Pack:=1 and ASP.NET: The beginning

Uff, just fighted for two days of getting that byte-array into a structure. There were always strange values starting from a specific property. After a few hours, I found out that there was a off by 1 byte error: if I shift every byte back one byte, I will reach the right result. Code tells more than 1000 words:

Structure Test
  Dim a As Byte
  Dim b As Int16
  Dim c as Byte
End Structure

Dim handle As GCHandle = GCHandle.Alloc(byteArray, _
                                      GCHandleType.Pinned)
Dim t As New Test
t = CType(Marshal.PtrToStructure(_
                         handle.AddrOfPinnedObject(), _
                         GetType(Test)), Test)

This will give you false values for b and c. This is why: "The default behaviour in the framework is for values in the structure to be aligned at 4-byte boundaries, so values start at FieldOffset 0,4,8,12 ..." (see forum). To avoid this, use as a structure-attribute and everything's fine now :)

Another bad book read: Programmieren mit ASP.NET AJAX. The first chapter is good - everything else just confusing. No good examples. Maybe I didn't get the point - I haven't done anything in ASP.NET yet. I'm watching now and the first 6 videos were fine :)

Ah, I forgot to mention the free first chapter of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack and Scott "ScottGu" Guthrie - famous bloggers writing a book. I'm curious to read it :)

Mix09 and "The Guide"

Right now, Mix09 is on air. This is a Microsoft developer conference focusing on web development. I bet, you want to see some videos from here.

I recently finished The Application Architecture Guide 2.0. Now I can design every system from a mobile app up to a RIA :)

log4net and SnippetEditor

I recently searched a logging-framework ("there must be some logging-frameworks out there, you must not write your own" - I thought) and stumbled across log4net. It is a port of the log4j logging framework of Apache. It is configurable via xml or via code, claims that it's super-fast and has tons of various output streams. I will use it from now on in my private code-projects, because I haven't got the time to write a Message.dll (our logger here at MCC) for my own.

I'm already using "prop " and "dp " (dp only for C#) frequently and by using Entering and Returning of Message.dll, I wished to have a shortcut for this too. Et voilá, I googled a bit and found the great Snippet Editor. Veeeery handy. Now I've got "logstart " for setting up the logger and "loger " for generating the Entering- and Returning-code for the Message.dll.

MSDN magazine and Unity

οἶδα οὐκ εἰδώς, oída ouk eidós!

Thank you wikipedia for helping me with my greek. In the last few weeks, I learned so much while considering this and that for the new architecture; my programming-knowledge seems to duplicate with every line I read. Was I completely dazzled all the time?

Well, I'm reading the MSDN magazine now (in fact, I'm trying to manage to read a tiny part of it) to keep me up to date at least with the MS-world. By the way, in the february-issue, there is a great article about MVVM by Josh Smith.

One cool new think I learned is IoC of famous Martin Fowler. So I looked at Unity, a relatively new dependency injection container. Imho a great way for spreading logging and parts of our MCC_Aufzeichnung. Works fine with MVVM as Jason Dolinger demonstrates. This video was kind of an eye-opener in the matter of WPF for me.