Posts Tagged C#
.NET StringBuilder — Fast, but not as fast as you think!
Posted by eric in C# Programming, General Programming, Microsoft .NET 3.0 / WinFX, Reverse Engineering on May 28, 2009
I recently ran into a situation where I was tasked to profile some .NET code and do some optimizations anywhere hot spots popped up. I was amazed to find out that one of the BIGGEST offenders in our code block was a simple call to StringBuilder.Append(char). I had to take a step back and scratch my head and wonder if my profiler was confused.
I re-ran some tests using the StopWatch class to hard code some metrics into the application and they also confirmed the findings. What’s up? How could a class that everyone says you can use to your hearts content when it came to string concatenation was failing me?
Turns out, it was a mix of misuse and a common misconception about the StringBuilder Class.
Continue reading “.NET StringBuilder — Fast, but not as fast as you think!” »
Example Huffman Compression Routine in C#
Posted by eric in C# Programming, General Programming on May 22, 2009
This last week I decided to sit down and hash out a simple Huffman compression routine using C#. I’d never created a compression routine before from scratch (my past implementations were static for the sake of time savings), so I fleshed one out. I know that many examples exist elsewhere on the net…. but they all seemed overly complicated and up their own ass 
I had a couple goals in mind while creating my routine:
1. KEEP IT SIMPLE — A lot of routines out there WORK, but their code is too overly complicated for their own good. This over complication leads to slowness which brings me to my next goal 
It should be a simple class that accepts input data, with simple public accessors that are easy to understand even for the novice developer (sorry folks, no asynchronous delegates).
2. MAKE IT FAST — When dealing with large amounts of data in C#, especially when running it through an algorithm, it’s all too easy to use all the handy built in virtual methods or using other build in tools which make coding easier with speed being the sacrifice. Die hard C++ developers will point to these routines as C#’s downfall as a legitimate language when it comes to data intensive tasks.
Continue reading “Example Huffman Compression Routine in C#” »
2D WndrPong! using the Microsoft XNA Game Studio v2.0!
Posted by eric in C# Programming, Gaming, General Programming, Microsoft XNA on December 28, 2007
I decided to take some time this weekend to sit down and learn what I could about the latest release of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio. I started out with a book I purchased called Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creators Guide, which turned out to be a terrible book. Most of the examples in this book assume that you’re starting with a project the book provides on a Website, which already has hundreds of lines of code, custom shaders and everything built in… without even explaining how the code is working in the background.
After fumbling around with that for an hour or so an only succeeding in creating a small square on the screen, I headed over to Microsoft.com to see if any MSDN articles might exist to help me along in my ‘ground up’ learning of XNA. I was pleasantly surprised when I found a great article titled “Your First Game: Microsoft XNA Game Studio in 2D“. This was EXACTLY what I was looking for as it starts from the ground up, assuming the reader has never done game programming before, let alone 3D game programming. 
The example provided my Microsoft in this article is a simple 2D Texture of a cat that bounces around the window. I was so pleased with the ease of coding this, I thought to myself, “Heck, how hard could it be to recreate Pong?” So I set upon my task.
Several hours and many Coca-Cola bottles later I had not only my first XNA game running in Windows, but after purchasing the XNA Creators Club annual subscription from the XBox Live! marketplace for $99, I had it running on my XBox 360 as well I decided to take a little extra time and add a debug information screen as well as a small welcome screen
Controls (PC):
Up/Down for Player 1 Paddle (Left): Q/A
Up/Down for Player 2 Paddle (Right): Up Arrow/Down Arrow
Debug Information: F1
Controls (XBox 360):
Up/Down for Player 1 Paddle (Left): Left Thumbstick on Player 1 Remote
Up/Down for Player 2 Paddle (Right): Left Thumbstick on Player 2 Remote
I did run into a couple of ‘gotchas!’ while working with Game Studio. The major one I had trouble with was when you’re developing for the XBox 360 you have to account for overscan on the Television and have your game render within the ‘Safe Area‘. I noticed that when I was playing my Pong! game on my LCD TV at 720p, the edges of the game were cut off and it looked like it was stretched past the borders of my TV. After asking the fine folks in #XNA on IRC about this issue, they were able to help me out. Now I have my Pong! game account for this by setting up an XBox 360 macro which pads the edges of the play area by 50 pixels.
