Category Archives: C# 4

C#, C# 4

The irritation of bad names

28 Comments

A couple of days ago I accidentally derailed the comments on Eric Lippert’s blog post about unused "using" directives. The reason that redundant code doesn’t generate a warning in Visual Studio is that it’s what you get to start with in Visual Studio. This led me to rant somewhat about other aspects of Visual Studio’s behaviour which sacrifice long term goodness in favour of short term efficiency. Almost all the subsequent comments (at the time of writing this post) are concerned with my rant rather than Eric’s post. Some agree with me, some don’t – but it’s only now that I’ve spotted the bigger picture behind my annoyances.

All of them are to do with names and the defaults provided. I’ve blogged before about how hard it is to find a good name – it’s a problem I run into time and time again, and the ability to rename something is one of the most important refactorings around.

If you don’t know, ask

Now if it’s hard to find a good name, it stands to reason that anything the IDE can generate automatically is likely to be a poor name… such as "Form1", "textBox1" or "button1_Click". And yet, in various situations, Visual Studio will happily generate such names, and it can sometimes be a small but significant pain to correct it.

The situation which causes me personally a lot of pain is copying a file. For C# in Depth, I have a lot of very small classes, each with a Main method. When I’m evolving an example, I often want to take the existing code and just change it slightly, but in a new file. So I might have a file called OrderByName.cs containing a class called OrderByName. (I agree this would normally be a bad class name, but in the context of a short but complete example it’s okay.) I want to just select the file, hit copy and paste, and be asked for a new filename. The class within the file would then be renamed for me as well. As an aside, this is the behaviour Eclipse has in its Java tooling.

In reality, I’d end up with a new file called "Copy of OrderByName.cs", still containing a class called OrderByName. Renaming the file wouldn’t offer to rename the class, as the filename wouldn’t match the class name. Renaming the class by just changing it and then hitting Ctrl-. would also rename the original class, which is intensely annoying. You’re basically stuck doing it manually with find and replace, as far as I can see. There may be some automated aid available, but at the very least it’s non-obvious.

Now the question is: why would I ever want a file called "Copy of OrderByName.cs"? That’s always going to be the wrong name, so why doesn’t Visual Studio ask me for the right name? It could provide a default so I can skip through if I really want to (and probably an "Apply to all items" if I’m copying multiple files) but at least give me the chance to specify the right filename at the crucial point. Once it knows the right new filename before it’s got a broken build, I would hope it would be easy to then apply the new name to the class too.

The underlying point is that if you absolutely have to have a name for something, and there’s no way a sensible suggestion can be provided, the user should be consulted. I know there’s a lot of discussion these days about not asking the user pointless questions, but this isn’t a pointless question… at least when it comes to filenames.

If you don’t need a name, don’t use one

I’m not a UI person, so some of this section may be either outdated or at least only partially applicable. In particular, I believe WPF does a better job than the Windows Forms designer.

Names have two main purposes, in my view. They can provide semantic meaning to aid the reader, even if a name isn’t strictly required (think of the "introduce local variable" refactoring) and they can be used for identification.

Now suppose I’m creating a label on a form. If I’m using the designer, I can probably see the text on the label – its meaning is obvious. I quite possibly don’t have to refer to the label anywhere in code, unless I’m changing the value programmatically… so why does it need a name? If you really think it needs a name, is "label1" ever going to be the right name – the one you’d have come up with as the most meaningful one you could think of?

In the comments in Eric’s blog, someone pointed out that being prompted for a name every time you dragged a control onto the designer would interrupt workflow… and I quite agree. Many of those controls won’t need names. However, as soon as they do need a name, prompting for the name at that point (or just typing it into the property view) isn’t nearly such a distraction… indeed, I’d suggest it’s actually guiding the developer in question to crystallize their thoughts about the purpose of that control.

Conclusion

Okay, this has mostly been more ranting – but at least it’s now on my blog, and I’ve been able to give a little bit more detail about the general problem I see in Visual Studio – a problem which leads to code containing utterly useless names.

The fundamental principle is that I want every name in my code to be a meaningful one. The IDE should use two approaches to help me with that goal:

  • Don’t give a name to anything that doesn’t deserve or need one
  • If a name is really necessary, and you can’t guess it from the rest of the context, ask the user

I don’t expect anything to change, but it’s good to have it off my chest.

