Nobodyknows+ with Hero's Come Back

Hey, a long time since I posted a song. Here is a Japanese rock+hip pop video for one of the soundtrack songs of Naruto.



And if you like it, listen some more on this MySpace site.

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Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear

I remember reading Greg Bear books a while ago and thinking they were really cool. The coolness, of course, came from his hard sci-fi style, mixing good ideas with believable science. Now, after about a decade I suppose, I've decided to read another of his books and here is my review.

Darwin's Radio starts a little like Village of the Damned, but without the extraterrestrial origin, continues a bit like The Stand, without the religious mambo-jumbo, and ends in waiting for Darwin's Children, the next book in the series. The plot is about a major and sudden evolution of the species, without the X-Men powers.

My personal feel was that the writing is less than I wanted. The book seems shallow and uninteresting after reading Peter F. Hamilton. While the science is interesting, it also makes huge leaps of faith and I wouldn't put it behind Bear to end the story with a good versus evil battle. Was I too young to appreciate good writing, starved as I was of anything interesting in my life? Or is this book not so hot?

I will certainly read the next volumes, but I am a bit disappointed. I feel like I am watching a play after seeing a real good movie.

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Nullable types and their boxing in O/R mapping

Nullable types are new to .NET 2.0 and at first glance they seem great. The idea that you can now wrap any type into a generic one that also allows for null values seems valuable enough, especially for database interactions and the dreaded SQL null.

However, having an object that can be both instantiated and null can cause a lot of issues. First of all, boxing! You can define a Nullable<int>, set it to null, then access one of its properties (HasValue). So suddenly a piece of code like obj=null; obj.Property=...; makes sense. But if you want to send it as a parameter for a method, one that receives an object and then does stuff with it, the object must represent the null value, which means it is no longer an instance of anything. Therefore you can't get the type of the variable that was passed to the method!

Quick code snippet:
int? i=null;
DbWrapper.Save("id",i);
With Save defined as:
public void Save(string name,object value)

Now, I want to know what kind of nullable type was sent to the method. I can't see that if the parameter signature is object, so I am creating another signature for the method:
public void Save(string name,Nullable value)

At this time I get an error: static types cannot be used as parameters. And of course I can't, because Nullable is a generic static type that needs the type of the wrapped value. So the type is actually Nullable<int>. My only solution now is to create a signature for every value type: integers, floating point values, booleans, chars and IntPtrs. String and Object are value types, but they accept null, so Nullable<string> is not used on them, but if you count all the other value types , there are 14 of them!

There is another option that I just thought of: a custom object that implicitly converts from a nullable. Then the method would use this object type as a parameter.
I tested it and it works. Here is the code for the object:

Click to show

using System;
using System.Data.SqlTypes;

namespace Siderite.Util
{
    ///<summary>
    /// Wraps a nullable type so that it can be passed as a method parameter
    ///</summary>
    [Serializable]
    public class NullableWrapper
    {
        private Type _underlyingType;
        private object _wrappedValue;

        private NullableWrapper()
        {
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// The underlying type in the nullable type
        ///</summary>
        public Type UnderlyingType
        {
            get { return _underlyingType; }
            set { _underlyingType = value; }
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// The value inside the nullable type
        ///</summary>
        public object WrappedValue
        {
            get { return _wrappedValue; }
            set { _wrappedValue = value; }
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Byte> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Byte);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Int16> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Int16);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Int32> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Int32);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Int64> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Int64);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<UInt16> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (UInt16);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<UInt32> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (UInt32);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<UInt64> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (UInt64);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Single> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Single);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Double> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Double);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Decimal> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Decimal);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Boolean> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Boolean);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<Char> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (Char);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }


        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<IntPtr> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (IntPtr);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Conversion implicit operator
        ///</summary>
        ///<param name="obj"></param>
        ///<returns></returns>
        public static implicit operator
            NullableWrapper(Nullable<UIntPtr> obj)
        {
            NullableWrapper nw = new NullableWrapper();
            nw.UnderlyingType = typeof (UIntPtr);
            nw.WrappedValue = obj ?? null;
            return nw;
        }