I’m including the Source Code for my version of Pong! which I’ve titled, “2D WndrPong!”. You can work in XNA Game Studio for free using Visual C# 2005 Express Edition along with XNA Game Studio 2.0 To deploy your games to an XBox 360, you must pair your XBox with your PC (using the “XNA Game Studio Device Center” tool) then you must purchase an XNA Creators Club Membership from the XBox 360 Marketplace. I believe the prices are $49.99 for 3 Months, $99.99 for a year. I opted for the entire year since I know it’s going to take me some time to learn
Baby Steps
2D WndrPong! Source Code – Download (36k)
WWWinamp is being converted to .NET Framework v3.5!
Posted by eric in C# Programming, General Programming, WWWinamp on December 5, 2007
Yep, it’s true!
I’ve spent the last week or so playing around with the .NET Framework v3.5 and I really like what I see. Microsoft has also put a lot of work into Team Foundation Server 2008 as well. I’ve setup a Virtual Machine using Virtual PC here running Team Foundation Server 2008 on Windows 2003 Server R2 and was able to get WWWinamp imported + converted without issue!
[zoomer]66|450|0|WWWinamp in Team Foundation Server 2008|1|0[/zoomer]
One thing I have noticed is that TFS does take up quite a bit of resources. I had to kick my VM up to 2GB of RAM in order for it to handle and build WWWinamp without hitting the swap file. Something to keep in mind moving forward I suppose. I’d imagine a large installation of TFS would require something along the lines of a Quad Core CPU with at least 4GB RAM.
There are several features in .NET 3.5 that I plan on implementing in WWWinamp right off the bat:
- Object Initializers – This will really help clean up the already massive code base. It’ll also speed things up a bit
- Embedded Manifest – A feature I’m surprised they didn’t implement with the release of .NET 3.0. Now the .manifest file will be embedded into WWWinamp, so you won’t have the extra file handing around if you run Windows Vista
- Extension Methods – Again, this will help clean up the code base and make things faster. I imagine it’ll take up a little more memory, but these days RAM is abundant
Now, I see LinQ and I’m trying to figure out it’s role in everything. I think it’ll make DB communication easier but I’m not a fan of the anonymous data types and implicit local variables. I think it could lead to some sloppy coding methodology if not kept in check.
I think it’s handy that you can now run a SQL like statement on a generic, but I’m wondering what sets this apart from the FindAll method that already exists in System.Collection.Generics. It does make it easier though to search through a Generic Collection for a developer who doesn’t have a solid grasp on delegates.
So, all that said, things are moving along. I’ll keep you all updated on the progress and please, send in those feature requests!
WWWinamp Feedback Requested
Posted by eric in C# Programming, WWWinamp on December 2, 2007
I started tapping away at the WWWinamp source the other night and was curious if there are any features you guys, the users, would like to see added? I’ve been trying to think up new ideas but I’m not sure if they’d even be helpful.
So basically, I’m asking help for what to put in the next version. If you could leave a comment with any of the following, that’d REALLY help out!
- What feature would you like to see added to WWWinamp?
- Is there any nagging bug or weird behavior you would like fixed?
I’m currently fiddling around with Visual Studio 2008 right now and am looking into the benefits C# 3.5 offers over 2.0, which the current release of WWWinamp is based upon.
Thanks for your feedback and support everyone! I look forward to your responses!
Discogs.com API Assembly for .NET Applications v1.0 Build 2871
Posted by eric in C# Programming, Discogs API, General Programming, General Software on November 12, 2007
Greetings Everyone!
I’ve been working on the Discogs.com API Assembly for .NET Applications now for a couple days and have been able to make some progress. It’s now a bit more stable as well a a tiny bit easier to use.
I took some time and added a DEBUG class. This class allows you to find out what’s happening within the Discogs.com Assembly if you start to have issues! This new class has two properties:
- Verbose (bool) – If set to TRUE, Verbose logging will be enabled allowing you to get more precise detail on what is going on within the Assembly. Otherwise, only exceptions will be logged.
- Log (string) – This is a string containing the current debug log.
Also, it has one Method:
- LogEvent (string sEvent) – Logs the value passed in to the debug log. This way you can use the same debug log from your own applications Should help make things a little easier.
New in this version as well is better error handling in the event of 404′s or an Artist/Release isn’t found. Before if you requested something that didn’t exist, the Assembly kinda crapped out while trying to deserialize the (non-existent) XML This has all been fixed.
I’m also including a small example program (with source code) on how to use the Discogs.com API Assembly. I’ve coded the example in C#, so sorry to all those VB.NET developers out there! If one of you guys would like to translate it to VB.NET, I’d be more than happy to post it here as well.
If you do not already have Microsoft Visual Studio installed, no worries! Microsoft provides a free version for C# development called Visual C# Express and you can get it here over at Microsoft.com.
You will need to update the Reference to the Discogs.com API Assembly. It currently points to where I had it setup on my local machine.