C#, C# 4

Type initialization changes in .NET 4.0

17 Comments

This morning, while checking out an email I’d received about my brain-teasers page, I discovered an interesting change to the CLR in .NET 4.0. At least, I think it’s interesting. It’s possible that different builds of the CLR have exhibited different behaviour for a while – I only have 32-bit versions of Windows installed, so that’s what I’m looking at for this whole post. (Oh, and all testing was done under .NET 4.0b2 – it could still change before release.)

Note: to try any of this code, build in release mode. Running in the debugger or even running a debug build without the debugger may well affect the behaviour.

Precise initialization: static constructors

I’ve written before about static constructors in C# causing types to be initialized immediately before the type is first used, either by constructing an instance or referring to a static member. In other words, consider the following program:

using System;

class StaticConstructorType
{
    private static int x = Log();
    
    // Force “precise” initialization
    static StaticConstructorType() {}
    
    private static int Log()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“Type initialized”);
        return 0;
    }
    
    public static void StaticMethod() {}
}

class StaticConstructorTest
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        if (args.Length == 0)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(“No args”);
        }
        else
        {
            StaticConstructorType.StaticMethod();
        }
    }
}

Note how the static variable x is initialized using a method that writes to the console. This program is guaranteed to write exactly one line to the console: StaticConstructorType will not be initialized unless you give a command line argument to force it into the “else” branch. The way the C# compiler controls this is using the beforefieldinit flag.

So far, so boring. We know exactly when the type will be initialized – I’m going to call this “precise” initialization. This behaviour hasn’t changed, and couldn’t change without it being backwardly incompatible. Now let’s consider what happens without the static constructor.

Eager initialization: .NET 3.5

Let’s take the previous program and just remove the (code-less) static constructor – and change the name of the type, for clarity:

using System;

class Eager
{
    private static int x = Log();
    
    private static int Log()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“Type initialized”);
        return 0;
    }
    
    public static void StaticMethod() {}
}

class EagerTest
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        if (args.Length == 0)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(“No args”);
        }
        else
        {
            Eager.StaticMethod();
        }
    }
}

Under .NET 3.5, this either writes both “Type initialized” and “No args” (if you don’t pass any command line arguments) or just “Type initialized” (if you do). In other words, the type initialization is eager. In my experience, a type is initialized at the start of execution of the first method which refers to that type.

So what about .NET 4.0? Under .NET 4.0, the above code will never print “Type initialized”.

If you don’t pass in a command line argument, you see “No args” as you might expect… if you do, there’s no output at all. The type is being initialized extremely lazily. Let’s see how far we can push it…

Lazy initialization: .NET 4.0

The CLR guarantees that the type initializer will be run at some point before the first reference to any static field. If you don’t use a static field, the type doesn’t have to be initialized… and it looks like .NET 4.0 obeys that in a fairly lazy way. Another test app:

using System;

class Lazy
{
    private static int x = Log();
    private static int y = 0;
    
    private static int Log()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“Type initialized”);
        return 0;
    }
    
    public static void StaticMethod()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“In static method”);
    }

    public static void StaticMethodUsingField()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“In static method using field”);
        Console.WriteLine(“y = {0}”, y);
    }
    
    public void InstanceMethod()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“In instance method”);
    }
}

class LazyTest
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“Before static method”);
        Lazy.StaticMethod();
        Console.WriteLine(“Before construction”);
        Lazy lazy = new Lazy();
        Console.WriteLine(“Before instance method”);
        lazy.InstanceMethod();
        Console.WriteLine(“Before static method using field”);
        Lazy.StaticMethodUsingField();
        Console.WriteLine(“End”);
    }
}

This time the output is:

Before static method
In static method
Before construction
Before instance method
In instance method
Before static method using field
Type initialized
In static method using field
y = 0
End

As you can see, the type initialized when StaticMethodUsingField is called. It’s not as lazy as it could be – the first line of the method could execute before the type is initialized. Still, being able to construct an instance and call a method on it without triggering the type initializer is slightly surprising.

I’ve got one final twist… what would you expect this program to do?

using System;

class CachingSideEffect
{
    private static int x = Log();

    private static int Log()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“Type initialized”);
        return 0;
    }
    
    public CachingSideEffect()
    {
        Action action = () => Console.WriteLine(“Action”);
    }
}

class CachingSideEffectTest
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        new CachingSideEffect();
    }
}

In .NET 4.0, using the Microsoft C# 4 compiler, this does print “Type initialized”… because the C# compiler has created a static field in which to cache the action. The lambda expression doesn’t capture any variables, so the same delegate instance can be reused every time. That involves caching it in a static field, triggering type initialization. If you change the action to use Console.WriteLine(this) then it can’t cache the delegate, and the constructor no longer triggers initialization.

This bit is completely implementation-specific in terms of the C# compiler, but I thought it might tickle your fancy anyway.

Conclusion

I’d like to stress that none of this should cause your code any problems. The somewhat eager initialization of types without static constructors was entirely legitimate according to the C# and CLR specs, and so the new lazy behaviour of .NET 4.0. If your code assumed that just calling a static method, or creating an instance, would trigger initialization, then that’s your own fault to some extent. That doesn’t stop it being an interesting change to spot though :)

Books, C#, C# 4, Wacky Ideas

Contract classes and nested types within interfaces

8 Comments

I’ve just been going through some feedback for the draft copy of the second edition of C# in Depth. In the contracts section, I have an example like this:

[ContractClass(typeof(ICaseConverterContracts))]
public interface ICaseConverter
{
    string Convert(string text);
}

[ContractClassFor(typeof(ICaseConverter))]
internal class ICaseConverterContracts : ICaseConverter
{
    string ICaseConverter.Convert(string text)
    {
        Contract.Requires(text != null);
        Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<string>() != null);
        return default(string);
    }

    private ICaseConverterContracts() {}
}

public class InvariantUpperCaseFormatter : ICaseConverter
{
    public string Convert(string text) 
    {
        return text.ToUpperInvariant();
    }
}

The point is to demonstrate how contracts can be specified for interfaces, and then applied automatically to implementations. In this case, ICaseConverter is the interface, ICaseConverterContracts is the contract class which specifies the contract for the interface, and InvariantUpperCaseFormatter is the real implementation. The binary rewriter effectively copies the contract into each implementation, so you don’t need to duplicate the contract in the source code.

The reader feedback asked where the contract class code should live – should it go in the same file as the interface itself, or in a separate file as normal? Now normally, I’m firmly of the "one top-level type per file" persuasion, but in this case I think it makes sense to keep the contract class with the interface. It has no meaning without reference to the interface, after all – it’s not a real implementation to be used in the normal way. It’s essentially metadata. This does, however, leave me feeling a little bit dirty. What I’d really like to be able to do is nest the contract class inside the interface, just like I do with other classes which are tightly coupled to an "owner" type. Then the code would look like this:

[ContractClass(typeof(ICaseConverterContracts))]
public interface ICaseConverter
{
    string Convert(string text);

    [ContractClassFor(typeof(ICaseConverter))]
    internal class ICaseConverterContracts : ICaseConverter
    {
        string ICaseConverter.Convert(string text)
        {
            Contract.Requires(text != null);
            Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<string>() != null);
            return default(string);
        }

        private ICaseConverterContracts() {}
    }
}

public class InvariantUpperCaseFormatter : ICaseConverter
{
    public string Convert(string text) 
    {
        return text.ToUpperInvariant();
    }
}

That would make me feel happier – all the information to do with the interface would be specified within the interface type’s code. It’s possible that with that as a convention, the Code Contracts tooling could cope without the attributes – if interface IFoo contains a nested class IFooContracts which implements IFoo, assume it’s a contract class and handle it appropriately. That would be sweet.

You know the really galling thing? I’m pretty sure VB does allow nested types in interfaces…

Books, C#, C# 4, General, Parallelization, Speaking engagements, Stack Overflow

Recent activities

15 Comments

It’s been a little while since I’ve blogged, and quite a lot has been going on. In fact, there are a few things I’d have blogged about already if it weren’t for “things” getting in the way.

