even give intellisense :)

Give Me! Give Me! Give Me!

To download both the FastSharp binary and source code visit FastSharp Code Gallery Page.

JavaScript Rich Text Editors

MattManela — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:22:27 GMT

While in college I worked on several websites for my school (Binghamton University). One of my main tasks in developing websites was to create a easy to use system which would let non-developers be able to update and modify web content. I wrote these systems in PHP and I used a rich text editor control to allow non-developers to modify content. The editor I would install was always TinyMCE. It is a very feature rich and easy to use editor and is open source (which is a nice plus). It also worked very well with PHP style applications.

Here is a screen shot of TinyMCE:

Now that I am working at Microsoft I began learning and playing with ASP.NET. The development model and ideology behind ASP.NET is very different from what I was used to for PHP. Each have their advantages and disadvantages but that is not the point of this post ;) After writing some applications with ASP.NET I wanted to try to write something similar to what I have done in the past with PHP and TinyMCE. While TinyMCE will work fine with ASP.NET I wanted a RTE that was made with ASP.NET development in mind. Recently, I found one which is published on Codeplex (an open source development site). Its not so catchy title is RTE (Rich Text Editor) ASP.NET Control. It works very well and already supports many of the features that TinyMCE has. It is not as polished as TinyMCE however since it is also open source it will hopefully grow and gain polish as the community gets its hands on it.

Here is a screen shot of RTE (Rich Text Editor) ASP.NET Control: