Finding the current culture settings using the CultureInfo class in .NET C#

December 25, 2016 Leave a comment

Finding the the culture settings – the locale – of a thread is straightforward in .NET:

CultureInfo cultureInfo = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

We extract the current culture from the current thread. The CultureInfo class holds a number of properties to extract information from it. Examples:

string cultureName = cultureInfo.Name;
string cultureDisplayName = cultureInfo.DisplayName;
string nativeName = cultureInfo.NativeName;
string englishName = cultureInfo.EnglishName;
string cultureAbbreviation = cultureInfo.TwoLetterISOLanguageName;

As my computer is set to run with Swedish settings I got the following values from top to bottom:

Read more of this post

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

Getting the type of an object in .NET C#

December 24, 2016 2 Comments

You’ll probably know that every object in C# ultimately derives from the Object base class. The Object class has a GetType() method which returns the Type of an object.

Say you have the following class hierarchy:

public class Vehicle
{
}

public class Car : Vehicle
{
}

public class Truck : Vehicle
{
}

Read more of this post

Filed under .NET, Reflection Tagged with ,

Examining the Assembly using Reflection in .NET

December 23, 2016 1 Comment

The CLR code of a project is packaged into an assembly. We can inspect a range of metadata from an assembly that also the CLR uses to load and execute runnable code: classes, methods, interfaces, enumerations etc.

In order to inspect an Assembly in a .NET project we’ll first need to get a reference to the assembly in question. There are various ways to retrieve an assembly, including:

Assembly callingAssembly = Assembly.GetCallingAssembly();
Assembly entryAssembly = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly();
Assembly executingAssembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();

…where Assembly is located in the System.Reflection namespace.

Read more of this post

Filed under .NET, Reflection Tagged with ,

Rewriting Hello World according to SOLID in .NET

December 22, 2016 5 Comments

Introduction

There are numerous posts on this blog dedicated to various software principles. One of those principles is SOLID with special attention to ‘D’, i.e. the dependency inversion principle (DIP).

In this short post we’ll rewrite the classic introductory C# Hello World program according to what we’ve learnt before.

Read more of this post

Filed under .NET, Design principles Tagged with , , ,

A basic example of using the ExpandoObject for dynamic types in .NET C#

December 21, 2016 Leave a comment

The ExpandoObject in the System.Dynamic namespace is an interesting option if you ever need to write dynamic objects in C#. Dynamic objects are ones that are not statically typed and whose properties and methods can be defined during runtime. I’ve come across this object while I was discovering the dynamic language runtime (DLR) features in .NET. We’ve seen an example of that in this post with the “dynamic” keyword.

Read more of this post

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

An example of using the dynamic keyword in C# .NET

December 20, 2016 Leave a comment

The dynamic keyword in C# is similar to Reflection. It helps you deal with cases where you’re not sure of the concrete type of an object. However, you may expect the object to have a certain method that you can invoke at runtime. E.g. you have a framework that external users can write plugins for. You may set up a list of rules for the plugin to be valid, e.g. it must have a method called “Execute” and a property called “Visible”.

There are various ways you can solve this problem and one of them is dynamic objects. Using the dynamic keyword will turn off the automatic type checking when C# code is compiled. The validity of the code will only be checked at runtime.

Read more of this post

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

Calculate standard deviation of integers with C# .NET

December 19, 2016 Leave a comment

Here comes a simple extension method to calculate the standard deviation of a list of integers:

public static double GetStandardDeviation(this IEnumerable<int> values)
{
	double standardDeviation = 0;
	int[] enumerable = values as int[] ?? values.ToArray();
	int count = enumerable.Count();
	if (count > 1)
	{
		double avg = enumerable.Average();
		double sum = enumerable.Sum(d => (d - avg) * (d - avg));
		standardDeviation = Math.Sqrt(sum / count);
	}
	return standardDeviation;
}

Here’s how you can call this method:

List<int> ints = new List<int>() { 4, 7, 3, 9, 13, 90, 5, 25, 13, 65, 34, 76, 54, 12, 51, 23, 3, 1, 7 };
double stdev = ints.GetStandardDeviation();

View all various C# language feature related posts here.

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

Generate truly random cryptographic keys using a random number generator in .NET

December 18, 2016 1 Comment

The well-known System.Random class lets us generate random numbers quickly. However, the values provided by System.Random are not truly random. Instead, they are pseudo-random. The return values should only be used in case true randomness is not that important, such as in the classic number-guessing game. In case you need a random value to be used in cryptography such as a cryptographic key in symmetric and asymmetric encryption then System.Random is not an acceptable option.

Read more of this post

Filed under .NET, Security Tagged with , , ,

Big Data: a summary of various Amazon Big Data tools

December 17, 2016 Leave a comment

Introduction

We have gone through a lot of material about Big Data on this blog. This post summarises each Amazon Cloud component one by one, what they do and what their roles are in a Big Data architecture.

The components

Read more of this post

Filed under .NET, Amazon, Big Data

5 ways to write to a file with C# .NET

December 16, 2016 Leave a comment

It’s a common scenario that you need to write some content to a file. Here you see 5 ways to achieve that.

1. Using a FileStream:

private void WriteToAFileWithFileStream()
{
	using (FileStream target = File.Create(@"c:\mydirectory\target.txt"))
	{
		using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(target))
		{
			writer.WriteLine("Hello world");
		}
	}
}

Read more of this post

Filed under .NET, Files and directories Tagged with

← Older posts

Newer posts →

Elliot Balynn's Blog

A directory of wonderful thoughts

Software Engineering

Web development

Disparate Opinions

Various tidbits

chsakell's Blog

WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TUTORIALS WITH OPEN-SOURCE PROJECTS

Once Upon a Camayoc

ARCHIVED: Bite-size insight on Cyber Security for the not too technical.