Rather than writing a whole series of very short blog posts, I thought I’d wrap them all up here…

C# in Depth: next MEAP drop available soon – Code Contracts

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on my writing dilemma. For the moment, the plan is to have a whole chapter about Code Contracts, but not include a chapter about Parallel Extensions. My argument for making this decision is that Code Contracts really change the feel of the code, making it almost like a language feature – and its applicability is almost ubiquitous, unlike PFX.

I may write a PFX chapter as a separate download, but I’m sensitive to those who (like me) appreciate slim books. I don’t want to “bulk out” the book with extra topics.

The Code Contracts chapter is in the final stages before becoming available to MEAP subscribers. (It’s been “nearly ready” for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been on holiday, amongst other things.) After that, I’m going back to the existing chapters and revising them.

Talking in Dublin – C# 4 and Parallel Extensions

Last week I gave two talks in Dublin at Epicenter. One was on C# 4, and the other on Code Contracts and Parallel Extensions. Both are now available in a slightly odd form on the Talks page of the C# in Depth web site. I no longer write “formal” PowerPoint slides, so the downloads are for simple bullet points of text, along with silly hand-drawn slides. No code yet – I want to tidy it up a bit before including it.

Podcasting with The Connected Show

I recently recorded a podcast episode with The Connected Show. I’m “on” for the second 2/3 of the show – about an hour of me blathering on about the new features of C# 4. If you can understand generic variance just by listening to me talking about it, you’re a smart cookie ;)

(Oh, and if you like it, please express your amusement on Digg / DZone / Shout / Kicks.)

Finishing up with Functional Programming for the Real World

Well, this hasn’t been taking much of my time recently (I bowed out of all the indexing etc!) but Functional Programming for the Real World is nearly ready to go. Hard copy should be available in the next couple of months… it’ll be really nice to see how it fares. Much kudos to Tomas for all his hard work – I’ve really just been helping out a little.

Starting on Groovy in Action, 2nd edition

No sooner does one book finish than another one starts. The second edition of Groovy in Action is in the works, which should prove interesting. To be honest, I haven’t played with Groovy much since the first edition of the book was finished, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s happened to the language in the meantime. I’ll be applying the same sort of spit and polish that I did in the first edition, and asking appropriately ignorant questions of the other authors.

Tech Reviewing C# 4.0 in a Nutshell

I liked C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, and I feel honoured that Joe asked me to be a tech reviewer for the next edition, which promises to be even better. There’s not a lot more I can say about it at the moment, other than it’ll be out in 2010 – and I still feel that C# in Depth is a good companion book.

MoreLINQ now at 1.0 beta

A while ago I started the MoreLINQ project, and it gained some developers with more time than I’ve got available :) Basically the idea is to add some more useful LINQ extension methods to LINQ to Object. Thanks to Atif Aziz, the first beta version has been released. This doesn’t mean we’re “done” though – just that we think we’ve got something useful. Any suggestions for other operators would be welcome.

Manning Pop Quiz and discounts

While I’m plugging books etc, it’s worth mentioning the Manning Pop Quiz – multiple choice questions on a wide variety of topics. Fabulous prizes available, as well as one-day discounts:

  • Monday, Sept 7th: 50% of all print books (code: pop0907)
  • Monday, Sept 14: 50% off all ebooks  (code: pop0914)
  • Thursday, Sept 17: $25 for C# in Depth, 2nd Edition MEAP print version (code: pop0917) + C# Pop Quiz question
  • Monday, Sept 21: 50% off all books  (code: pop0921)
  • Thursday, Sept 24: $12 for C# in Depth, 2nd Edition MEAP ebook (code: pop0924) + another C# Pop Quiz question

Future speaking engagements

On September 16th I’m going to be speaking to Edge UG (formerly Vista Squad) in London about Code Contracts and Parallel Extensions. I’m already very much looking forward to the Stack Overflow DevDays London conference on October 28th, at which I’ll be talking about how humanity has screwed up computing.

Future potential blog posts

Some day I may get round to writing about:

  • Revisiting StaticRandom with ThreadLocal<T>
  • Volatile doesn’t mean what I thought it did

There’s a lot more writing than coding in that list… I’d like to spend some more time on MiniBench at some point, but you know what deadlines are like.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to and what I’ll be doing for a little while…

Books, C#, C# 4

Tricky decisions… Code Contracts and Parallel Extensions in C# in Depth 2nd edition

83 Comments

I’d like some feedback from readers, and I suspect my blog is the simplest way to get it.

