Its generally not possible to avoid threading in a.net project of even moderate complexity.
* The UI pumps messages on its own thread. You need to do background processing on another thread.
* Any communication should be done using asynchonous callbacks, or IO completion ports or similar. Otherwise you'll end up with the noob-esq while-sleep pattern.
* ASP.Net pages run slow as hell, because people like to round trip to the database in sequence when databinding lists - this not only makes the pages slow, it limits total throughput. Learn how to use asynchonous pages. Most of the sites I've had the misfortune to work on could be happily served off my laptop instead of the quad-core beast they were struggling with.
To write modern software you need to understand threading.
I'm referring to the interactions between.NET runtime and Windows OS.
Then why don't you go and read the damn source code and identify the "super secret" calls that are being used? The framework is open sourced under the MS-RPL, and the runtime is avaliable the normal way you get shared source access to Windows components.
The 2.0 runtime is an ECMA spec, which Mono has already fully implemented.
The only things that are going to be slightly difficult to implement are things like System.Messaging where they won't (obviously) have MSMQ to back them up. Not a major issue, they can just wrap RabbitMQ or something else available on *nix.
C is not syntactic sugar for assembler. Going back to assembler would lose you some type safety, etc.
LINQ is a syntactic nicety for something which can be done equivalently in code. You don't lose anything by doing it manually (well, except its a pain in the ass).
Its rather like how the new automatic properties work - it just implies a variable and a standard get/set pair.
As OP pointed out, you can create an expression in code. LINQ is just a nicer way of doing this, its shorthand, nothing more. Expression trees are nothing new. Diamond Binding (an ORM tool I use) exposes an expression tree as part of its database query API. Looks similar too: Product.Find(Expression.Or(Expression.Eq(Product.Column.Foo, bar),...) etc.
Things that aren't syntactic sugar are the more fundamental changes, like generics.
Australia is around 18c/kWh peak. The grid will buy back power at that rate.
The government provides a subsidy of $8/Watt up to 1kW for solar installations. If you net negative useage for a billing period, the total buyback is doubled.
These new tech CGID panels (and theres a few manufacturers) cost around $1/watt. I think around $3-4 a watt is break-even, but a realistic economic analysis (I could invest in an oil company and get say 9% return), was suggesting around $2 a watt. (Theres fudge factoring for weather/night included here).
So yes, these are in fact a better buy than paying your power company, in Australia. Don't think you can call up the Solar Shop though - those bastards are still pimping the shitty ones.
Ten big trucks running off that, that tube, and what happens to your own personal tube? I just the other day got... a tube was switched on by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up in a big ball with all the trucks going on the tube commercially.
They want to deliver vast amounts of power from the tubes. And again, the tubes is not something that you just dump anything on. It's not a big internet. It's a series of wires. And if you don't understand, those wires can be filled and if they are filled, when you switch your lights on, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts onto that wire enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Any of these languages can be used to program for.Net, using any other.Net library written in any other language. Theres even a cross-compiler for JVM bytecode, called IKVM. "What language" a library is written in is generally completely meaningless in the.Net environment. You can pick the best tool for the job every single time.
So no,.Net is not C#. I mainly use C#, but also a bit of Boo (python like, but cooler - syntatic macros let you modify the abstract syntax tree of the language in code - like #defines on crack), and some F#.
The CLI has done some pretty amazing things for language interoperablity and portability. You would do well to actually research what you complain about before you open your mouth.
* Stupid VB syntax for generics as im too lazy to figure out escaping.
Where is IIRC an extension method on IEnumerable(T) from System.Core. Most of the newer features are just syntactic sugar. Its pretty obvious this is the case, because there hasnt been any runtime changes to support anything functional...
I still haven't seen a compelling reason to change from diamond binding to LINQ. Having nice wel-defined business objects is a lot better IMO, and being based on NHibernate makes it a more mature product.
Runtime 2.0 introduced support for generics (among some other things). This was the "big upgrade".
Framework 3.x added a bunch of extra libraries, like WCF/WPF etc, the new features to the C# compiler (which mono also has), and importantly it still ran on Runtime 2.0 (so is backwards compatible). Its just that the new APIs, such as WCF haven't been implemented by the Mono team.
Net 3.x is a set of libraries for the 2.0 runtime.
It extends the API avaliable with things like WPF/WCF, theres a load of support for LINQ, etc. The runtime is the same.
So yeah, if you develop an app using VS2008, then it will run on Mono 2.0... UNLESS you are using Windows Presentation Foundation or something like that.
