Suggestion: Add instance modifiers to C# (and other languages)
I’d like to be able to do
someFunctionReturningY(x){ somePropertyOfY=4; … }.DoSomething();
It should also support casting without needing parentheses in the following type of statement:
Z zzz = (Z)functionReturningY{somePropertyOfZ=…; … };
The same pattern should work for enums too apart from object instances. It is inspired by initializers in C#, e.g. var x = new Test(){someProperty=…}. It’s just a generalization of the same pattern.
E.g. at the following scenario I want to modify an object that GetMetadataFromUI function returns
and currently I’m forced to write this which is way more verbose:
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HowTo: Copy effective-computed CSS style for specific HTML paragraph
I’m in the process of setting up a temporary landing page for the trafilm project, where I need apart from showing the trafilm logo to also show some text description about the project, till I set up an instance of MonoX Social CMS for it, like the one in ClipFlair’s Community website (ClipFlair Social).
Since ClipFlair Social has some nice text styling, I decided to borrow the style of one of its home page paragraphs, using Firefox web browser’s developer tools (accessible via F12 key).
Being at the Inspector tab of the dev tools (which is the default when they first open), using the “Pick element” tool (first one on the dev tools pane’s toolbar on the left), I select the paragraph that looks nicely styled and I go to the Computed tab at the Style view, then press CTR+A to select all computed style CSS declarations for that paragraph element and press CTRL+C or right click and select Copy to copy them to the clipboard.
If pasted (CTRL+V) in some text editor like Window’s Notepad that looks like a big ugly line, since they contain Unix-style line-endings, that is LF (linefeed) and not Windows-style ones (CRLF, Carriage Return + Line Feed), but editors like Wordpad or Notepad++ can show them nicely and even convert line endings from Unix to Windows and vice-versa if you wish so (e.g. in Notepad++ the respective actions are at Edit / EOL Conversion menu).
So, this is the copied Computed CSS style for that paragraph:
border-bottom-color: #333;
border-bottom-style: none;
border-bottom-width: 0px;
border-image-outset: 0 0 0 0;
border-image-repeat: stretch stretch;
border-image-slice: 100% 100% 100% 100%;
border-image-source: none;
border-image-width: 1 1 1 1;
border-left-color: #333;
border-left-style: none;
border-left-width: 0px;
border-right-color: #333;
border-right-style: none;
border-right-width: 0px;
border-top-color: #333;
border-top-style: none;
border-top-width: 0px;
color: #333;
cursor: default;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0px;
line-height: 24px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-top: 0px;
-moz-border-bottom-colors: none;
-moz-border-left-colors: none;
-moz-border-right-colors: none;
-moz-border-top-colors: none;
As you can see, it has lots of stuff that isn’t needed, unless you want to be sure your style doesn’t get affected by style of parent elements. In my case I decided to trim it down a bit:
color: #333;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0px;
line-height: 24px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-top: 0px;
Adding around the text above (which is represented by the CSS comment /* … */ below) a CSS selector to wrap those declarations in order to make a proper CSS rule-set:
p {
}
and passing to CSS LINT tool to help us clean up the CSS we get no errors, but several warnings:
For example, as explained at W3Schools.com, in CSS one can use shorthand margin and padding properties:
The
marginproperty is a shorthand property for the following individual margin properties:
margin-topmargin-rightmargin-bottommargin-left
CSS has properties for specifying the padding for each side of an element:
padding-toppadding-rightpadding-bottompadding-left
…so one wonders why Firefox Dev Tools don’t spit those out with that order and give them in bottom, left, right and top order instead.
Also instead of 0px, one is suggested to always write 0 instead, since zero will always be zero irrespective of the CSS units used for it (at least for the currently available CSS unit systems that is). This is merely to save in bandwidth I think, since 0px is better, suggesting to anyone modifying this value in the future they’d better use “px” [pixels] instead of say “pt” [points]).
