C++/C# coding blog
Emacs is a powerful, extensible text editor which is available for just about any operating system. It can be run in console mode which makes it useful for editing scripts and config files through a terminal emulator. However, configuring Emacs to behave in the way you want can be a daunting and time-consuming task. Here, … Read more
Last week I was working on a C# project in VS2019 and I wanted to use some language features from C# 8.0 (in particular ‘using declarations’). So how do we check if a project is using C# 8.0? The logical place to look is the project settings. Right-click on the project and select Properties=>Build. Scroll … Read more
LINQ (Language-integrated query) provides a common query syntax for dealing with objects, databases and XML. It was introduced in C# 3.0. In this post we shall look at using LINQ to Objects. LINQ to Objects can be used with enumerable objects such as arrays, lists and strings. There are two ways to access LINQ in … Read more
Generics in C# allow you to generalise classes and methods to work with different underlying types. Generics are used in many of the C# collections such as List, Vector and Queue. Using generics allows the compiler to enforce type-safety. List, Vector etc. are examples of generic classes. It is also possible to define generic methods. … Read more
Gaussian elimination is a direct method for solving a linear system of equations. A linear system is a set of simultaneous equations (linear) in several variables. In theory, solving such a system algebraically is straightforward. First, we eliminate the first variable either by substitution or appropriate row operations. We then continue to eliminate the second … Read more
The Bridge pattern is a structural design pattern in which abstraction is used to separate the interface from the implementation so that the two can be modified independently. The Bridge pattern is particularly useful when developing code which might need to run on different platforms. For example, suppose you want to develop a user interface … Read more
Tasks In .NET, the Task class enables us to run jobs asynchronously. It offers a more high-level framework than we saw in the previous post on threading, which means we don’t have to get involved with mutexes and signalling. There are two versions of the task class: the non-generic Task class which is for tasks … Read more
Threads are an important concept in asynchronous programming. In this post we will cover creating threads and give a brief overview of some of the low-level synchronisation classes in .NET. Finally we look at the .NET thread pool which allows a series of tasks to be run in parallel. Creating threads The Thread class can … Read more
Lambda expressions allow us to define anonymous expressions. You can use lambda expressions where where you might use a delegate function. Lambda expressions are defined using the lambda operator =>. There are two types of lambda expressions: An expression lambda which is defined by an expression. A statement lambda which is defined by a statement … Read more
A delegate is an object that holds a reference to a method. A delegate can be used to implement a callback mechanism, for example to receive notification of an event such as a user clicking on a button. Delegates are also useful when we consider of the principle of separation of concerns. For example, we … Read more