I'm fairly certain that LINQ would work, in fact - just not LINQ to Entities. The vanilla LINQ is just a bunch support like IQueryable IExpression, etc. So (ab)using LINQ to query collections and things would probably work fine. Not that I can be fucked testing;)
SharpDevelop is better than Monodevelop, and is BSD licensed. It also, frankly, pwns the crap out of Eclipse. The only reason I don't use it on Windows (its much faster than VS, btw) is that its refactoring tools aren't yet on par with the excellent Resharper add-in.
Regardless, you can compile cross platform binaries with Visual Studio. If your time is worth so little that the $200 license for Windows is too high, then I respectfully suggest you reconsider either your rates, or your career.
You can review the Apache source code to figure out what's going on.
You or I not be as efficient at reviewing Apache (or IIS) source to track down the remaining tricky bugs as one of the Apache (or IIS) devs. Attempting to do so would be wasting your time, hence stakeholders' money, and would be bad practice.
You ask the vendor politely to fix it. If they don't think its a problem, and its a serious enough issue, then you give them money to fix it.
You'd also be running the risk of your shitty bandaid fix not being accepted, or being modified. Then you are up shit creek supporting an inhouse fork, without a paddle.
The source code is only useful if your time is practically worthless.
Seems you are either too stupid, or possibly just going to pick a trendy nerd-disease, such as "aspergers", to excuse your total lack of reading comprehension.
Auto heal doesnt have to turn you into a walking tank. It allows the game to be made _more difficult_. What you are asking for is a clumsy health pack interface, where the game has to hold your hand by stacking on artificially high health. You are asking for the ability to happily run around on "10%" health like nothings happened. You are asking for the ability to take bullets with nothing more than a numeric penalty that can be recovered by bashing the M key.
Your argument has no goddamn merit at all. You seem completely unable to seperate a workable health model from the games this model is commonly used in. Are you such a fanboy of your favourite games that you blindly refuse to acknowlege possible game mechanics when they are put into a genre you don't like first?
So, errr, play on the difficulty levels that aren't targetted at people on console or GTFO?
You know the only realistic game I played? Operation Flashpoint. That had all the realism of walking for ten kilometers and then being the first guy in your patrol to be sniped in the head! Great fun!
Or we could play any other old FPS. Look daddy I have 10hp and no health packs! I'm going to duck behind this fence and jump and peg people for 3hp using my shitty pistol. Notice how the AI doesn't come and hunt me down! WOW IM A HARDCORE GAMER! This is classic gaming AT ITS FINEST.
Yeah, I'm pissed they took the planning out of the Rainbow Six series too... but its still one of the more immersive games I've played to date. (Bar system shock 2 - which despite its many many flaws turned out to be excellent).
Yeah Australia is going nuts at the moment trying to implement internet filters. Nevermind that IE has had parental control since IE4, and Vista has that built in. Presumably there are similar solutions on other OS's.
How many damn levels of filtering does there have to be between a man and his porno? I mean, FFS, will the situation be that I have to call the National, State and City Filtering Authorities and register for a two hour unblock on my IP a couple of days in advance every time I want to fap?
Gentlemen it will be a sad day for all of us when we have to go back to tribeswomens titties in National Geographic magazine....
If you are thinking about your health and medkits then you are metagaming. You are not immersed. The game is probably less enjoyable, unless you are into the sort of faggotry which comes with memorising weapon stats and spray patterns like CS kiddies.
One of the most entertaining modern FPSs I've played was the R6 Vegas games on the hardest difficulty. That came with regenerating health and a cover system.
It worked _well_. On the hardest difficulty, you could be killed in a single 3 round burst from an SMG, or a direct hit to your center of mass from a rifle. You had to be careful. A glancing hit to an extremity or a stray low velocity round to the armour would knock you for six. Your character would act like you just got punched in the guts, blurred vision, wobbly aim for ten seconds. Get clipped again, and you'd be dead. None of this "old bullshit from a forgotton era" of some integer ticking down with the hits without ill effects until you die.
This made the game harder. None of this crap where you decide you have "enough medkits" to be able to jump out of cover and shoot some guy. Enough fucking medkits indeed. In a decent game if you are pinned down then you can't get away with that shit.
If your idea of a fun game is "well I can probably just sprint past them while bashing the medkit key", or "well I dealt with the guard pretty well, but the bullet thats stuck in my armor unfortunately gave me 35 damage, which is a bit high, so I should probably reload" then... enjoy.
