Monthly Archives: May 2008

Martian Voyeur

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Filed under Misc

I’m a space buff so I’ve been following the Phoenix mission for a while now. It finally arrived at Mars and successfully landed 5 days ago (Sunday).

That in and of itself is incredible, considering some of the recent failures NASA has had. This landing went picture perfect, though.

But what’s even more amazing is that the Mars Orbiter, already in orbit around Mars, was able to snap a picture of Phoenix as it was parachuting to the surface!. Just contemplating the enormous number of tasks that had to be done just right to pull that off can make your head spin.

Here’s the photo (from Space.com and NASA):

image

Granted, it’s not a frame from “The Right Stuff” but still, you gotta give the guys at NASA props for pulling this off.

Here’s hoping Phoenix performs even half as well as the other two scamps, Spirit and Opportunity, that have been scurrying around farther south for more than 4 years now.

Being a Good Windows Citizen

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Filed under Installations, Rants, VB Feng Shui

I’m constantly amazed by some of the goofy things that application installations do to my system without even giving me the option.

Obviously, there’s the whole spyware/adware problem, but that’s just blatant.

There’s an entirely other, more subtle, level to the problem, where applications do little things that are difficult to undo, are annoying and that you aren’t given the option of not “doing” in the first place.

Here’s one example. Now, I like the CodeJock products, and I’m not really picking on them here, it’s just that they give me a good example:

image

This is the “Right Click – New” menu that you get from Explorer when you right click in a folder and select “New”.

Now, I’m a pretty busy developer, and I like a nice shortcut just as much as the next guy, but honestly, I can’t imagine EVER creating so many “Command Bars Designer Documents” that I’d want an entry for it on my New Items menu like this. As you can see, there’s already enough junk on this menu. I wonder how many people out there create a new contact, bitmap image or briefcase so regularly that it belongs on this menu. Hell, I’ve always created new Word docs by opening Word, starting my document and then “File-Save”-ing them wherever, never by the “New Office Word Document” menu, but then, maybe that’s just me.

A few others:

  • Unrequested shortcuts on the QuickLaunch space or the Desktop.
  • Unrequested Tray Icons.
  • Adding Vista Sidebar gadgets without permission.
  • Stealing file extension associations without asking and not restoring them on uninstall.

Any other bits of application rudeness out there anyone has run into?

Choices in Utility Function Implementation

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Filed under .NET, VB Feng Shui

One thing I’ve begun to notice about VB.NET is that there are a pile of options as to how you might implement a particular piece of functionality. I’m still not convinced that this is necessarily a good thing, but it is hard to argue with having options.

For instance, I recently needed a function to retrieve the number of elements defined in an enumeration. Now, I realize that enumerations can be sparse, and that creating an array to be indexed by the enumeration values will not work with all enumerations, but that’s a topic for another post.

The first option I thought of was to implement it as a plain ol’ function in a module:

Debug.print GetEnumItemCount(GetType(MyEnum))

    Public Function GetEnumItemCount(ByVal typ As Type) As Integer
        If typ.IsEnum Then
            Return System.Enum.GetNames(typ).Length
        Else
            Return 0
        End If
    End Function

Not terribly interesting and it’s perfectly functional, but it just doesn’t seem particularly .NET-ish. Also, I don’t really care for the “double function” approach (ie calling GetType() to retrieve the enum type descriptor object to pass into the function).

So, any way to improve this?

One way is to get rid of the extra GetType function call. Unfortunately, the only way I’ve seen to do this so far is to pass in one of the enumeration values instead of the enumeration itself (or its type).

Debug.print GetEnumSiblingCount(MyEnum.Value1)

    Public Function GetEnumSiblingCount(ByVal e As [Enum]) As Integer
        Return System.Enum.GetNames(e.GetType).Length
    End Function

I’ve renamed the function GetEnumSiblingCount because that’s exactly what this new function does, return the total number of siblings to the passed in enumeration element.

Unfortunately, this approach still seems a little a lot odd.

My next thought was, why not add an extension method to the enumeration itself, so you could do something like:

Debug.print MyEnum.Count

Unfortunately, since MyEnum is a type and not considered an actual object in any sense, you can’t invoke a method on it, or even define one on it for that matter.

You can, however, get close, by defining an extension method on the Type object itself:

Debug.Print GetType(MyEnum).Count

Module EnumExtender
    <extension ()> _
    Public Function Count(ByVal typ As Type) As Integer
        If typ.IsEnum Then
            Return System.Enum.GetNames(typ).Length
        Else
            Return 0
        End If
    End Function
End Module

The downside here is that we’re extending not just enum types but all types, and extending anything other than enums with this function doesn’t make much sense.

Interestingly, there’s yet another option; extend the enum elements themselves.

Debug.print MyEnum.Value1.SiblingCount

Module EnumExtender
    <extension ()> _
    Public Function SiblingCount(ByVal anEnum As [Enum]) As Integer
        Return System.Enum.GetNames(anEnum.GetType).Count
    End Function
End Module

However, this also has the same problem as a previous try in that it just doesn’t feel right to ask an enumeration element for some property of it’s containing type.

Ok, how about just changing up the definition of the enumeration itself:

    Public Enum MyEnum
        Value1 = 0
        Value2 = 1
        Value3 = 2
        Count = 3
    End enum

Short, sweet, no compiler tricks or reflection.

But. It doesn’t work with existing, already defined Enumerations, and since the Count is part of the enumeration, the actual count of the enum is 4, not 3, which would seem to be confusing in the long run.

I’m sure there’s many more possibilities as well, and, hopefully, I’ve missed a better one and someone out there will let me know it!

Long story short, my first inclination, the plain ol’ function-in-a-module GetEnumItemCount(), seems the best solution for this particular piece of functionality.

In reality, the best solution for most of these sorts of generic, application-wide, stateless utility functions seems to be the plain ol’ function-in-a-module.