        ///<summary>
        /// Return the Sql Server typed value from the wrapped nullable type
        ///</summary>
        ///<returns></returns>
        ///<exception cref="Exception"></exception>
        public object GetSqlValue()
        {
            if (UnderlyingType == null) return DBNull.Value;
            switch (UnderlyingType.FullName)
            {
                case "System.Byte":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlByte.Null
                               : new SqlByte((byte) WrappedValue);
                case "System.SByte":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlInt16.Null
                               : new SqlInt16((sbyte) WrappedValue);
                case "System.Int16":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlInt16.Null
                               : new SqlInt16((Int16) WrappedValue);
                case "System.Int32":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlInt32.Null
                               : new SqlInt32((Int32) WrappedValue);
                case "System.Int64":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlInt64.Null
                               : new SqlInt64((Int64) WrappedValue);
                case "System.UInt16":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlInt32.Null
                               : new SqlInt32((UInt16) WrappedValue);
                case "System.UInt32":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlInt64.Null
                               : new SqlInt64((UInt32) WrappedValue);
                case "System.UInt64":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlInt64.Null
                               : new SqlInt64(((Int64) WrappedValue));
                case "System.Single":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlSingle.Null
                               : new SqlSingle(((Single) WrappedValue));
                case "System.Double":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlDouble.Null
                               : new SqlDouble(((Double) WrappedValue));
                case "System.Decimal":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlDecimal.Null
                               : new SqlDecimal(((Decimal) WrappedValue));
                case "System.Boolean":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlBoolean.Null
                               : new SqlBoolean(((Boolean) WrappedValue));
                case "System.Char":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlString.Null
                               : new SqlString(((Char) WrappedValue).ToString());
                case "System.String":
                    return WrappedValue == null
                               ? SqlString.Null
                               : new SqlString(((String) WrappedValue));
                default:
                    throw new Exception("Unsupported type " 
                        + UnderlyingType.FullName);
            }
        }
    }
}

Update:
There are issues regarding this object, mainly refering to constants. If you pass a constant value like the number 6 a method that expects either Object or NullableWrapper, will choose NullableWrapper. More than that, it will choose a NullableWrapper<byte> since the value is under 256. Adding signatures for int, double, etc causes Ambiguos reference errors. So my only solution so far is to consider the UnderlyingType of even Nullable<byte> as Int32. It is obviously a hack, but I haven't found a good programming solution to it, yet. If you have an idea, please let me know! Thanks.

Links:
Nullable Types (C# Programming Guide)
Check If Type is a Nullable Type - Convert Nullable Type to Underlying Type - C# 2.0 Generics

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FxCop integration in Visual Studio 2005 Standard or Professional

FxCop is a free Microsoft utility that analyses compiled .Net code and makes suggestion based on rules, may them be design, security, performance of company policy rules.

The first problem is that you can only use it on compiled code. That means executables and DLLs. But what about ASP.Net 2.0? It doesn't build a DLL anymore, like 1.1 did. How can one use it? I have built an application (one that you will have to message me to send to you) that takes the project name as a parameter and then creates an FxCop project file with the DLLs from the site bin folder as reference DLLs and the DLLs from the Asp.Net temporary folder of that project as analysis targets. That means that you can also use it for ASP.Net now.

The second problem is that FxCop is now part of Team System, the overpriced and overhyped version of Visual Studio, and any attempts to use it with the Standard or Professional versions are cumbersome and undocumented. Siderite to the rescue! Here is a quick way to integrate FxCop as an external tool to Visual Studio and use it for either Console and Windows Forms applications or Asp.NET sites.

Step 1. Download FxCop. The latest version is 1.35, but there is also a 1.36 beta available that knows about lambda expressions and stuff like that.
Step 2. Get from me the FxCopAspNet application (completely free and with source), or build your own. Here is a possibly working link for it: at MediaFire.
Step 3. Open Visual Studio, go to Tools/External Tools and add two FxCop entries:
- FxCop [use C:\Program Files\Microsoft FxCop 1.36\fxcop.exe as Command, "$(TargetPath)" as Arguments and C:\Program Files\Microsoft FxCop 1.36 as Initial Directory]
- FxCopAspNet [use C:\Program Files\FxCopAspNet\FxCopAspNet.exe as Command, "$(ProjectFileName)" as arguments and C:\Program Files\FxCopAspNet as Initial Directory]
Step 4. Just open your web site or application in Visual Studio, compile it, then click on the FxCop item that applies.