We need a middleground between invulnerability and one-shot-one-kill. Health/Medkits is a pretty unsophisticated solution to "should the player have died from his recent actions"?
When a player is trying to get through a sequence of challenges, to make them challenging you have to balance them against the ability of the player. Otherwise the player cannot succeed, or only succeed by exploiting shitty AI. Both crap options. If you want to balance this out, then the players toughness needs to be a known quantity. So they are basically going to have to approach each challenge on full health. So you can pick between a fiddle around with a stupid medkit system or player recovers slowly over time anyway.
I agree. I think you perhaps misinterpreted my intention of the regenerating health. Running backwards would not cut it. Regen would be a balance issue, and just say you pegged it at 1 hp/sec and you are being chased by a bunch of blokes doing 10 hp/sec, the regen is negligable to the outcome.
I'm definitely not advocating a duck-behind cover, full health in 2 seconds system. That would obviously ruin the game. Going and hiding and tooling around with medkits in an inventory system isn't a great game mechanic though.
Bullshit. First person cover would be fine if I could edge along a wall and peek around.
When you are stuck with a dinky control system with your eyes right on the centreline of mass, so you have to expose half your damn body to look around a corner - then it just plain sucks. The new cover systems may be pretty generous with the camera angles allowed, but that could be fixed.
If you want realistic vision and all that jazz, look at the relative unplayability of Op Flashpoint. Whats next, complaining that holding W doesnt have the intricicies of running over rough terrain, and that we need to use a joystick to balance the characters legs?
The control systems are designed to let you _naturally_ control the character. Not learn how to walk again for every game you have installed.
Slashdot Mirror
Its generally not possible to avoid threading in a .net project of even moderate complexity.
* The UI pumps messages on its own thread. You need to do background processing on another thread.
* Any communication should be done using asynchonous callbacks, or IO completion ports or similar. Otherwise you'll end up with the noob-esq while-sleep pattern.
* ASP.Net pages run slow as hell, because people like to round trip to the database in sequence when databinding lists - this not only makes the pages slow, it limits total throughput. Learn how to use asynchonous pages. Most of the sites I've had the misfortune to work on could be happily served off my laptop instead of the quad-core beast they were struggling with.
To write modern software you need to understand threading.
Then why don't you go and read the damn source code and identify the "super secret" calls that are being used? The framework is open sourced under the MS-RPL, and the runtime is avaliable the normal way you get shared source access to Windows components.
The 2.0 runtime is an ECMA spec, which Mono has already fully implemented.
The only things that are going to be slightly difficult to implement are things like System.Messaging where they won't (obviously) have MSMQ to back them up. Not a major issue, they can just wrap RabbitMQ or something else available on *nix.
C is not syntactic sugar for assembler. Going back to assembler would lose you some type safety, etc.
LINQ is a syntactic nicety for something which can be done equivalently in code. You don't lose anything by doing it manually (well, except its a pain in the ass).
Its rather like how the new automatic properties work - it just implies a variable and a standard get/set pair.
As OP pointed out, you can create an expression in code. LINQ is just a nicer way of doing this, its shorthand, nothing more. Expression trees are nothing new. Diamond Binding (an ORM tool I use) exposes an expression tree as part of its database query API. Looks similar too: Product.Find(Expression.Or(Expression.Eq(Product.Column.Foo, bar), ...) etc.
Things that aren't syntactic sugar are the more fundamental changes, like generics.
Australia is around 18c/kWh peak. The grid will buy back power at that rate.
The government provides a subsidy of $8/Watt up to 1kW for solar installations. If you net negative useage for a billing period, the total buyback is doubled.
These new tech CGID panels (and theres a few manufacturers) cost around $1/watt. I think around $3-4 a watt is break-even, but a realistic economic analysis (I could invest in an oil company and get say 9% return), was suggesting around $2 a watt. (Theres fudge factoring for weather/night included here).
So yes, these are in fact a better buy than paying your power company, in Australia. Don't think you can call up the Solar Shop though - those bastards are still pimping the shitty ones.
Ten big trucks running off that, that tube, and what happens to your own personal tube? I just the other day got... a tube was switched on by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up in a big ball with all the trucks going on the tube commercially.
They want to deliver vast amounts of power from the tubes. And again, the tubes is not something that you just dump anything on. It's not a big internet. It's a series of wires. And if you don't understand, those wires can be filled and if they are filled, when you switch your lights on, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts onto that wire enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Hey, I've got an idea. We'll put whatever crap we put over existing solar panels above them?