Any and all feedback is appreciated!
Cheers!
Discogs.com API Assembly for .NET Applications v1.0 Build 2871 – Download (9k)
Discogs.com API Assembly Example Application (with Source) – Download (10k)
Reading ID3 Tags using C#
Posted by eric in C# Programming, General Programming on February 21, 2007
I’m currently working on an application which will read through a directory full of MP3′s downloaded from USENET and then sort them into sub-folders titled after the “Artists – Album” stored within the ID3 tag.
I currently only have code that can read ID3v1 tags but am working on updated code which will allow for ID3v2+ tags to be read as well.
I use a STRUCT to hold the ID3 data and then use a quick little routine to parse the raw byte[] array containing the ID3 data read from the file into my STRUCT.
The STRUCT:
[csharp]
private struct ID3Tag
{
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 3)]
public byte[] bTagHeader; //0-2
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 30)]
public byte[] bTrackName; //3-32
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 30)]
public byte[] bArtistsName; //33-62
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 30)]
public byte[] bAlbumName; //63-92
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 4)]
public byte[] bYear; //93-96
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 30)]
public byte[] bComment; //97-126
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValArray, SizeConst = 1)]
public byte[] bGenres; //127
}
[/csharp]
Reading the last 128 bytes of the MP3 file into a byte[] array:
[csharp]
private byte[] ReadID3FromFileToByte(string sLocalFile)
{
using (FileStream oFS = new FileStream(sLocalFile, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
{
using (BinaryReader oBR = new BinaryReader(oFS))
{
oBR.BaseStream.Position = (oFS.Length – 128);
return oBR.ReadBytes((int)oFS.Length);
}
}
}
[/csharp]
The routine used to convert by the byte[] array into the STRUCT:
[csharp]
private ID3Tag ID3BytesToID3Struct(byte[] bRawID3)
{
GCHandle hRawID3 = GCHandle.Alloc(bRawID3, GCHandleType.Pinned);
ID3Tag id3NewTag = (ID3Tag)Marshal.PtrToStructure((hRawID3.AddrOfPinnedObject()), typeof(ID3Tag));
hRawID3.Free();
return id3NewTag;
}
[/csharp]
And the code which brings it all together:
[csharp]
byte[] bFileData = ReadID3FromFileToByte(sMyInputFile);
ID3Tag myID3 = ID3BytesToID3Struct(bFileData);
[/csharp]
I hope this is able to help someone else out in their efforts to read an ID3 tag using C#.
Cheers!
Why does the Microsoft .NET implementation of GZip compression suck?
Posted by eric in General Programming on January 22, 2007
I’ve been working on a self contained patch generator using C#. For the patch data payload, I wanted to use GZip (or deflate) to compress the payload, this way if you generated a patch for a 1MB file, the patch file wouldn’t be +1MB (5 bytes per change).
I did some quick tests to compare compression ratios on a simulated data payload:
Original Uncompressed Payload: 288k
GZipped using System.IO.Compression: 171k
Zipped using WinZip with “Super Fast” Compression: 105k
7-Zipped using 7-Zip with “Maximum” Compression: 61k
I had to do some research and dig into the MSDN libraries before the answer was finally revealed from the horses mouth:
“The compression functionality in DeflateStream and GZipStream is exposed as a stream. Data is read in on a byte-by-byte basis, so it is not possible to perform multiple passes to determine the best method for compressing entire files or large blocks of data. The DeflateStream and GZipStream classes are best used on uncompressed sources of data. If the source data is already compressed, using these classes may actually increase the size of the stream.”
It’s a bit disappointing that Microsoft itself would not recommend it’s own built in compression routine, and even go so far to say that it may “actually increase the size of the stream”. I hope in the upcoming version of .NET 3.0, they address some shortcomings of this area of the framework. Perhaps an exposed method where you can pass a byte[] which can be compressed using multiple passes and Adaptive Huffman Encoding.
I know there are several alternatives out there, such as assemblies which support the ZIP compression format, but wasn’t the goal of .NET to move away from DLL hell?
In the meantime, I’ll probably be sticking with the Microsoft implementation of GZip until I take some time to create my own Huffman encoding routine. I think a good place to start would be this book titled Data Compression: The Complete Reference. I remember thumbing through it once at a Borders book store and thinking it was a really great reference. At the time though, I had no use for such a resource.
Quick note to my readers: I understand that there are plenty of online resources for Adaptive Huffman Encoding and other compression methods using C# that have already been created. Personally, I learn by doing. So when I do my own research and create something from the ground up it really helps me understand how it all works.
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