I’m currently writing chapter 15 of C# in Depth, tentatively about Code Contracts and Parallel Extensions. The problem is that I’m 15 pages in, and I haven’t finished Code Contracts yet. I suspect that with a typesetter moving the listings around a little it can be shortened a little bit, but I’m still concerned. With the amount I’ve still got to write, Code Contracts is going to end up at 20 pages and I expect Parallel Extensions may be 25. That makes for a pretty monstrous chapter for non-language features.

I’d like to present a few options:

  1. Keep going as I am, and take the hit of having a big chapter. I’m not going into huge amounts of detail anyway, but the bigger point is to demonstrate how code isn’t what it used to be. We’re no longer writing a simple series of statements to be executed in order. Code Contracts changes this dramatically with the binary rewriter, and Parallel Extensions adjusts the parallelism, and ironically makes it easier to write asynchronous code as if it were executed sequentially.
  2. Try to whittle the material down to my original target of around 35 pages. This means it’ll be a really cursory glance at each of the technologies – I’m unsure of how useful it would be at all at that point.
  3. Don’t even claim to give enough information to really get people going with the new technologies, but possibly introduce extra ones as well, such as PostSharp. Build the theme of "you’re not writing C# 1 any more" in a stronger sense – zoom back to show the bigger picture while ignoring the details.
  4. Separate them into different chapters. At this point half the new chapters would be non-language features, which isn’t great for the focus of the book… but at least they’d be a more reasonable size.
  5. Ditch the chapters from the book completely, possibly writing them as separate chapters to be available as a mini-ebook companion to the book. (We could possibly include them in the ebook version.) This would make the second edition more focused again and possibly give me a bit more space when revising earlier chapters. However, it does mean there’d only be two full-size new chapters for the second edition. (There’ll be a new "wrapping up" chapter as well for a sense of closure, but I’m not generally counting that.)

Other suggestions are welcome, of course. I’m not going to claim that we’ll end up doing whatever is suggested here, but I’m sure that popular opinion will influence the final decision.

Thoughts?

C#, C# 4, Evil code

Evil Code of the Day: variance and overloading

6 Comments

(Note that this kind of breakage was mentioned a long time ago in Eric Lippert’s blog, although not in this exact form.)

Whenever a conversion becomes available where it wasn’t before, overload resolution can change its behaviour. From C# 1 to C# 2 this happened due to delegate variance with method group conversions – now the same thing is true for generic variance for interfaces.

What does the following code print?

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

class Base
{
    public void Foo(IEnumerable<string> strings)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“Strings”);
    }
}

class Derived : Base
{
    public void Foo(IEnumerable<object> objects)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“Objects”);
    }
}

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        List<string> strings = new List<string>();
        new Derived().Foo(strings);
    }
}

The correct answer is “it depends on which version of C# and .NET framework you’re using.”

If you’re using C# 4.0 and .NET 4.0, then IEnumerable<T> is covariant: there’s an implicit conversion from IEnumerable<string> to IEnumerable<object>, so the derived overload is used.

If you’re using C# 4.0 but .NET 3.5 or earlier then the compiler still knows about variance in general, but the interface in the framework doesn’t have the appropriate metadata to indicate it, so there’s no conversion available, and the base class overload is used.

If you’re using C# 3.0 or earlier then the compiler doesn’t know about generic variance at all, so again the base class overload is used.

So, this is a breaking change, and a fairly subtle one at that – and unlike the method group conversion in .NET 2.0, the compiler in .NET 4.0 beta 1 doesn’t issue a warning about it. I’ll edit this post when there’s an appropriate Connect ticket about it…

In general though, I’d say it’s worth avoiding overloading a method declared in a base class unless you really have to. In particular, overloading it using the same number of parameters but more general ones seems to be a recipe for unreadable code.