Bet nobody thought of that ingenious trick!
Some thicker glass... coming out the top of the array there. Oh yeah that looks really good. Check out all its MAJESTY.
He doesn't. You should be able to tell from the dense usage of the dollar-sign in his posting that its another twitter sockpuppet.
The runtime supports one language: MSIL.
Your compiler of choice emits MSIL from a higher level language, such as C#.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CLI_Languages
Any of these languages can be used to program for .Net, using any other .Net library written in any other language. Theres even a cross-compiler for JVM bytecode, called IKVM. "What language" a library is written in is generally completely meaningless in the .Net environment. You can pick the best tool for the job every single time.
So no, .Net is not C#. I mainly use C#, but also a bit of Boo (python like, but cooler - syntatic macros let you modify the abstract syntax tree of the language in code - like #defines on crack), and some F#.
The CLI has done some pretty amazing things for language interoperablity and portability. You would do well to actually research what you complain about before you open your mouth.
Wow are you another twitter sockpuppet?
The APIs you can use from .Net are documented on the MSDN. If they aren't documented, then you can't use them.
So what about the "undocumented APIs that .Net uses". Why don't you go and look through the framework source code and see if you can find them?
Fucking retarded fanboys.
Sorry, he knows exactly what hes talking about. I suggest you check the MSIL with Reflector or suchlike.
LINQ is syntatic sugar for specifying expressions which are defined in System.Core.
with thing as a List(of Bar)* where Bar has property i, the simple:
is just syntatic sugar for:
* Stupid VB syntax for generics as im too lazy to figure out escaping.
Where is IIRC an extension method on IEnumerable(T) from System.Core. Most of the newer features are just syntactic sugar. Its pretty obvious this is the case, because there hasnt been any runtime changes to support anything functional...
I still haven't seen a compelling reason to change from diamond binding to LINQ. Having nice wel-defined business objects is a lot better IMO, and being based on NHibernate makes it a more mature product.
Runtime 2.0 introduced support for generics (among some other things). This was the "big upgrade".
Framework 3.x added a bunch of extra libraries, like WCF/WPF etc, the new features to the C# compiler (which mono also has), and importantly it still ran on Runtime 2.0 (so is backwards compatible). Its just that the new APIs, such as WCF haven't been implemented by the Mono team.
Net 3.x is a set of libraries for the 2.0 runtime.
It extends the API avaliable with things like WPF/WCF, theres a load of support for LINQ, etc. The runtime is the same.
So yeah, if you develop an app using VS2008, then it will run on Mono 2.0... UNLESS you are using Windows Presentation Foundation or something like that.
I'm fairly certain that LINQ would work, in fact - just not LINQ to Entities. The vanilla LINQ is just a bunch support like IQueryable IExpression, etc. So (ab)using LINQ to query collections and things would probably work fine. Not that I can be fucked testing ;)
SharpDevelop is better than Monodevelop, and is BSD licensed. It also, frankly, pwns the crap out of Eclipse. The only reason I don't use it on Windows (its much faster than VS, btw) is that its refactoring tools aren't yet on par with the excellent Resharper add-in.
Regardless, you can compile cross platform binaries with Visual Studio. If your time is worth so little that the $200 license for Windows is too high, then I respectfully suggest you reconsider either your rates, or your career.
You or I not be as efficient at reviewing Apache (or IIS) source to track down the remaining tricky bugs as one of the Apache (or IIS) devs. Attempting to do so would be wasting your time, hence stakeholders' money, and would be bad practice.
You ask the vendor politely to fix it. If they don't think its a problem, and its a serious enough issue, then you give them money to fix it.
You'd also be running the risk of your shitty bandaid fix not being accepted, or being modified. Then you are up shit creek supporting an inhouse fork, without a paddle.
The source code is only useful if your time is practically worthless.
Extremely fast? My bike would do that in first gear... :D
Seems you are either too stupid, or possibly just going to pick a trendy nerd-disease, such as "aspergers", to excuse your total lack of reading comprehension.
Auto heal doesnt have to turn you into a walking tank. It allows the game to be made _more difficult_. What you are asking for is a clumsy health pack interface, where the game has to hold your hand by stacking on artificially high health. You are asking for the ability to happily run around on "10%" health like nothings happened. You are asking for the ability to take bullets with nothing more than a numeric penalty that can be recovered by bashing the M key.