Now, this is not meant to be a tutorial on FxCop, here are some links that might enlighten people:
Download FxCop 1.36 Beta
Download FxCop 1.35
Open Source FxCop Integration Add-in for Visual Studio 2005
How to copy the necessary files from Team System to Visual Studio 2005 Professional to make integration work
Use FxCop from your own code
A small tutorial
FxCopUnit, FxCop testing unit project
Video on how to create your own FxCop rules

There are a myriad rules included in the default installation of FxCop, some of them are just annoying, like some naming rules or some telling you you shouldn't raise Exceptions just objects inherited from Exception, but some are pretty good. A lot more can be found on the Internet and now, with the integration in VS Team System, I expect a lot more to pop-up.

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TV Series I have been watching

The third in this category of blog entries, this describes the few TV shows I have been watching lately. The previous entry can be found here.

House MD is a doctors show. A bit more interesting than E.R. and Grey's Anatomy because they actually focused on interesting characters and interesting medicine. However, after three seasons, the quirky intelligent doctor is just annoying, the supporting cast makes no sense and the medicine is becoming a joke. It's never lupus!

Prison Break is the new Lost. It had an interesting premise and I admit I watched it with pleasure for about a season and a half. Then it all went haywire. I predicted it, too... When people recommended the show I said "How the hell can you keep a prison break for 3 seasons?"; and the answer is that you can't. Not without bringing in mysterious government secret agencies with hidden and malevolent agendas. As acting goes, I like Dominic Purcell, interpreting the older brother, but I can't seem to see him in any decent show. You may remember him from John Doe, another clicheatic TV dead end.

Also in the list:
Numb3rs, even if the math has gone sour already and the show has basically turned into another pure police show. (good versus bad silliness)
Stargate Atlantis, which will probably end with this season without any other decent sci fi to replace it.
Battlestar Galactica, which was great, but moving towards boredom.
Regenesis probably won't get another season after season 3. It was never a great show, but it was decent, being Canadian and all :), with a bunch of virus hunters. It could have been a lot more scientific.
Grey's Anatomy is still on the market for my wife, but barely. A doctor show, but now it is very little about medicine and a lot about the human side of the characters; and who the hell wants a movie about people, completely overlooking the cool stuff happening near them?
Private Practice is an off shoot of Grey's Anatomy, but we never even started watching it.
Ugly Betty still sucks enormously and the wife still watches it.
Eureka. The second season waits on my harddrive, cobwebs on each file. Maybe if I am really bored...
Desperate Housewives takes the desperation way too far, probably reflecting the feelings of the screenwriters when watching the audience numbers fall.
A new season of Doctor Who will start in December.

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Night's Dawn trilogy - Peter F. Hamilton

He did it again! Or would it be better for me to say he has done it afore, as I am kind of moving backwards in the Peter F. Hamilton writings? Night's Dawn is a huge book, about 9Mb of pure text, divided into three parts purely out of paper formatting reasons, I am sure. So far, this is the best thing he has written, at least in my opinion.

Maybe the guy is the kind of writer who writes his best work first, then tries unsuccessfully to follow up. Not that any of his followups could be called a failure, it's just that Night's Dawn is really cool! I mean who can seriously deal with possession, necromancy, devil worship, witch hunting, vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons, all in a future world in which humanity has conquered space an tries to attack the situation with science and rationality? Seriously! If this guy would have written the Bible, there would be no Muslims! (Ron Hubbard, eat your heart out!)

There isn't much else I can say. I certainly cannot summarize a book that spreads over about a dozen inhabited planets, all with their own history, socio-economic situations described and own characters to add plot (real plot) to the story. Right now I am terrified. I need to find the Greg Mandel trilogy, which is the last of the Hamilton big stories, and there are only two outcomes: a) I hate it, which would have wasted my time and trust in humanity; b) I love it, and then I go into withdrawal waiting for the last two volumes of the Void trilogy and whatever else he brilliantly writes in the future.

Bottom line: if you like Sci-Fi, you need to read this. Hamilton and the ReSharper guys are the only people I ever felt the need to send money to in order to apologize for my shameless Internet piracy.

Links:
Peter Hamilton's official site
Wikipedia's entry on the Night's Dawn trilogy
Peter F. Hamilton's entry in Wikipedia.

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Lateral parking solution for women everywhere

There are a lot of people in the world having problem with lateral parking. It is not only difficult to manage when you have nothing to go on but the little tiny images in the car mirrors, but stressful as well, as normally the procedure is done on a crowded street with drivers behind you urging you to do it faster.

Not a problem anymore! The Chinese have found the perfect way of parking in under 5 seconds! Here is a video tutorial on how to do it:



Here is an alternative solution.

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