Books, C#, C# 4, Stack Overflow, Wacky Ideas

Faking COM to fool the C# compiler

3 Comments

C# 4 has some great features to make programming against COM components bearable fun and exciting. In particular:

  • PIA linking allows you to embed just the relevant bits of the Primary Interop Assembly into your own assembly, so the PIA isn’t actually required at execution time
  • Named arguments and optional parameters make life much simpler for APIs like Office which are full of methods with gazillions of parameters
  • "ref" removal allows you to pass an argument by value even though the parameter is a by-reference parameter (COM only, folks – don’t worry!)
  • Dynamic typing allows you to remove a load of casts by converting every parameter and return type of "object" into "dynamic" (if you’re using PIA linking)

I’m currently writing about these features for the book (don’t forget to buy it cheap on Friday) but I’m not really a COM person. I want to be able to see these compiler features at work against a really simple type. Unfortunately, these really are COM-specific features… so we’re going to have to persuade COM that the type really is a COM type.

I got slightly stuck on this first, but thanks to the power of Stack Overflow, I now have a reasonably complete demo "fake" COM type. It doesn’t do a lot, and in particular it doesn’t have any events, but it’s enough to show the compiler features:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

// Required for linking into another assembly (C# 4)
[assembly:Guid("86ca55e4-9d4b-462b-8ec8-b62e993aeb64")]
[assembly:ImportedFromTypeLib("fake.tlb")]

namespace FakeCom
{
    [Guid("c3cb8098-0b8f-4a9a-9772-788d340d6ae0")]
    [ComImport, CoClass(typeof(FakeImpl))]
    public interface FakeComponent
    {
        object MakeMeDynamic(object arg);
        
        void Foo([Optional] ref int x,
                 [Optional] ref string y);
    }
 
    [Guid("734e6105-a20f-4748-a7de-2c83d7e91b04")]
    public class FakeImpl {}
}

We have an interface representing our COM type, and a class which the interface claims will implement it. Fortunately the compiler doesn’t actually check that, so we can get away with leaving it entirely unimplemented. It’s also worth noting that our optional parameters can be by-reference parameters (which you can’t normally do in C# 4) and we haven’t given them any default values (as those are ignored for COM anyway).

This is compiled just like any other assembly:

csc /target:library FakeCom.cs

Then we get to use it with a test program:

using FakeCom;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        // Yes, that is calling a "constructor" on an interface
        FakeComponent com = new FakeComponent();
        
        // The boring old fashioned way of calling a method
        int i = 0;
        string j = null;
        com.Foo(ref i, ref j);
        
        // Look ma, no ref!
        com.Foo(10, "Wow!");
        
        // Who cares about parameter ordering?
        com.Foo(y: "Not me", x: 0);

        // And the parameters are optional too
        com.Foo();
        
        // The line below only works when linked rather than
        // referenced, as otherwise you need a cast.
        // The compiler treats it as if it both takes and
        // returns a dynamic value.
        string value = com.MakeMeDynamic(10);
    }
}

This is compiled either in the old "deploy the PIA as well" way (after adding a cast in the last line):

csc /r:FakeCom.dll Test.cs

… or by linking the PIA instead:

csc /l:FakeCom.dll Test.cs

(The difference is just using /l instead of /r.)

When the test code is compiled as a reference, it decompiles in Reflector to this (I’ve added whitespace for clarity):

private static void Main()
{
    FakeComponent component = (FakeComponent) new FakeImpl();

    int x = 0;
    string y = null;
    component.Foo(ref x, ref y);

    int num2 = 10;
    string str3 = "Wow!";
    component.Foo(ref num2, ref str3);

    string str4 = "Not me";
    int num3 = 0;
    component.Foo(ref num3, ref str4);

    int num4 = 0;
    string str5 = null;
    component.Foo(ref num4, ref str5);

    string str2 = (string) component.MakeMeDynamic(10);
}

Note how the compiler has created local variables to pass by reference; any changes to the parameter are ignored when the method returns. (If you actually pass a variable by reference, the compiler won’t take that away, however.)

