How to declare natural ordering by implementing the generic IComparable interface in C# .NET

November 4, 2016 Leave a comment

Primitive types such as integers can be ordered naturally in some way. Numeric and alphabetical ordering comes in handy with numbers and strings. However, there’s no natural ordering for your own custom objects with a number of properties.

Consider the following Triangle class:

public class Triangle
{
	public double BaseSide { get; set; }
	public double Height { get; set; }

	public double Area
	{
		get
		{
			return (BaseSide * Height) / 2;
		}
	}
}

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Implementing an enumerator for a custom object in .NET C#

November 1, 2016 Leave a comment

You can create an enumerator for a custom type by implementing the generic IEnumerable of T interface. Normally you’d do that if you want to create a custom collection that others will be able to iterate over using foreach. However, there’s nothing stopping you from adding an enumerator to any custom type if you feel like it, it’s really simple.

Consider the following Guest class:

public class Guest
{
	public string Name { get; set; }
	public int Age { get; set; }
}

Guests can be invited to a Party:

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Divide an integer into groups with C#

October 28, 2016 3 Comments

Say you’d like to divide an integer, e.g. 20, into equal parts of 3 and distribute any remainder equally across the groups. The result of such an operation would be the following 3 integers:

7,7,6

20 can be divided into 3 equal parts of 6 and we have a remainder of 20 – 6 * 3 = 2. 2 is then added as 1 and 1 to the first two groups of 6. The result is a more or less equal distribution of the start integer.

The following function will perform just that:

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Truncate a DateTime in C#

October 27, 2016 Leave a comment

Occasionally you need to truncate a date to the nearest year, month, day etc. E.g. you need to transform the date 2015-06-05 15:33:30 into 2015-06-05 00:00:00, i.e. truncate it to the nearest day and set the lower levels of the date to 0.

Here comes a series of extension methods to help you with that:

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6 ways to concatenate strings with C# .NET

October 24, 2016 4 Comments

There are multiple ways to build a string out of other strings in .NET. Here come 5 of them.

Let’s start with the most obvious one that language learners encounter first, i.e. concatenation done by the ‘+’ operator:

string concatenatedOne = "This " + "is " + "a " + "concatenated " + "string.";

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Two ways to measure time in C# .NET

October 20, 2016 Leave a comment

Imagine that you want to want to measure how long it takes to execute a method or function in .NET. Maybe you suspect that a specific call in your code is taking too long but you would like to measure its performance.

There are professional – and expensive – tools out there that can monitor the behaviour of applications at the code level such as AppDynamics or DynaTrace. However, they are relatively complex to install and get to work and may be overkill for a simple initial code diagnostics. Instead you might want to start with some simple C# code to begin with.

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Overriding the + and – operators in C# .NET

October 19, 2016 Leave a comment

It’s easy to override the mathemtical operators like + or – in C# to build custom operations.

Consider the following simple Rectangle class:

public class Rectangle
{
	public Rectangle(int width, int height)
	{
		Height = height;
		Width = width;
	}

	public int Width
	{
		get;
		set;
	}

	public int Height
	{
		get;
		set;
	}
}

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Extending class definitions with partial classes in C# .NET

October 13, 2016 Leave a comment

The ‘partial’ keyword helps you divide your classes into multiple files within the same namespace. One obvious usage of partial classes is to split the definition of a large type into smaller chunks. You cannot just use the partial keyword with classes but methods as well.

The partial classes will reside in two – or more – different cs files in the same namespace. Say you have a partial Customer class in the project-name/domains folder:

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Comparing strings using the CompareInfo class in .NET C#

October 11, 2016 Leave a comment

It’s important to be aware of the cultural settings in a globalised application when comparing strings. The CompareInfo class and the CompareOptions enumeration provide a useful way to compare strings based on specific cultures.

One way to get hold of the CompareInfo class belonging to a specific culture is through the CultureInfo class:

CultureInfo swedishCulture = new CultureInfo("sv-SE");
CompareInfo swedishCompareInfo = swedishCulture.CompareInfo;

CultureInfo hungarianCulture = new CultureInfo("hu-HU");
CompareInfo hungarianCompareInfo = hungarianCulture.CompareInfo;

CultureInfo germanCulture = new CultureInfo("de-DE");
CompareInfo germanCompareInfo = germanCulture.CompareInfo;

The CompareInfo object has a Compare method which returns 0 if the strings are equal, -1 if the first string is less than the second and 1 if the opposite is the case. The following comparison of two German strings returns -1 as by default the comparison is case-sensitive:

int comparison = germanCompareInfo.Compare("mädchen", "Mädchen");

This is where the CompareOptions enumeration proves useful. Here are the possible values:

  • IgnoreCase: make the comparison case-insensitive
  • IgnoreNonSpace: ignore diacritics, or officially non-spacing combining characters in Unicode. Example: “Madchen” will be equal to “Mädchen” with this flag
  • IgnoreSymbols: ignore symbols, like white-space, #, $, % etc. “Mädch$en” and “M#ädchen” will be considered equal with this flag
  • IgnoreKana and IgnoreWidth: concern mostly the Japanese language
  • None: the default value if the basic overload of Compare is called
  • Ordinal: quick but culture-insensitive comparison based on the Unicode value of each character
  • OrdinalIgnoreCase: same as Ordinal but the comparison is also case-insensitive
  • StringSort: use a sort algorithm where non-alphanumeric symbols, such as ‘-‘ come before the alphanumeric characters

Read all posts related to Globalisation in .NET here.

Filed under .NET, C# language features, Globalization Tagged with , , ,

Using immutable collections for thread-safe read-only operations in .NET

October 3, 2016 Leave a comment

Sometimes you have a scenario where multiple threads need to read from the same shared collection. We’ve looked at the 4 concurrent, i.e. thread-safe collection types on this blog that are available in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace. They can be safely used for both concurrent writes and reads.

However, if your threads strictly only need to read from a collection then there’s another option. There are collections in the System.Collections.Immutable namespace that are immutable, i.e. read-only and have been optimisied for concurrent read operations.

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Filed under .NET, Async/Parallelism, C# language features, Task Parallel Library Tagged with , , , ,

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