Your argument has no goddamn merit at all. You seem completely unable to seperate a workable health model from the games this model is commonly used in. Are you such a fanboy of your favourite games that you blindly refuse to acknowlege possible game mechanics when they are put into a genre you don't like first?
Its called good suspension. You get it on the bigger vehicles.
So, errr, play on the difficulty levels that aren't targetted at people on console or GTFO?
You know the only realistic game I played? Operation Flashpoint. That had all the realism of walking for ten kilometers and then being the first guy in your patrol to be sniped in the head! Great fun!
Or we could play any other old FPS. Look daddy I have 10hp and no health packs! I'm going to duck behind this fence and jump and peg people for 3hp using my shitty pistol. Notice how the AI doesn't come and hunt me down! WOW IM A HARDCORE GAMER! This is classic gaming AT ITS FINEST.
Yeah, I'm pissed they took the planning out of the Rainbow Six series too... but its still one of the more immersive games I've played to date. (Bar system shock 2 - which despite its many many flaws turned out to be excellent).
Yeah Australia is going nuts at the moment trying to implement internet filters. Nevermind that IE has had parental control since IE4, and Vista has that built in. Presumably there are similar solutions on other OS's.
How many damn levels of filtering does there have to be between a man and his porno? I mean, FFS, will the situation be that I have to call the National, State and City Filtering Authorities and register for a two hour unblock on my IP a couple of days in advance every time I want to fap?
Gentlemen it will be a sad day for all of us when we have to go back to tribeswomens titties in National Geographic magazine....
If you are thinking about your health and medkits then you are metagaming. You are not immersed. The game is probably less enjoyable, unless you are into the sort of faggotry which comes with memorising weapon stats and spray patterns like CS kiddies.
Languages evolve. For this reason I tend not to talk about the large amounts of faggots on my back porch.
I hearby hand you an official "Waa Waa, Cry Some More?" tag.
One of the most entertaining modern FPSs I've played was the R6 Vegas games on the hardest difficulty. That came with regenerating health and a cover system.
It worked _well_. On the hardest difficulty, you could be killed in a single 3 round burst from an SMG, or a direct hit to your center of mass from a rifle. You had to be careful. A glancing hit to an extremity or a stray low velocity round to the armour would knock you for six. Your character would act like you just got punched in the guts, blurred vision, wobbly aim for ten seconds. Get clipped again, and you'd be dead. None of this "old bullshit from a forgotton era" of some integer ticking down with the hits without ill effects until you die.
This made the game harder. None of this crap where you decide you have "enough medkits" to be able to jump out of cover and shoot some guy. Enough fucking medkits indeed. In a decent game if you are pinned down then you can't get away with that shit.
If your idea of a fun game is "well I can probably just sprint past them while bashing the medkit key", or "well I dealt with the guard pretty well, but the bullet thats stuck in my armor unfortunately gave me 35 damage, which is a bit high, so I should probably reload" then... enjoy.
We need a middleground between invulnerability and one-shot-one-kill. Health/Medkits is a pretty unsophisticated solution to "should the player have died from his recent actions"?
When a player is trying to get through a sequence of challenges, to make them challenging you have to balance them against the ability of the player. Otherwise the player cannot succeed, or only succeed by exploiting shitty AI. Both crap options. If you want to balance this out, then the players toughness needs to be a known quantity. So they are basically going to have to approach each challenge on full health. So you can pick between a fiddle around with a stupid medkit system or player recovers slowly over time anyway.
I agree. I think you perhaps misinterpreted my intention of the regenerating health. Running backwards would not cut it. Regen would be a balance issue, and just say you pegged it at 1 hp/sec and you are being chased by a bunch of blokes doing 10 hp/sec, the regen is negligable to the outcome.
I'm definitely not advocating a duck-behind cover, full health in 2 seconds system. That would obviously ruin the game. Going and hiding and tooling around with medkits in an inventory system isn't a great game mechanic though.
Bullshit. First person cover would be fine if I could edge along a wall and peek around.
When you are stuck with a dinky control system with your eyes right on the centreline of mass, so you have to expose half your damn body to look around a corner - then it just plain sucks. The new cover systems may be pretty generous with the camera angles allowed, but that could be fixed.
If you want realistic vision and all that jazz, look at the relative unplayability of Op Flashpoint. Whats next, complaining that holding W doesnt have the intricicies of running over rough terrain, and that we need to use a joystick to balance the characters legs?
The control systems are designed to let you _naturally_ control the character. Not learn how to walk again for every game you have installed.