When the code is linked instead, the middle section is the same, but the construction and the line calling MakeMeDynamic are very different:

private static void Main()
{
    FakeComponent component = (FakeComponent) Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetTypeFromCLSID
        (new Guid("734E6105-A20F-4748-A7DE-2C83D7E91B04")));

    // Middle bit as before

    if (<Main>o__SiteContainer6.<>p__Site7 == null)
    {
        <Main>o__SiteContainer6.<>p__Site7 = CallSite<Func<CallSite, object, string>>
            .Create(new CSharpConvertBinder
                       (typeof(string), 
                        CSharpConversionKind.ImplicitConversion, false));
    }
    string str2 = <Main>o__SiteContainer6.<>p__Site7.Target.Invoke
        (<Main>o__SiteContainer6.<>p__Site7, component.MakeMeDynamic(10));
}

The interface is embedded in the generated assembly, but with a slightly different set of attributes:

[ComImport, CompilerGenerated]
[Guid("C3CB8098-0B8F-4A9A-9772-788D340D6AE0"), TypeIdentifier]
public interface FakeComponent
{
    object MakeMeDynamic(object arg);
    void Foo([Optional] ref int x, [Optional] ref string y);
}

The class isn’t present at all.

I should point out that doing this has no practical benefit in real code – but the ability to mess around with a pseudo-COM type rather than having to find a real one with the exact members I want will make it a lot easier to try a few corner cases for the book.

So, not a terribly productive evening in terms of getting actual writing done, but interesting nonetheless…

C#, C# 4

Evil code of the day

35 Comments

At a glance, this code doesn’t look particularly evil. What does it do though? Compile it with the C# 4.0b1 compiler and run it…

using System;

class Base
{
    public virtual void Foo(int x, int y)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Base: x={0}, y={1}", x, y);
    }
}

class Derived : Base
{
    public override void Foo(int y, int x)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Derived: x={0}, y={1}", x, y);
    }
}

class PureEvil
{
    static void Main()
    {
        Derived d = new Derived();
        Base b = d;
        
        b.Foo(x: 10, y: 20);
        d.Foo(x: 10, y: 20);
    }
}

The results are:

Derived: x=20, y=10
Derived: x=10, y=20

I’m very nearly tempted to leave it there and just see what the reactions are like, but I’ll at least give you a hint as to where to look – section 21.3 of the C# 4 spec explains why this gives odd results. It does make perfect sense, but it’s hideously evil.

I feel dirty.

Bonus questions

  • What happens if you rename the parameters in Derived.Foo to yy and xx?
  • (As suggested by Mehrdad) What happens if you call it with a dynamic value?
C#, C# 4, Google, Speaking engagements

OS Jam at Google London: C# 4 and the DLR

18 Comments

Last night I presented for the first time at the Google Open Source Jam at our offices in London. The room was packed, but only a very few attendees were C# developers. I know that C# isn’t the most popular language on the Open Source scene, but I was still surprised there weren’t more people using C# for their jobs and hacking on Ruby/Python/etc at night.

All the talks at OSJam are just 5 minutes long, with 2 minutes for questions. I’m really not used to this format, and felt extremely rushed… however, it was still a lot of fun. I used a somewhat different approach to my slides than the normal “bullet points in PowerPoint” – and as it was only short, I thought I might as well effectively repeat the presentation here in digital form. (Apologies if the images are an inconvenient size for you. I tried a few different ones, and this seemed about right. Comments welcome, as I may do a similar thing in the future.)

First slide

Introductory slide. Colleagues forced me to include the askjonskeet.com link.

Second slide

.NET isn’t Open Source. You can debug through a lot of the source code for the framework if you agree to a “reference licence”, but it’s not quite the same thing.
Third slide

.NET isn’t Open Source, but the DLR is. And IronRuby. And IronPython. Yay!

And of course Mono is Open Source: the DLR and Mono play nicely together, and the Mono team is hoping to implement the new C# 4.0 features for the 2.8 release in roughly the same timeframe as Microsoft.
Fourth slide

This is what .NET 4.0 will look like. The DLR will be included in it, despite being open source. IronRuby and IronPython aren’t included, but depend heavily on the DLR. (Currently available versions allow you to use a “standalone” DLR or the one in .NET 4.0b1.)

C# doesn’t really depend on the DLR except for its handling of dynamic. C# is a statically typed language, but C# 4.0 has a new static type called dynamic which you can do just about anything with. (This got a laugh, despite being a simple and mostly accurate summary of the dynamic typing support in C# 4.0.)
Fifth slide

The fundamental point of the DLR is to handle call sites – decide what to do dynamically with little bits of code. Oh, and do it quickly. That’s what the caches are for. They’re really clever – particularly the L0 cache which compiles rules (about the context in which a particular decision is valid) into IL via dynamic methods. Awesome stuff.