So we clean up this CSS into (pay attention to the order of values in margin and padding shorthand declarations, which is top, right, bottom, left, that is clockwise starting from the top side of the HTML elements targeted via the CSS rule selector, which is a paragram – p – in our case):
p {
color: #333;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0;
line-height: 24px;
margin: 0 0 20px 0;
padding: 0 0 10px 0;}
Pasting at CSS LINT online tool again we get no warnings anymore (apart from no errors):
One might also remove the redundant space chars at the end of each line that Firefox places when copy-pasting the style declarations. Notepad++ can do it via Edit / Blank Operations / Trim Trailing Space menu command:
Fix: Windows Phone update error 80072f8f
I was setting up a new Lumia phone (with Windows Phone 8.1) and neither phone update, nor the (Here) maps downloads were working. When trying Settings / Phone Update, it was showing error 80072f8f and was pointing to http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/how-to/wp8/basics/solutions-to-update-issues to read more info. However that error code wasn’t listed there. Wonder if there is any page listing all the possible error codes. I find it silly if they have error codes that aren’t documented anywhere officially.
I looked it up on Google (sorry Bing!) and found http://www.techanges.com/fix-windows-phone-error-80072f8f/, which was saying this was related to time/date discrepancy between the phone and the windows update server. Obviously the maps also get their updates via the same system, although the maps update was showing the misleading message that it couldn’t connect to the maps library at that moment.
Although I had set correct timezone, it had wrong date/time, it was set to autoupdate date/time, but forgot that it had no SIM card in it yet. Obviously it doesn’t get these updates from a time server, but from the mobile phone connection provider. Hope Windows 10 phone fixes that and gets the date/time from time server like the one from NIST or from Microsoft that Windows uses on the desktop.
Suggestion: If and while etc. clauses should accept bool? in C#
At TrackingCam app (http://TrackingCam.codeplex.com) I have the following WPF code, where cbTrackingPresenter is a CheckBox control defined in my MainWindow’s XAML:
private void cbTrackingPresenter_Checked(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
if (cbTrackingPresenter.IsChecked == true)
StartTrackingPresenter();
else
StopTrackingPresenter();
}
Note the (redundant in my opinion) == true pattern used there. If the == true is omitted, you get the compile-time error "CS0266", with message "Cannot implicitly convert type ‘bool?’ to ‘bool’. An explicit conversion exists (are you missing a cast?)"
Why not make the "if" clause (and "while" and any clause accepts a boolean/condition) more clever and have it accept bool? too? It would only fire the condition if the value is "true" (not if it is false or null) in that case.
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HowTo: show inner exception message if available, else outer one
Sometimes when you catch an exception in .NET, the message it prints out isn’t very informative, since it is wrapping another exception that had been thrown a bit inner in the code. That exception is in that case accessible via InnerException of the Exception instance.
That inner exception is also an Exception, so one would like to use its Message instead of the outer exception’s one, if an inner exception exists and, only if an inner exception doesn’t exist use the caught exception’s message. Here’s a clean-looking pattern I’ve coined up to achieve this while working on the TrackingCam application:
try
{
//…
}
catch (Exception e)
{
MessageBox.Show((e.InnerException ?? e).Message);
}
the ?? operator returns e.InnerException if it is not null, else falls back to returning e. Those two results are both of type Exception, so you can use Message on them, by putting the ?? operator’s expression in parentheses.
Suggestion: C# static extension methods invokable on class type too
it would be nice if C# supported syntax like:
public static DependencyProperty Register(static DependencyProperty x, string name, Type propertyType, Type ownerType, FrameworkPropertyMetadata typeMetadata)
that is static extension methods for classes, that can be invoked without a class instance (just with the class type), apart from normal extension methods that can be invoked on a class instance.
Then for example I could use it in Silverlight to add to its DependencyProperty class some extra WPF syntax that it currently misses, in order to increase code portability. It would wrap Dr.WPF’s implementation of value coercion for Silverlight’s DependencyProperty. I have the related code at my Compatibility library (http://Compatibility.codeplex.com) and respective NuGet package (http://nuget.org/packages/Compatibility), but the syntactic sugar is missing to achieve source code portability (via WPF and Silverlight projects that include common files via file links) without changes.
Note the "static DependencyProperty" parameter instead of the "this DependencyProperty" one that is used in C# extension methods (or else instead of static maybe they could use other keyword like type or typeof there, but I feel static is more appropriate).
Related discussion:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/866921/static-extension-methods
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/249222/can-i-add-extension-methods-to-an-existing-static-class
Also see https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-2015/suggestions/2060313-c-support-static-extension-methods-like-f where somebody mentions "static extension properties" apart from "extension properties". Indeed it is natural that if static extension methods are to be allowed in the future, static extension properties should be added too (to extend a type with [attached] static properties)
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