I’m sure the DLR does many other snazzy things, but this feels like it’s the core part of it.

Sixth slide

At execution time, the relevant binder is used to work out what a call site should actually do. Unless, that is, the call has a target which implements the shadowy IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface (winner of “biggest mouthful of a type name” prize, 2009) – in which case, the object is asked to handle the call. Who knows what it will do?
Seventh slide

Beautifully syntax-highlighted C# 4.0 source code showing the dynamic type in action. The method calls on lines 2 and 3 are both dynamic, even though in the latter case it’s just using a static method. Which overload will it pick? It all depends on the type of the actual value at execution time.

If I’d had more time, I’d have demonstrated how the C# compiler preserves the static type information it knows at compile time for the execution time binder to use. This is very cool, but would take far too long to demonstrate in this talk – especially to a bunch of non-C# developers.
Eighth slide There were a couple of questions, but I can’t remember them offhand. Someone asked me afterwards about how all this worked on non-.NET implementations (i.e. Mono, basically). I gather the DLR itself works, but I don’t know whether C# code compiled in the MS compiler will work at the moment – it embeds references to binder types in Microsoft.CSharp.dll, and I don’t know what the story is about that being supported on Mono.

This is definitely the format I want to use for future presentations. It’s fun to write, fun to present, and I’m sure the “non-professionalism” of it makes it a lot more interesting to watch. Although it’s slower to create text-like slides (such as the first and the last one) this way, the fact that I don’t need to find clip-art or draw boxes with painful user interfaces is a definite win – especially as I’m going to try to be much more image-biased from now on. (I don’t want people reading slides while I’m talking – they should be listening, otherwise it’s just pointless.)

Books, C#, C# 4

Dynamic type inference and surprising possibilities

9 Comments

There have been mutterings about the fact that I haven’t been blogging much recently. I’ve been getting down to serious work on the second edition of C# in Depth, and it’s taking a lot of my time. However, I thought I’d share a ghastly little example I’ve just come up with.

I’ve been having an email discussion with Sam Ng, Chris Burrows and Eric Lippert about how dynamic typing works. Sam mentioned that even for dynamically bound calls, type inference can fail at compile time. This can only happen for type parameters where none of the dynamic values contribute to the type inference. For example, this fails to compile:

static void Execute<T>(T item, int value) where T : struct {}
…
dynamic guid = Guid.NewGuid();
Execute("test", guid);

Whatever the value of guid is at execution time, this can’t possibly manage to infer a valid type argument for T. The only type which can be inferred is string, and that’s not a value type. Fair enough… but what about this one?

static void Execute<T>(T first, T second, T third) where T : struct {}
…
dynamic guid = Guid.NewGuid();
Execute(10, 0, guid);
Execute(10, false, guid);
Execute("hello", "hello", guid);

I expected the first call to compile (but fail at execution time) and the second and third calls to fail at compile time. After all, T couldn’t be both an int and a bool could it? And then I remembered implicit typing… what if the vaue of guid isn’t actually a Guid, but some struct which has an implicit conversion from int, bool and string? In other words, what if the full code actually looked like this:

using System;

public struct Foo
{
    public static implicit operator Foo(int x)
    {
        return new Foo();
    }

    public static implicit operator Foo(bool x)
    {
        return new Foo();
    }

    public static implicit operator Foo(string x)
    {
        return new Foo();
    }
}

class Test
{
    static void Execute<T>(T first, T second, T third) where T : struct {}

    static void Main()
    {
        dynamic foo = new Foo();
        Execute(10, 0, foo);
        Execute(10, false, foo);
        Execute("hello", "hello", foo);
    }
}

Then T=Foo is a perfectly valid inference. So yes, it all compiles – and the C# binders even get it all right at execution time. So much for any intuition I might have about dynamic typing and inference…

No doubt I’ll have similar posts about new C# 4 features occasionally… but they’re more likely to be explanations of misunderstandings than deep insights into a correct view of the language. Those end up in the book instead :)